The Refusal: Lessons From Policy Resistance in New York City

• In Event: Challenging Neoliberal Reforms Through Collaborative, Community-Engaged Research

Abstract

Objectives: To examine how teachers who work in schools with multilingual, transcultural, immigrant diversity cope within an environment of neoliberal policy reform. This study focuses on a group of teachers who refused to administer a high-stakes test to their immigrant students. It is argued that the test provided them with little information of their students’ learning and broke the trust between teachers and students. Their refusal was about recognizing and resisting standardization and privatization, and protecting community, culture, and diversity.

Theoretical framework: When applying theories of neoliberalism to education, it is possible to note how education has shifted from emphasis on human relations, to student competition and production. In this study, in particular, focus is placed on how neoliberal education reformers erase memory by shaping the dialogue and setting the topic of conversation in media. The public attitude towards teachers in the last decade has been described as a “campaign of vilification” (Ravitch, 2011), and schools serving poor, immigrant, or racial minority youth are characterized as deserving “an all-out assault on public education and a call for sweeping change” (Kumashiro, 2012, p. 11).

Methods and Data. This paper reports on partial data collection from long-term fieldwork for an ethnographic study of teachers as policy-makers. While the overall report draws on larger frames in the wider study, for purposes of this paper, data sources include: (1) transcripts from four 90-minute semi-structured interviews with three teacher activists who opted out of testing; (2) newsmedia reports, video transcripts, and website transcripts describing the teacher of the walkout and neoliberal policy environment; and (3) transcripts from two 3-hour community meetings with NYC teachers.

Results and conclusions: The presentation will discuss the context leading up to the teachers’ testing refusal and opt-out; how the teachers organized the action; results of the action; and teachers’ dissemination of their action through story-telling in community meetings with other NYC teachers. In addition to presenting the community-engaged work of the teachers, the presentation focuses briefly on the role of the researcher, using Apple’s (2010) frame for research as witness and scribe. As Dave Stovall noted at AERA in 2015, stories “actively counter the evisceration of memory” given that neoliberal education reformers “erase memory” (2015). By acting as a witness to teachers’ community-engaged work, researchers assist in their active countering of neoliberalism.

Significance: Dumas writes that “our work has largely focused on policy as a set of interventions, regulations and institutional and societal consequences” and we know less “how policy is lived, and too often suffered, by those who have little hand in policy formation or implementation” (2014, p. 2). Nationwide, testing opt-out movement is a critical way to restore community and respect teachers’ unique knowledge of their specific, student population. Lessons from the action are culled from the teachers’ reflections on their activism and organizing, and presented here as inspiration for future opt-out of testing. In addition, the necessity of such action on behalf of immigrant adolescents is discussed, given the rising immigrant student population in the United States.

Author

• Christine Brigid Malsbary, Vassar College