“We’re kind of at a pivotal point”: Opt Out’s vision for an ethic of care in a post-neoliberal era

Abstract

This article explores the Opt Out Florida (OOF) movement, a predominantly woman-led group seeking to dismantle neoliberal education policy by coaching children to boycott high-stakes standardized tests. Guided by Campbell’s assertion that neoliberalism will never disappear without a “gender revolution” and Noddings’s belief that those who have claimed power in the “traditional masculine structure” of our educational institutions will not readily cede their authority, we assert that movements like Opt Out are not only necessary to bring about a post-neoliberal future, but offer important insight into the role activist mothers may play in fulfilling that vision for all children. As a noticeably maternal movement, Opt Out displays a commitment to Noddings’s description of moral education and her assertion that “if an enterprise precludes…meeting the other in a caring relation, [one] must refuse to participate in that enterprise.” Understanding standardized tests as instruments of control meant to defund and privatize public education, Opt Out members actively resist them. Their ethic of care eschews corporate influence, and guides both their mission to return control of the classroom to the local level and their rejection of the deskilling and intensification of the teaching profession. Drawing on critical ethnographic data from OOF, we ultimately argue that the movement’s emphasis on the ideal moral and caring relations between school and child offers one example of what post-neoliberal education might look and sound like from a distinctly feminine perspective.

Portraits of Protest in Florida: How Opt-Out Makes the Personal Political

“…Initially, we wondered what led individuals to the opt-out movement and elicited the OOFN's specific aims and broader vision for public education (McCardle et al, 2018;Schroeder et al, 2018Schroeder et al, , 2020b. From there, spurred by Facebook interactions during the contentious 2016 election cycle to revisit our findings, we contacted our original 25 interviewees, five of whom participated in 1-on-1 follow-up phone interviews.…”

“…Thus, we have studied one of the movement's hot spots-the Opt Out Florida Network (OOFN)-for five years, guided by the critical ethnographic principle that "how people are represented is how they are treated" (Madison, 2005, p. 4). In that time, we have showcased the OOFN in myriad ways: analyzing the group's racial and gender dynamics (Currin et al, 2019;, their informed critiques of high-stakes standardized testing and vision for a more democratic alternative (McCardle et al, 2018;Schroeder et al, 2020b), how the OOFN experienced the 2016 election and subsequent confirmation of Betsy DeVos (Schroeder et al, 2021), and the moral dilemmas parents and teachers face when acting against prescribed roles (Schroeder et al, 2020a).…”

Disassembling Efforts to Legalize Opting-Out in Arizona: A Case Study of Legislative Politics

“…Opt-out is a national movement (Pizmony-Levy & Green Saraisky, 2016) based on local efforts as expressed in New York (Hursh, 2019;Wang, 2017), Colorado (Clayton et al, 2019), and Florida (Schroeder et al, 2018). While these and other studies address opt-out demographics (Paquin Morel, 2019) and public perception of the movement (Pizmony- Levy & Cosman, 2017), fewer studies address the political activism that extends beyond the act of refusing specific tests to changing standardized testing policy.…”

“…New York's high opt-out rates, particularly in affluent areas such as Long Island, and the weight of available studies combine to suggest New York forms an epicenter for the opt-out movement. While opt-out is occurring in other states including Florida (Currin et al, 2018;Schroeder et al, 2018) and Colorado (Clayton et al, 2019), Western states in general and Arizona in particular are underrepresented in the literature.…”

“…Common reasons for participating in opting-out include opposition specifically to the Common Core (Wang, 2017) and resistance to various expressions of neoliberal discipline such as loss of teacher curricular control, corporate influence in schools, and undue pressure placed on students by standardized tests. To fight against this, some advocate for more local control (Currin et al, 2016;Paquin Morel, 2019;Schroeder et al, 2018).…”