More Than a Score (38 page)

JH:
All right!

PR:
Well, you could imagine after being home for . . . well, at that time, about four years and just kind of being in this box, it was like there's a world out there and that's the power of social media. So Anthony posted it on his blog and it went viral and then he said, “You know Peg, you really should start a blog,” and I was like, “Well of course, that's what I should do.” So I started writing
Peg with Pen
and shortly after that began to think about strategy and how to take down corporate education reform. And so that's when I began to see these online pockets of [standardized testing] opt-outs here and there, but I could see by looking at all of them that there was no clear organized strategy to pull everyone together. So I began to think about how can I do this. I looked at Facebook and different organizing tools that were free to me because obviously I didn't have a lot of money and we were down to one income. So I looked at Facebook and I saw that if you did a group you could have all these files within that group and I thought, well, here you have it. Here is the perfect strategy. I could have a file for every state. We could plug in opt-out information per state and we would be organizing.

And at that time Morna [McDermott-]McNulty and I were in correspondence, and I just said, “Hey Morna, I've thinking of starting a Facebook page; do you want to help me?” She was like, “Oh sure, yeah, I'll help you.” You know we were just thinking some small little thing and I said you know I think I'm going to call it—again I'm thinking strategically, how can I make it really sound big and powerful even though I'm really just a stay-at-home mom—so I called it United Opt Out National. I knew it should be national and that this name is going to pull people in because it's going to sound like something big is happening. I titled it that because I had looked at all the other opt-out pages and none of them were taking off the way I thought they should be.

Once we started the page we couldn't keep up with the requests for help [from people asking how to opt their children out of tests], so immediately I was in this work mode of emailing every department of education and then pulling in Tim Slekar, who had created a page. He was really funny because he goes, “Why are you creating your page when I've got my page?” and I explained to him why and so then he joined us.

JH:
Oh, that's great.

PR:
Yeah. I mean it was just funny how we got organized and then Shaun Johnson was trying to help me with names. I think we were just messaging online. I didn't even know any of these people and then I said, “Well, Shaun, why don't you help?” And then Celesta, whom I had interviewed for my blog, got on board and then Morna recommended Lorie Murphy, who is great at strategy and also was involved in Save Our Schools—so there were the six of us. And what was funny at the time—I had no idea that Shaun and Morna worked together and I had no idea that Shaun and Tim were doing the radio show. I didn't know there were any of these connections out there, so it was just kind of this crazy thing. It just kind of happened. It was meant to be.

JH:
That's great—what a crew you pulled together around this initial effort! I'd also like to know about what you guys hoped originally you would get out of this and then what frustrations you had in terms of the difficulties and pulling more people into the group.

PR:
Well, what we wanted out of it at the beginning was to get mass opt-out of high-stakes testing and just, you know, shut them down. Again that's still obviously one of our main strategies—so that was our goal. You know there were a lot of bumps along the way because this is new territory, and so we made some mistakes. We organized with some folks who tried to tear us apart and take us down.

JH:
Really?

PR:
So there were a lot of things like this that occurred along the way that were pretty painful but good learning experiences and we're all a lot wiser for it, I think.

JH:
Were there real political debates or was it just personal infighting?

PR:
One of the political debates was, and you still see this today, this idea of opting out versus home schooling—the whole Tea Party, and all these sort of different factions. We had a lot of people who would get on our page and say
We're homeschoolers; we want to opt out and we also want to end public schools. We want to dismantle them and get rid of them forever
kind of thing. And of course we could not agree to that. So when all these people started getting on our page we had to figure out how to handle it and it was pretty ugly, but in fact it helped us get our message very clear. Now it's really clear what we stand for, but all of that stuff made us say, “Yeah, we support opt-out, but hey, we support opt-out in improving and reclaiming public schools!”

JH:
I'm really glad you shared that because I think it has strengthened your organization as you've said, but I also think it holds immense lessons for the current struggle right now against Common Core.

PR:
Yes.

JH:
And I think we have to be really careful, and I would guard against making alliances with the right wing because I think in the end that's a very fragile coalition that will end up doing more harm to public education by emboldening the voices of the Tea Party than anything we get from working in coalition with them against Common Core. And I think we have very different reasons for opposing Common Core that we shouldn't be shy about, you know, voicing.

PR:
Right. I'm with you on that 100 percent and you're right; when the Tea Party situation came about and we realized, oh my God, here we go again. It's obviously another challenge. . . . We're getting our new campaign going and I'm trying to organize opt-out leaders to help me, but when I talk to people I have to send them a statement saying this is what we believe in, do you agree? Because there are so many Tea Party people out there opting out that you've just got to be careful, you don't know.

JH:
That's right. Well, can you tell me about how United Opt Out grew and what some of your major accomplishments have been in the last few years?

PR:
Sure. So we started with the Facebook page. We immediately started building the troops more or less through that page. We thought you know we need to again have an event that is very political, that's very loud, and Morna said one night, “Why don't we occupy the [federal] department of education?” And I'm like, “Oh yeah, we'll occupy the department of education, that's of course the natural next step in opposing the policy of high-stakes testing in education reform.” So again we just kind of would jump into these things and take this leap, but it seemed like what else would you do at this point? How do you get louder? How do you get heard?

So we had our first occupation in DC—on our best day [we had] maybe fifty people. But the cool thing was we met all these amazing activists. People came from all over the country to that, so you might have only fifty people but those fifty people took that information and went back and spent a whole 'nother year organizing.

JH:
That's great.

PR:
What was so funny is I'll never forget that first day standing up and looking at that crowd, thinking, oh, dear God. We did all this advertising and promoting and pushing it and pushing it, but that day only fifty folks came out. So that was really difficult, but we also knew we had to have a base and start somewhere, so those people I met at that first occupation are people who now are doing amazing things and are leaders in their communities. So we did it again the second year. The second year we had on our best day a hundred, but we had three hundred for the march to the White House, so that was an improvement. What's interesting about the second occupation is that's how we got a lot of New York folks. The following year was that year of massive opt-outs in Long Island and those people will continue to say to me, Hey, it was that second occupation that got us going. It empowered them, it gave them confidence to take that back home.

JH:
That's such a great lesson. You've got to start somewhere.

PR:
It was and it was a good lesson to be okay with small numbers. People say to me again and again about the second occupation, “You guys are going to get slammed in the news,” and I said, you know what, I don't even care. We're organizing. This is local, this is grassroots. People are going to take it back in small numbers. Even though it's hard to look at, those people were so empowered and such amazing activists we knew that they would go back and pull in more people.

JH:
That's right. I wasn't able to get out to those demonstrations, but I was so glad to read about them on social media. They were inspiring to me and there were countless thousands other across the country who were with you in spirit. And we don't have the billions of dollars that the other side has to organize mass rallies, but those connections you made have proven invaluable, so I'm so glad you did that work. And that was in 2012. What are you doing now?

PR:
This year in 2014 we decided to take on a new strategy and I'm really excited about what we did this year. We looked around the country and we said, okay, where are there hot pockets that are really intense, where people are ready to mobilize but they need support? My city [Denver] was one obvious answer. It's a hotbed and people are kind of organizing in different little areas, but they need to come together. And so we decided to create a conference that was really a democratic classroom, a three-day action in which we would pull together everybody from around Colorado who wanted to attend and asked them what they needed and then created an action plan to really map out goals for the next year.

It was a fascinating process and I think one of the strengths that people often don't recognize is teachers are organizers—we believe in democratic classrooms. That right now is such an amazing strength because we can use that to harness and empower people and so that's what we did. We set it up and I think we had thirty national activists who came in to support Denver. We had about a hundred and twenty folks sign up for the event. On our best day we probably had eighty-five.

JH:
Nice.

PR:
But people stayed over those three days and worked so it wasn't sit and listen to lectures; it was, “What are you going to do?” And they were having conversations with experts: We had Lois Weiner; we had Sam Anderson. We had [Finnish education policy advisor] Pasi Sahlberg. We just had some amazing people who came in and sat down and helped us map out a plan of resistance.

JH:
Now that's a map I support! You know last spring was dubbed the “Education Spring” by a lot of commentators. In my time being politically active around education I haven't seen anything like the last year and this year in terms of a revolt against standardized testing. I'm wondering what are the most inspiring struggles you've seen around the country.

PR:
Oh, wow. Well, in terms of just the opt-out piece, watching New York with thirty-three thousand opt-outs is just amazing. I mean, my God, thirty-three thousand!

JH:
I know!

PR:
Also watching Barbara Madeloni get elected [as president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association] literally brought me to tears. You know, watching CTU come out against Common Core; we are gaining momentum. Those three things this year have just been mind-boggling—it's happening and we've just got to be really careful and keep it moving.

JH:
Why do you think this movement has exploded in the last couple of years? I mean you've talked about small rallies and some frustrating early beginnings to the opt-out movement. But the people I've talked to around the country who are involved in this work, like Monty Neill at FairTest and people at Rethinking Schools like Wayne Au, have talked about the current moment as the biggest revolt against high-stakes standardized testing in US history. I wonder if you see that and why you think the movement has taken off in this moment.

PR:
Sure. Well, I think it's the Race to the Top policies; what we always said was Race to the Top is No Child Left Behind on steroids, in terms of the explosion of standardized testing.

But I really think it took a few years for this truth to really sink in and hit home. It's the parents and the teachers—we've got these parents who are calling and saying, “I don't understand what's going on. Every time my child goes to school they are taking a test,” or “My child is coming home crying,” or “My child has a stomachache and won't go to school.” And so you know I get these stories day in and day out, some absolutely horrific, and so the parents are just up in arms. It's in everybody's backyard now. It doesn't matter where you are, it's there.

I think the other piece of this is the teachers are beginning to put it together. They have been denied information. Honestly our unions and the mainstream media have been denying us information about what's going on.

It's fascinating because I've had teachers say to me, “I don't understand what's going on, Peggy, why is this happening?” And so it's kind of like they are waking up and the ones that have been kept from this information or are too exhausted to look, they are beginning to look—that's been my experience. Teachers will email me and say, “Oh my gosh, I just read your blog and it clicked and now I can't quit researching.” It's this mass awakening because it's not so easy to hide [the destructive effects] of testing anymore. It's so blatant in the schools the teachers are going, “Yes it was bad, but now it's really, really bad—to the point where I'm ashamed to even be standing in this room doing what I'm been told to do,” and I think that's another big piece of it.