ABSTRACT
Many of the chapters in this book have served to describe the reality of our current political economy and its implication for public education in this country. And, the reality is harsh. Using a variety of scare tactics, the corporate and political right are exerting economic and political pressure to institute more for-profit scripted programs to be evaluated by for-profit standardized tests, which are culturally, linguistically, and economically biased against diverse populations of children. When those populations score poorly on such tests, the corporate and political right use those scores to claim that the teachers are not making “adequate progress” even with the for-profit scripted program. The right can then take over the school; sell it to a private corporation; blame colleges of education for failing to train teachers; and dismantle colleges of education so that there is no voice of protest in this process. This is a pretty bleak scenario. But, it is not the only scenario. For example, in chapter 1, Relatively Speaking: McCarthyism and Teacher-Resisters, Carole Edelsky begins by painting a distressing picture of the new McCarthyism and its impact on classroom teachers, but she also leaves us with a glimmer of hope as she describes how twenty educators across the country are engaging in acts of resistance in the areas of testing and curriculum. Likewise, in the preceding chapter, Rick Meyer along with several of his colleagues at the University of New Mexico describe the subversive acts of nonviolent civil disobedience in which they engaged in order to counter act the sophisticated, well orchestrated, and well funded misinformation events of the corporate and politi-cal right. The acts of these classroom teachers and teacher educators are encouraging and hopeful to all of us and it is that sense of hope that we want to build on, expand, foster, and nourish as we bring this book to a close.
