The Backlash Against School Choice and Accountability Policies: The Organizations and Their Politics

Abstract

The organizers of this colloquy and the authors of The Fight for America’s Schools ask two important questions: What are the political and organizational challenges faced by groups opposed to school choice and test-based accountability reforms? And what do they portend for the landscape of education politics going forward? In this article, I discuss two such challenges and their implications. First, the groups discussed in the book have so far been united by opposition to school choice and test-based accountability reforms, but they may well suffer going forward from the absence of a positive policy agenda—a set of specific alternative policies that would improve student achievement and school performance. Second, the strongest of these groups by far are teacher unions, but barring fundamental changes in union leaders’ incentives, they are unlikely to adopt the book’s recommendation that they abandon the traditional model of “business unionism” in favor of “social justice unionism.”