Opting Out or Opting In? Test Boycott and Parental Engagement in American Public Education

This article provides a “thick” understanding of how public school parents understand their decision to opt their children out of standardized tests. In it, Amy Shuffelton draws from qualitative research interviews with Chicago parents to explore how three mothers connected opting out of standardized testing to their broader commitments to public schools. In probing the democratic potential of their logic, Shuffelton points to avenues of hope for democratic and equitable public schooling. As scholars have argued on multiple grounds, public schools have generally preserved inequitable power relations and resource allocations rather than changed them, and this happens in part because of parental resistance to reforms they believe to be detrimental to the interests of their children. Precisely because privileged parents have and implement the power to use schooling to pass advantages to their own children, however, it is important to consider when and why some of these parents instead see reason to build a public school system that shares those advantages widely. Putting these parents' explanations for opting out of testing into conversation with ideas about the democratic public in texts by John Dewey and Bonnie Honig, Shuffelton finds potential pathways, as well as hurdles, to reviving commitment to public schooling.