This morning’s New York Times offers the latest example of the pathetically poor coverage of the opt-out movement and the role of teacher unions in it. The current narrative has it that the unions are the principal motivators of the movement and the parents of the children opting out almost the dupes of the union bosses who have come to see opposition to testing as their weapon to defend from the bipartisan assault on public education. My experiences as a union leader at both the local and state levels in New York tell a different story and make wonder and confirm my suspicions that the mainstream media are at best handmaidens to the corporate education reform movement in our state.

Let’s be clear; while I and other local union leaders welcome NYSUT to the opt out cause they are newbies to the movement. In fact, they’re even pretty new to the anti-testing movement. As a former member of the NYSUT Board of Directors I recall with considerable chagrin the obdurate refusal of the union’s previous leadership under Dick Iannuzzi to embrace the anti-testing movement. I vividly remember an exchange between Dick Iannuzzi in which he answered my call to squarely oppose high stakes testing and the Common Core State Standards and join forces with the growing opt-out movement with, “We disagree. I don’t think parents want to do away with testing. What they want are better tests.” Let’s remember too that it was Iannuzzi’s team that negotiated the current APPR agreement with Governor Cuomo, an agreement which acknowledged that student scores on high stakes tests were an appropriate measure of student performance. By the time Iannuzzi realized the growing power of the anti-test/opt out movement and began to quietly cooperate with it, that movement was already launched with a dynamic leadership all its own. Here on Long Island, Long Island Opt Out led the way with a leader in Jeanette Deutermann who knows more about organizing than most of the union leaders I know. In part, his failure to read the political tea leaves on the testing/ opt –out issue would cost him the presidency of NYSUT.

Even in the early days of the Magee administration, while she and our national union affiliates gradually began to speak more critically of what testing was doing to public education and while some locals had upped their profiles and publically supported the opt-out movement, there still was not clear policy decision taken to frontally assault the testocracy by promoting refusal of the examinations. It was literally only weeks ago that Karen Magee in an interview said that if she had school age children, she would opt them out of the impending exams. That remark and stronger ones to follow came only after the governor and the leaders of both parties in the legislature conspired to screw that state’s teachers.

What early union support there was for the opt-out movement existed here and there at the local level. The fact is that most locals were even reluctant to tell their own members to opt their children out, repeatedly seeking guidance from NYSUT, only to get equivocation.

No, the opt out movement has been an essentially parent driven movement, aided in some places by local teacher unions, but completely independent of them, so much so that at times there was some friction between our supporting locals on Long Island at the parent leadership of the movement. While I’m very glad that NYSUT has come around to a full-throated support of opting-out, they are walking on a path that others have blazed before them. If I had had my way, the critique offered by the New York Times would have been true. It didn’t work out that way, however.