United Opt Out has consistently spoken against the abuses of testing and high stakes for students and teachers.

Here is a link to their Declaration of Independence and to other important information about them.

And here is their Declaration of Independence from corporate education reform.

 

United Opt Out National http://unitedoptout.com

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IN OPPOSITION, July 4, 2013
The unanimous Declaration of the national United Opt Out,
When in the course of educating a nation, it becomes necessary for its people to restrain the political and private powers which have obfuscated the fundamental mission of a public system of education to, among other points, compensate for the proclivities of the Laws of Nature to separate and exclude swaths of humankind into those that have and those without.

That to secure this broad mission of a public education, Governments are commissioned by its people to serve unequivocally the explicit needs of those to be educated. It is not to relinquish control of the purposes of education to incorporated powers which deign the will of a free People to determine the means and ends of their cultural developments.

Whenever any Government or Agent of the State abrogates the responsibility to defend the general preparations of its future citizens from untoward profit-making, it is the Right of the Educated to alter or to refuse impositions, and to institute a new Education, laying its foundation on principles and powers to most likely effect their Autonomy, Freedom, and Happiness.

Love, indeed, will resolve that a public system of Education long established should not be upended for fickle and makeshift designs, and accordingly all experience has shown, that an aspirational People are disposed to trust, as certain evils are trustworthy, when impossible oaths are expressed as guarantees of accomplishment. That such promises are made by representatives of the Education State, to whom its People have become accustomed, is the most perverse injury of all.

But when a long record of exploitations and failures, in pursuit of objectives that evince a design to reduce the Educated to absolute Quantification, in effect leading to total economic Exploitation, it is their right, it is their obligation, to refuse such Education, and to provide new Custodians for their future achievement. Such has been the persistent sufferance of the Educated, particular to Inhabitants of the most meager of circumstances; and such is now the requisition which prohibits them from amending their rightful System of Education.

The history of the present Secretary of Education, of his maids of State, and sycophants in unelected offices, is a history of recurring ignorance and ineptitude, all having in ultimate purpose the reduction of the Educated to singularly objective values that are inherently valueless. It is with this Ignorance and Ineptitude that the current Government wields an inseparable Autocratic alliance between Incorporated and State interests against the wishes of the People.

To prove this, let United Opt Out submit these Facts to a candid world:

• He has refused to reduce inequality and segregation, the most unwholesome and unnecessary for a public Education.

United Opt Out National http://unitedoptout.com

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  • He has constrained the role of professional Educators and contributed to their egregious humiliation in the face of unreasonable scrutiny from the State.
  • He has ignored significant corrective actions necessary to diminish disparities in opportunities, resources, and human capital in Education as sanctioned by the Fiscal Fairness Act.
  • For refusal to recommend other Laws or Regulations for the Rightful accommodation of large groups of students, principally second language, impoverished, and students of color, unless Schools relinquish the autonomy of Educators and control of their Curriculum, needs inestimable to them and formidable to ideologues only.
  • He condones through inadequate and narrow investigations a professional culture of Lying, Cheating, and Exploitation within School communities.
  • He has endeavored to prevent School populations from selecting refusal of specific Federal impositions that hinder local needs from an erroneous Competition for funds, such that these limited monies could not possibly repair previous and egregious breaches in support, that otherwise bind Schools and Districts to compliance.
  • For taking away our traditional public Schools in favor of Charters, altering our most valuable laws to hasten dissolutions, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Local Boards to enact control of Mayors as opposed to the People expressly.
  • For Accommodating large bodies of untrained Educators among us:
    • For protecting them, by granting certain exceptions, from qualification for any

      Educator position which they hold in the most challenging Schools;

    • For imposing Subsidies on public School systems to sponsor amateurs;
    • For shielding open Educator positions, that should otherwise be available to

      qualified candidates, for provisional Recruits.

  • He has excited insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the

    inhabitants of our cities against each other, setting as rivals the poor against the poor, to become executioners of their own friends and Brethren, to fall themselves by their Hands, to enable the affluent in escaping responsibility.

  • He has affected to render Corporations independent of and superior to the Civil power.
  • He has exacerbated the conditions dissolving elected Boards repeatedly, for opposing with effete vacillation his encroachment on the rights of the people.
  • He has denied sufficient protections to confidential information gathered by private entities in the process of public Education; ignored the apprehensions expressed by the caregivers of the students of our public Schools therein; and perseveres in implementation of diffuse collection methods in defiance of personal Privacy.
  • For conscripting the publicly Educated into labour on behalf of Private entities to refine the instruments of our own Oppression; not for the re-investment of knowledge and resources acquired, but to enrich the remunerative coffers of speculators.
  • He has abdicated Government in the defense of public Education by declaring Accountability greater to Preservation, and waging Wars of Attrition against us.

United Opt Out National http://unitedoptout.com

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In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Secretary of Education whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Profiteer, is unfit to be the warden of a Public lavatory let alone a free system of Public Education.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Private brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their Board members to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of our Allegiance to the public in Education. We have appealed to their assumed senses of innate justice and fairness, and we have summoned them by the ties of our common citizenship to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our cooperation and camaraderie. They too have been deaf to the voices of equality and solidarity. We must, therefore, submit to this necessity, which denounces our Disobedience, and hold them, as we hold us all, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Administrators of the national United Opt Out, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the free people of this Nation for the integrity of our intentions, do, in the Name and our Authority, defiantly publish and declare, That our public systems of Education are, and of Right ought to be, Absolved from any and all Obligations, Oppressions, and Exploitations set forth only by Private and Unelected Associations; that we assert the abilities to Choose and Refuse certain Acts and Things that violate the interminable conscientiousness of professional Educators; and that as Discerning and Intellectual personnel, charged with labors few are wont or capable to do, we have full Power to secure our own professional identities, determine to Whom and under what conditions for which we are Accountable, and succeed with significant voice to govern the Laws of our work.

And for support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Good Sense and a Common Destiny, we mutually pledge each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our Sacred Honor.