Grassroots social movement activism is on the rise in American education, so much so that some scholars (e.g. Ferman, 2017) have announced the arrival of a “New Politics of Education” in which local actors increasingly challenge the neoliberal consensus and institutional centralization that has dominated twenty-first-century education politics and policymaking (Ferman, 2017). In recent years, no grassroots education social movement has mobilized more people or achieved greater salience than the opt out movement, in which millions of parents across the country have protested standardized testing by keeping their children at home on test day. Despite widespread media coverage of the opt out movement, little empirical research has examined this phenomenon or attempted to link it to broader understandings of the changing nature of public participation with education politics. Contributing to this line of inquiry, this research addresses four questions pertaining to the opt out movement and its implications for education politics and policymaking: 1) Who participates in the opt out movement and who does not?; 2) What motivations do people have for participating in, or not participating in, the opt out movement?; 3) What environmental contextual factors promote or hinder opt out activism within school districts?; and 4) What are the effects of this activism on local school politics and the individuals involved?In answering these questions, this research is informed by and contributes to Marion Orr and John Rogers’ (2011) theoretical concept of “public engagement for public education.” It also draws upon relevant empirical research from the subfields of political participation (from political science), parent engagement (from education), and social movement studies (from sociology). Overall, this research comprises a mixed methods, multiple case study analysis of the opt out movement in four New York school districts with varying demographics and opt out participation rates. It utilizes six sources of original data: parent surveys, parent focus groups, interviews with opt out activists, interviews with district elites, a collection of relevant documents, and a statewide quantitative dataset of district opt out rates.Results indicate that the opt out movement is not the white, wealthy, suburban phenomenon it is often portrayed to be, but rather it mobilizes a diverse coalition of parents across virtually all districts in the State of New York. Second, opt out parents are motivated by a complex interaction of issue preferences (i.e. opposition to testing and neoliberal reform) and political attitudes (i.e. distrust, inefficacy, and estrangement vis-à-vis state and federal education policymaking). On the otherhand, non-opt out parents often share the issue concerns of opt out parents, but they do not construct their concerns as public problems demanding political intervention. Third, the divergent levels of opt out activism across the four case districts appears to be driven by differences in local social network ties as well as differences in parent perceptions of institutional and discursive support for the movement. In particular, district leadership is a critical factor in promoting or repressing opt out activism within these districts. Finally, results suggest that the opt out movement has not yet produced many changes to local testing and accountability policies, but it has been much more successful in increasing and transforming parent participation with education politics. This transformation, far from a nonaccomplishment, is likely to be the most significant legacy of the opt out movement moving forward.
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