Revolting families: The Catalan ‘opt out’ movement and practices of resistance against Standard Assessment Test (SAT). Some exploratory research

Abstract

Neoliberal policy technologies are spreading across the globe. Most go unrecognised and unopposed, but in some cases, they have provoked reactions and movements that reject or resist them. In this article we focus on one such movement of resistance, consisting of a network of families (the ‘opt out’ movement) that is boycotting the Standard Assessment Tests of primary education in Catalonia. We draw on exploratory research based on in-depth interviews with six of these families, as well as a review of articles, websites and documents produced by or about the movement. The participation of these families is examined in the light of Foucault’s notion of resistance in two different respects: resistance as a ‘tactical reversal’ and refusal as an ‘aesthetics of existence’. We begin with an outline of the global ideological context in which the Standard Assessment Tests are set, and then examine the background to the opt out movement’s resistance to the Standard Assessment Tests in Catalonia. This is followed by a Foucauldian analysis of this resistance, and then a description of the methodology used and the families interviewed. We make no significant empirical claims in the paper but rather seek to theorise certain paradoxes and tensions in relation to opting out and end with some remarks on the significance of the movement.

Keywords

Standard Assessment Tests resistance families opt out movement Foucault

Introduction

The OCDE (2016) has proposed the development of an international assessment of early learning outcomes among five-year-olds (IELS: International Early Learning Study), which is intended

to help countries improve the performance of their systems, to provide better outcomes for citizens and better value for money. Comparative data purport to show which systems are performing best, in what domains and for which groups of students. It would also provide insights into how such performance has been achieved. (103)

IELS is one component in a complex apparatus of global neoliberal policies that, by mobilising diverse methods of assessment, classification, comparison, ranking and categorising, have become the key techniques of modern governing and strategic devices in the reform of education systems around the world and the production of new kinds of subjects – head teachers (school leaders), teachers, students and families. Standard Assessment Tests (SATs), of which PISA, IELS, PIRLS and all their national and regional variations are examples, are one of the modalities of knowledge-power for neoliberal educational government – government by calculation (Bradbury and Robert-Holmes, 2017; Power, 1997; Sellar and Lingard, 2013). We interact with others, make decisions and think about ourselves in these terms. We govern, represent and improve ourselves through the medium of numbers. These practices and technologies are multiple points of contact between government and self-government; they work to make ‘government possible and to make government better’ (Rose, 1996: 45) in the interstices of everyday life. They produce a new rationality and a new subjectivity linked to the principles of competition, the market and profit, in relation to which we come to understand ourselves as forms of human ‘capital’ and as entrepreneurs of ourselves (Foucault, 2010a). In the mundane practices of education these numbers constitute ‘a regime of truth [that] offers the terms that make self-recognition possible’ (Butler, 2005: 22).

In these ways SATs are ‘productive’, they have the capacity to orient and produce particular behaviours, identities, relationships, and so on. As Foucault (1981) has made clear: ‘relations of power are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment. They have a directly productive role, wherever they come into play’ (94). However, as Foucault also suggests, there is no power without resistance. Indeed, as Foucault (1982) points out, ‘In order to understand what power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to dissociate these relations’ (780). In that spirit, this article seeks to understand the ‘opt out’ movement of families opposed to the introduction of SATs into Catalan schools, within the general framework of a significant but patchy international movement against testing in schools. What we analyse here is the first ‘reaction’ (2012–2017) to the SATs that were introduced in 2009, far later than in other countries like USA or England. Nonetheless, the Catalan SATs are one further iteration of the global trend of standardised assessment policies as part of a more general Global Education Reform Movement (Verger et al., 2019). Assessments are deployed for accountability purposes to monitor school performances in relation to centrally defined and measureable learning standards. In the next section we examine in depth the introduction of SATs in Catalonia and the actions and perspectives of families opposed to it, while in the ‘Resistance to the SATs: The dimensions of “tactical reversal” and “aesthetics of experience” (Foucault)’ section we suggest that Foucault’s conceptualisations of resistance and refusal are useful for thinking about the actions of these families.

The SATs and the birth of the ‘opt put’ movement in Catalonia (Spain)

The SATs organised by the Catalan Ministry of Education¹ were first introduced in Catalonia in 2009, both in year six (11–12 year olds) and in the fourth year of secondary education (15–16 year olds). During the 2013–2014 school year, dozens of families from a primary school in Barcelona, the Turó de Cargol school, began a boycott which involved not taking their children to school on the days of the SATs in year 6. In the same year, 2013, the Spanish government introduced the LOMCE (Ley Orgánica para la Mejora de la Calidad Educativa: Organic Law for the Improvement of Educational Quality), an educational law clearly informed by a combination of neoconservative and neoliberal models and practices, that bureaucratised, centralised and introduced various forms of assessment, ranking and competition into the school. This law deploys many elements of the failed Ley Orgánica de Calidad Educativa: Organic Law of Educational Quality, which the Popular Party had already tried to develop in early 2000 (Olmedo, 2008). This context of educational government in the Spanish federal system means that in Catalonia there has been a double and simultaneous movement against the educational policies of both the Catalan and Spanish governments. On the one hand, families and teachers joined together in the ‘Yellow Surge’² and ‘Yellow Assembly’³ that protested against cutbacks in education by the Catalan government and fought for ‘a public education of quality’; and on the other hand, within the framework of FAPAC (Federació d’Associacions de Mares i Pares d’Alumnes de Catalunya: Federation of Parents of Students’ Associations of Catalonia), the XEI⁴ (Xarxa d’Escoles Insubmises: Network of Dissident Schools) was set up to oppose the LOMCE on a more global level and geared towards the concrete promotion, articulation and dissemination of the movement of families that boycott the SATs.

The birth of the SATs boycott movement comprised three elements: a movement of families and teachers against the financial cutbacks of the Catalan government and in defence of public education (Yellow Surge – Yellow Assembly); a movement of families and some teachers against LOMCE and its policies (FAPAC; XEI – Network of Dissident Schools); and a specific movement promoted by the XEI to boycott the SATs, a policy initiated by the Catalan government but which dovetails neatly with LOMCE and the proposed extension of forms of auditing, the SATs and government by numbers.

In the 2014–2015 school year, the SATs were introduced into year 3 (8–9 year olds) by the Catalan Ministry of Education and by that time there were 1035 families and 52 primary schools throughout the region that publicly expressed their rejection of the SATs via the XEI and FAPAC campaigns. In just one year there was a significant increase in the number of families (from a few dozen to over a thousand) refusing to take their children to school on the days of the external tests, something that generated a significant amount of interest in newspapers and on television and social networks. It is worth highlighting that as well as not taking their children to school on the SATs days, these families set up self-organised alternative educational activities so as to show that ‘another form of education is possible, one very different from the standardised and competitive models that SATs represents’.⁵ This boycott was repeated in the 2015–2016 school year when, according to data from the XEI, 1597 families from 79 primary schools boycotted the SATs. In the 2016–2017 school year, 1712 families from 82 schools boycotted the SATs and in 2017–2018 school year they estimate a similar or slightly greater participation in the boycott than in the previous year, both in the number of families and schools. It might be useful to note here that, unlike in other countries such as the US or England, in Spain and Catalonia there is no real presence of ‘free’ schools that are exempted from the prescribed curriculum, and home schooling is not a realistic option. The vast majority of Catalan schools are state schools (60%), private schools run mainly by religious organisations but funded by the state (39%) or private (1%), all of which are obliged to follow the Spanish syllabus.

Resistance to the SATs: The dimensions of ‘tactical reversal’ and ‘aesthetics of experience’ (Foucault)

The boycott movement in Catalonia is now five years old, although in other countries, the USA in particular, such movements (at different scales) have existed for a longer and have had some impact on educational policy, as Hursh (2013), Bellamy (2016), Pizmony-Levy and Green-Saraisky (2016, 2017), Bennett (2016), Mitra et al. (2016), Wang (2017) and Kirylo (2018) have indicated. Over and against the depoliticising effects of neoliberal policies (Clarke, 2012, 2018), that reduce political concerns to matters of technical efficiency, the SATs Catalan boycott movement has brought about to some degree, as elsewhere, a re-politicisation of education.

In this regard, we suggest, Foucault’s conceptualisations of resistance and refusal can shed light on the actions of the families taking part in the SATs boycott movement in Catalonia. Following the work of Thompson (2003), Ball and Olmedo (2013), Ball (2015 and 2017) and Gallo (2016) based on the late work of Foucault, the SATs boycott movement can be seen as comprising two types of resistance that manifest in different ways. First, there is the ‘tactical reversal of mechanisms of power’. In this ‘negative’ dimension of resistance, families act reactively to the SATs by opting out. When the families decide not to send their children to school on the day of the tests, they are undermining the main foundation of the SATs: the presence of children in the school. That is to say, the families undertake a form of reactive resistance to the practices of testing, to the concrete and precise form of power-knowledge that the SATs represent (Ball, 2017). The families assert their freedom to not send their children to school and make the most of this freedom (Foucault, 1981: 12). In doing so, they seek to evade the processes of examination, discipline, normalisation and classification – and the ‘penalty the norm’ – that the SATs represent. By opting out, the families seek to call attention to and condemn the SATs as a ‘moral technology’ that objectifies and classifies the children-students based on their performance measurement. Such classifications, on the one hand, claim to unveil ‘the truth of the child’ and, on the other, render children as a form of value, as future productive citizens, as human resources.

Second, we can think about the resistance of these families as an ‘aesthetics of existence’. In relation to the actions of ‘tactical reversal’ we can ask with Hartmann (2003): ‘How can one have a positive means of resistance which does not devolve to re-action or negation?’ (4). Hartmann’s response to this question is: ‘The answer, as we know, emerges in the 1980s through discussion of caring for oneself and Foucault’s genealogy of the critical attitude’. This is similar to Thompson’s (2003: 120) response, which we can adapt by saying that effective resistance against the SATs necessitates a refusal of the types of individuality imposed through practices of self-formation and the promotion of alternative forms of subjectivity. In this second dimension, therefore, the resistance of families to the SATs is understood as a positive refusal, as an attempt to establish a horizon of freedom. These practices of resistance make the families into ‘critical agents’ (Postma, 2015) not only capable of identifying the regimes of knowledge-power and generating ‘tactical reversal’ (opposition) but also able to imagine different ways of educating, and forms of existence and putting them into practice as a form of freedom (activation). As an ‘aesthetics of existence’ what is attempted is not an alternative to SATs – something ‘better’ or more palatable. Rather the promotion of ‘new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of the type of individuality that has been imposed on us’ (Foucault, 1982: 785). Here, with Ball and Olmedo (2013) and Postma (2015), we understand that it is in the realm of subjectivity where an important part of the response to SATs and neoliberal governance is played out.

Methods and data

Through our own contacts and those provided by the XEI, we agreed via email to conduct a face-to-face interview with six families that had boycotted a year 3 and/or year 6 test in the 2015–2016 academic year, these comprise the research sample. There were three criteria for the selection of families: they had carried out a boycott of the SATs; territorial diversity (city-rural, and different villages, towns or cities in different regions of Catalonia); and, as far as was possible (which, as we shall see, was not very far) we sought diversity in the education and profession of the parents (social class). The semi-structured interviews were carried out face to face in 2016 and at the beginning of 2017 in the respective villages, towns and cities, and were recorded and coded using the Atlas.ti program. Our analysis of the interviews is both categorial and discursive. The categorial analysis is related to describing the responses provided by each family in the different research dimensions that we wished to examine in greater depth. These dimensions, in addition to the socio-economic data of the families, were based on the interview questions, and were: (a) how and from where the interviewees received the information about the movement that proposed boycotting the SATs; (b) the process of how and when they made the decision to boycott the SATs; (c) what their main reasons for boycotting the SATs were; (d) what role their children played in the whole process; (e) what kind of doubts, debates and resistance they experienced: their own, those of their family, of the school, of other families, and so on; (f) what happened on the specific days of the SATs boycott; (g) whether there was, for the parents, a political and social dimension to the boycott or whether it was just an individual affair; (h) if they felt any doubts, uncertainty or fear during the process; (i) how they assessed their decision after carrying out the boycott; (j) other comments they wished to add.

Having completed the categorial analysis of the interviews, we then undertook a discourse analysis of each interview. This sought to dissect, disrupt and render the familiar strange by interrogation (Graham, 2007), in order to identify the development and relations of different axes of power and knowledge and the different boycott practices and dimensions. The focus was on analysing the discourse underlying these practices and ‘words’. Or, in Foucault’s (1972) words:

In analysing a painting, one can reconstitute the latent discourse of the painter; one can try to recapture the murmur of his intentions [or] … set out to show a discursive practice that is embodied in techniques and effect … shot through with the positivity of a knowledge (savoir). It seems to me that one might also carry out an analysis of the same type on political knowledge. (214)

We also explored the websites linked to the boycott movement⁶ and traced press articles that, in 2016, referred to the movement. This provided a more general understanding of the movement, its arguments, organisation, actions, debates and controversies and served as background to the interviews.

Sample profile

When Pizmony-Levy and Green-Saraisky (2016: 6) portray the typical US opt out activist they define him/her as a ‘highly educated, white, married, politically liberal parent whose children attend public school and whose household median income is well above the national average’. Our six families, which we identified through personal contacts and through contacts facilitated by the XEI, share a great deal in common with this US profile. As we shall see in the ‘Paradoxes and tensions’ section, this generates tension in terms of equity (see Pizmony-Levy and Green-Saraisky, 2016; Posey-Maddox et al., 2016). Clearly this is a very small sample and the empirical claims we might make on this basis are very limited. These interviews were conducted as part of a more general attempt to make sense of the Catalan op-out movement: its origins, characteristics, revindications and modus operandi. As indicated above, the interviews provide us with an opportunity to think about the meaning and possibilities of forms of resistance to neoliberal technologies of governmentality.

Most of our samples are university-educated and middle-class, and all are white, and they are typical of the core membership of the XEI. Anna⁷ is a 43-year-old secondary school teacher and doctor in biology, and her husband Xesc is a 42-year-old doctor in physics. They have two children who go to a rural state school (in a community of less than 1000 inhabitants). Marta is a 46-year-old research project manager with a degree in physics and is married with a daughter who goes to a two-form entry state school in a middle-income district in Barcelona. Consol is a 40-year-old primary school teacher who teaches in a rural school in the region of Girona, in a community of less than 1000 inhabitants. She is married with two children, who attend this same school. Her double role as mother and teacher adds complexity to her commitment as an opt out activist. Belén is a 47-year-old chemical engineer and government employee, and is the XEI coordinator of all Catalonia. She is married and has two children who go to a two-form entry state school in a middle-income district of Barcelona. The other two interviewees, Paquita and Nuria, possess a somewhat different profile. Paquita is from a large town in the province of Girona, married with two children in a two-form-entry state school, where she is president of the parents’ association. She completed her basic education and works as a sales representative. She is a white working-class woman. Nuria is married and has three children in a rural school in a village in Girona of less than 1000 inhabitants. She completed her studies of basic vocational training and works as a carer. What is missing both here in the sample and, according to the leaders of the movement, in the membership of XEI, are parents from manual working-class backgrounds and minority ethnic parents. Two factors are involved here. First, according to XEI’s own data and consistent with research conducted in the US, UK and France (Monceau, 2011; Posey-Maddox et al., 2016; Rollock et al., 2015; Vincent, 2017; among others), these two profiles are a minority in the boycott movement. And second, the difficulty in finding these profiles, both for XEI and the researchers.

Having outlined the methodology used to collect and analyse the data, as well as the profile of our small sample of families, the next section will use the interview data and Foucauldian analysis to critique the SATs from a number of perspectives.

Interview data analysis

The SATs affect children’s wellbeing, learning and school culture

One of the arguments made by parents with regard to the SATs affecting the wellbeing of children was linked to the idea that these tests are done too early. As Xesc comments:

In Finland and those countries where they start reading later, and also the second language … it serves no purpose to start so early … but we live in a society of the more the better and the sooner the better. And … you know what? It just doesn’t make sense.

Anna, his partner, Marta and Belén made the same point. As Belén puts it: ‘when they are older, I see it a bit differently, but the truth is in year 3 they are little … in year 6 they’re not so little, because they are older, then’. Marta addresses this in similar terms:

In the tests of year 6, people think that they are mandatory, I’m not sure how to say it … it’s more difficult not to do them … it’s like different. But in year 3, speaking with the teachers we have seen that they are not appropriate to the age, the tests are too long, too complicated etc.

Finally, Belén echoes this:

In year 3 they are still very little, they will have time to study, to stop studying and all that … they will have time … . But in primary school, this first period of development, we respect the rhythms of learning that might be different.

In a more general sense, Anna expresses the argument that schools organised in response to the logic of the SATs were more likely to enact rankings and classifications of children and deploy ‘dividing practices’ and would as a result be less inclusive, and less geared towards the wellbeing of all children, more exclusive and unequal (Beneyto et al, 2019). As she put it:

The model of assessing the children in year 3 (SATs) is to rank them from first to last in a list and I don’t like that … I don’t think it’s a model that enriches … the poor kid that has the bad luck to lack skills in this particular intelligence of language or maths but has skills in another that is not valued, is labelled as unskilful … . which favours competition, continuous comparing with others … I don’t like it … . It fails to value many skills … what these tests value is not the most important … I would like schools to value other things like how the child develops, how we can help them to find their potentials in music, or the arts or emotionally … but everything is about pigeonholing … in year 3 you should have achieved this … why? Who says so?

These comments point to some of the totalising and individualising effects of techniques of testing, differentiating and categorising students (Foucault, 1982). Marta reiterates these concerns and makes a more general point:

There has to be another form of assessing the system that is different from this one, the experts in assessment can surely find another way. These forms of assessment are not adequate for them and also this is part of the struggle for what type of school and education we want as well.

Marta seems to be suggesting here that the tests have a distorting effect on the meaning of school and what it means to be educated. In other words, that testing is defining and determining that which it purports to measure. Education is in danger of being reduced to a series of performances and their measurement. Here we see a plurality of refusals, resistances and struggles against local fixations of power in specific sites.

Several of the parents interviewed echoed Marta’s concern regarding the SATs and the type of school they are producing. They see them as the basis of a new school culture that orients curriculum contents, teachers’ methods and student identities to the assessment parameters that the SATs instil (Collet-Sabé, 2017). The SATs are in other words disciplinary techniques that reorient behaviour, teaching and class dynamics. Anna objects to how the tests fail to reflect the project-type learning of her school, and instead

the children have to train before doing them and so what the tests show is not really real … this school and many others work by using projects, with hardly any lecture-type classes, doesn’t fit in with these tests at all.

Paquita agrees:

We know that there are schools that are training the children in order to take the tests … they are forced to take them, in order to also see how the teachers are doing their job, they train the children to do them.

Here are some of the mundane but significant and very real aspects of power at work in Catalan schools, reconfiguring the meaning and practice of teaching and the teacher. That is, the ‘imperious’ (Foucault, 2010a: 19) re-making of the teacher as a productive but docile neoliberal subject position. When Paquita says ‘force’ she is probably talking about one of the most important nostrums of neoliberalism: there is no alternative. Teachers are being produced one way, something that makes it difficult for them to think, to act … in other ways (Collet-Sabé, 2017).

For Marta and Belén, the key argument for boycotting the tests is above all that they fail to represent the type of school that they would like for their children. The tests produce ‘something’ the parents do not want. Marta wants ‘a school that is not measured in this way, with external tests’ a school that is ‘more creative, much more participative, that values the life experience of the children and not so much the results. We want a school that is not competitive, that doesn’t generate competition between schools … ’. Belén is of the same opinion:

In the school that my kids go to they work on areas of interest and they don’t do exams. I don’t see the point of making my son do an exam that he has never done in his life … . [it] makes no sense within the logic of the educational project of the school.

In other words, particular sorts of parental behaviour are interpolated by the testing regime, which produces ‘subjects of audit’ – subjects who are permanently monitored and compared against others, against standards of performance, and even if unintended, the tests elicit competitive and advantage-seeking behaviour from some parents producing a form of ‘good’ parenting articulated by competition (Lyon, 2018). The tests are seen by parents who opt out as forms of judgement addressed to their children which may have implications for their future school careers, and which contribute to producing or reinforcing a view of education as an arena of individual competition for esteem, position and scarce resources. Again, this contributes to re-forming what school is, what schools are for, what children are and what parents are supposed to be and to do (Ball, 2015 and 2017).

Uses of SATs results: Rankings, competition, exclusion

Several of the parents interviewed expressed their concern regarding the purposes of the tests and use made of the results. Nuria argues that this point was made by Marta who commented, ‘it might be OK for year 6 to do the tests … but the problem is what we do with the results’. Clearly, the purposes of the tests and what parents should make of the outcomes are ambiguous. Nuria puts it like this: ‘The main problem is what use they make of the tests and the results … if the department really wants to assess the system, it’s not necessary that everybody does the tests, a sample of students could do them’. Xesc points out that ‘these tests classify schools based on the results’ and ‘in the long term, can lead to serious distortions in the education system between schools creating differences …’. Consol laments that ‘the tests create conflicts between schools and between families and that is not building in a positive way – quite the opposite …’. And Belén suggests a more specific effect: ‘the different results among the schools are those that permit or facilitate school segregation …’.

As indicated by a wide variety of studies (Bonal and Tarabini, 2013; Olmedo, 2013; Ozga, 2013; Piattoeva, 2015; Sellar and Lingard, 2013; Serpieri et al., 2015; Verger et al., 2017; Wilkins, 2015; Collet-Sabé 2017; etc.) regimes of school-focused testing ‘fit’ with and ‘feed into’ the formation of education markets and foster choice and consumer-based relations between parents and schools. Such tests are one of the ways in which the neoliberal state constructs the conditions of possibility for an economy of schooling: a ‘concrete and real space in which the formal structure of competition could function’ (Foucault, 2010a: 132). Parents are aware that the tests are part of a more general ensemble of reforms and practices that act upon the experience of and purposes of education. Nonetheless, some parents, like Marta, as noted above, feel comfortable with this audit rationality (if children are ‘older’).

Critique of SATs as a part of neoliberal education policy reform

There is another core argument that links the SATs to the contemporary global ensemble of neoliberal/neoconservative political reforms, in two respects, and that sometimes go together and are sometimes separated in the Catalan case. On the one hand, in Catalonia there is considerable support for independence from Spain and some opponents of the SATs are not so much critical of the tests themselves but rather because they ‘come from the government of Spain’. Xesc explained how ‘in fact, in our school, more parents were against the tests for [that reason] than for our arguments about classification pressure on children and so on’.

Alongside this ‘nationalist’ argument is another kind of political consideration: objection to LOMCE, a general educational law which, as we saw in the ‘The SATs and the birth of the “opt put” movement in Catalonia (Spain)’ section, guided by neoconservative and neoliberal models and practices. As Paquita said: ‘The LOMCE is a classist law that segregates, it is recentralising, with these exams they want to control core subjects and we believe that education is much more than this: working in groups, more critical aspects … .’. Or in the words of Marta: ‘The tests of year 3 are clearly LOMCE and people don’t like this. Boycotting the tests is a way of protesting against LOMCE’. Belén, from a more global perspective, comments on how the educational model of LOMCE is borrowed from elsewhere and brings about ‘the commodification and the privatisation of public education. What we disagree with is the model … which comes from England with its famous Academies that arose as a way of taking public education and privatising it. … And that goes against guaranteeing equality of opportunities …’.

Here then the school boycotts in Catalonia are situated within a more general politics of education, both national and global. In both respects, the boycott movements contain traces and referents to some more fundamental struggles over what counts as education and what it means to be educated. This process, from resistance against specific laws to awareness of the global complexity of neoliberal reforms that bear upon the construction of their subjectivity, can perhaps be read as a process that goes from resistance to refusal.

Paradoxes and tensions

There are at least three tensions evident within these criticisms of and concerns about testing. The first is about the age of children. Parents are more concerned about SATs if children are ‘little’ than if they are at the end of primary or especially in secondary school where tests are seen as more ‘normal’. It is clear that this differentiation in the evaluation of tests based on the children’s ages has a certain internal contradiction since, in principle, the arguments against the SATs are relevant for all children, not just those of year 3. One way of understanding this would be that, in some way, these parents, at least in part, take for granted that there are exams, tests, rankings in life, and thus find it ‘normal’ that older children take them.

The second tension, related to the first, lies in the composition of the campaigning families – non-immigrant and middle-class with considerable cultural and economic capital – and their fight for social equity in education and against school segregation. A body of relevant research has questioned the effects and motivations of the participation of the white middle-class in this type of movement. Authors like Vincent (2017) have drawn attention to the classed nature of relations between teachers and families and of models of parenthood, Rollock et al. (2015) have identified the specific class and ethnic composition of Parents Associations, and Posey-Maddox et al. (2016) have explored the classed nature of school choice. The argument made is that white middle-class families colonise certain schools, parents’ associations and protest movements and use them to further their own particular class interests, with the effect of heightening class inequalities. However, our analysis suggests another aspect of social class that requires further consideration that we hope to pursue. That is, whether some of the forms of resistance indicated above are in some respects inherently classed. Foucault’s discussion of self-formation within ancient Greece might, at face value, suggest that they are.

The third tension is about the positioning of teachers and head teachers. Some teachers and head teachers are running SATs or at least facilitating their implementation and critiquing them. While some teachers do see SATs as having a positive role to play in making schools more accountable and clearly focused on the raising of ‘standards’ – as these are represented by test scores – others are discomforted by the affects on the wellbeing of their students and for their own professional autonomy. But there is a difficult move to make from discomfort to action (resistance or refusal) and many teachers are captured by a sense of administrative responsibility to prepare for and carry out the tests.

Conclusions

Anna: ‘It’s another way of saying ‘hey, things could be different, and schools could be set up differently and it’s good that they could be set up differently’.

Despite the tensions noted above, which exist to some extent in all social and educational movements, the opt out and boycott movement is significant, we suggest, in a number of ways. Not necessarily in terms of the numbers of parents involved, although the numbers are not insignificant, but rather in terms of the ways that the opposition to testing ‘interrupts’ current schooling ‘as normal’. For some parents, many more perhaps than are actively involved in the boycotts, the introduction of the tests has made them think about what education is, or more particularly the sort of education that they want for their children and for other children. This is for some represented as concerns about the wellbeing of their children, but for others it raises a set of more general issues about the purposes of ‘the school’ and education. In effect, they must consider whether this, a test-based form of schooling, is what they do not want as the education of their child, and thus what they do want. As Foucault (1982) puts it, ‘Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are’ (785). In other words, if they refuse to have their child tested then they must think about their reasons for their refusal, what they are against and what they are for. They develop a healthy suspicion of the present. For some this goes even further, and the boycotts become an educative experience both for them as ‘political’ actors – in attending meetings, making arguments, articulating concerns, organising events – and for them in relation to their children and the children of others, both in their parenting and in the organisation of alternative learning experiences. That is, opting out is a reconfiguring experience of refusal, involving ethical work done on themselves, and a process of formation of moral subjectivity. The resources and capacities for the sort of ethical work he outlines may not be equally distributed across the population, the material conditions for such work on ourselves are certainly not available to all. This needs thinking about further.

The parents must consider what is worthwhile, what they want their children to know, to do, to be capable of, to be. For the parents, boycotting the tests both makes schooling contingent and begins to establish the conditions for the creation of new modes of subjectivity. This is a form of activation that involves some kind of engagement in the travails and failures of self-fashioning, and experimenting with and choosing what we might be and how we might relate to others. It is ethics as a ‘social praxis’ that can be practiced in many different ways. However, we have to accept that we have almost no sense of the extent to which these parents undertake their boycott of SATs as part of a more general project of ethical self-fashioning.

Nonetheless, all of this is a very immediate and very relevant form of the politics of education and it points to profound tensions in relation to the school student subject in contemporary education that go well beyond the inanities of testing. What the boycotts also signal is the possibility of doing education policy differently, in ways that involve and engage parents in making decisions about schooling and the purposes of education.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to especially thank FAPAC (Federació d’Associacions de Mares i Pares de Catalunya) and XEI (Xarxa d’Escoles Insubmises) and Paul Marshall (University of Vic, Barcelona) for his inestimable help with the paper.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Jordi Collet-Sabé

Stephen J Ball

Notes

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