I dunno what to call it so I'll just use a vague term: "the system" these days has these kinds of problem, I've noticed. I'm talking more than just schools and tests here. I notice this in all aspects of life, like, say, buying from Wal-Mart instead of a mom and pop store. They're set up so that no matter what you're always potentially hurting someone. If you opt out you can potentially hurt teachers and schools. If you stay in... You still hurt them by participating in a system that you don't believe in, and if you believe it's best for your children's educational well-being to opt out, you're obviously hurting them as well. Maybe that's why we find the trolley problem so compelling: Many choices in our lives in the systems we live in have similar kind of scenarios. The trolley problem is also set up so that it always has one "lesser of two evils" choice that people think we should lean towards, like in this instance the choice of letting the kids stay to help the teachers and schools, which would correspond to killing one dude to save five on the other side of the tracks. Or not; I dunno. Maybe I'm just being stupid and comparing things that shouldn't be compared.
Wow I never had thought about it in this way before but I think you're on to something. I wonder, even if subconsciously, advertising is doing this to us. I appreciate that I am more connected and can make choices about what I purchase based on the practice of company xyz but am I really choosing the lesser of two evils or am I just more willing to participate in some evil rather than some other? In the article she even talks about how the principal threatened that the student "might feel weird, being different from all the other kids." There is definitely a not so subtle tone of guilt that the school was trying to place on the parent here. I am glad she stuck to her guns.
I remember a talk about privacy and surveillance where the speaker was saying something like this about mobile phones. He asked the audience how many would willingly carry around a tracking device on their person and nobody raised their hand, then he asked them how many of them has a mobile phone and all of them raised their hand. He then said that whats really happening is, the system is making our choices have a wider impact such that, the choice of having a mobile phone or not is turned into a more complex choice of effectively participating in society or not. He mentioned many other examples like google analytics and how our choices were framed in such ways that it makes it harder to opt out.