To the AFT/UFT: Where is OUR agenda?
From BeyondChron
The focus on competition, standardized test scores, teacher bashing, and privatization are at the core of the Whitehouse’s approach to public schools and will no doubt be a part of any legislative activity regarding reauthorizing federal education law, known popularly as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Coupled with the willful blindness to the centrality of anemic school funding levels and the tremendous role of child poverty on student performance, our expectations of Washington D.C. must continue to be low and skeptical as was predicted in this column from Duncan’s original appointment.
In so many ways, then, 2011 is poised to be a repeat of 2010, with all of its frustrations and extremes and politics as usual, but it’s also possible that we may have just gone past our ability to tolerate those politics. As families with children in the schools, we have no choice but to remain deeply engaged in the day to day struggles in classrooms and district board rooms to maintain, demand, and work for the best for our kids,. Yet we know that that work is made so much harder and more necessary by the relentless assault on the very
The focus on competition, standardized test scores, teacher bashing, and privatization are at the core of the Whitehouse’s approach to public schools and will no doubt be a part of any legislative activity regarding reauthorizing federal education law, known popularly as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Coupled with the willful blindness to the centrality of anemic school funding levels and the tremendous role of child poverty on student performance, our expectations of Washington D.C. must continue to be low and skeptical as was predicted in this column from Duncan’s original appointment.
In so many ways, then, 2011 is poised to be a repeat of 2010, with all of its frustrations and extremes and politics as usual, but it’s also possible that we may have just gone past our ability to tolerate those politics. As families with children in the schools, we have no choice but to remain deeply engaged in the day to day struggles in classrooms and district board rooms to maintain, demand, and work for the best for our kids,. Yet we know that that work is made so much harder and more necessary by the relentless assault on the very
