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Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Those Who Would Block the School House Door « City School Stories

Notes from the Field « City School Stories

Those Who Would Block the School House Door

Submitted by Frank Murphy, May 31, 2011

Across the state of Pennsylvania, school district administrators are struggling to grapple with the painful process of reducing services to the children whom they serve. They do so in response to the billion-dollar reduction in state education funding proposed by Governor Corbett. Cutting full day kindergarten classes is one of the most troublesome of options on the reduction list of some district leaders.

This will mean that an effective and proven strategy for assisting young children to build the prerequisite skills that they will need for future literacy achievement will be denied them. Any individual who purports the belief that all children should have access to a high quality instructional program should consider this possibility as unacceptable. Indeed, I would think that the corporate school reformers and their political allies who dominant America’s educational agenda would be right on top of this serious problem. They claim that they are on a civil