A Chicago Teacher Writes: The Joy of Finally Fighting Back
Guest post by Katie Osgood.
There is jubilation on the streets of Chicago.
The excitement is tempered with humility. No one wants a strike. Chicago teachers are very aware that this strike is difficult on parents, on students, and on the teachers themselves.
But for the first time in decades, Chicago's teachers are standing up. They are saying "no more" to the countless waves of harmful, poorly-planned, and unproven education reforms. There is freedom in drawing a line in the sand. For too long now, teachers have known that they were participating in something cruel. Giving test after standardized test, watching neighborhood schools be starved of resources and accepting that they had to "do more with less", watching as students began hating school as their lives revolved around test-prep curriculum, "zero tolerance" school discipline, and fewer and fewer of the engaging arts, music, world language, and physical education classes which makes their schools days rich and meaningful. All the while, teachers see the growingeffects of unabated poverty on their students' lives, while politicians and education reformers refuse to talk about the realities of our nation's poor.
And the politicians only make things worse. They further gut the public schools while giving away money to the favored charter schools and turnaround companies. In Chicago, they don't
Response to Anthony Cody: The Role of the Marketplace in Ecationdu
IRVIN SCOTT , STACEY CHILDRESS
September 13, 2012
This post also appears on Anthony Cody's blog, Living in Dialogue. It is the last post in a weekly series of posts, over five consecutive weeks, between teacher Anthony Cody, and various members of the US education team at the foundation.
Irvin Scott:
The interaction on this blog began with a spoken agreement and wish between us and Mr. Cody during a conversation this summer: to truly engage with those who have different views from our own. To listen to one other, potentially find common ground, agree where we can and respectfully disagree where we can't. To try and bring some civility to what can sometimes be an uncivil quarter of our education debates. That was our agreement - along with this set of topics reflected in this space over the last few weeks. While I am not sure each post in the series fully met the spirit of the agreement, I do appreciate any effort Mr. Cody made to move in that direction.
The topic of this final blog per our agreement is the "role of the marketplace in education."
However, before my colleague, Stacey Childress, Deputy Director for our Next Generations Models team, joins me to respond to Mr. Cody’s claim about markets, I want to return to a theme that I have tried to intersperse throughout both of my previous responses. As I have reflected on these exchanges, my meeting with Mr. Cody