Bad to the bone – teacher movement adopts rebel yell to confront critics
By Kimberly Beltran
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Mark Naison is one bad ass teacher – and he’s not afraid to admit it.
On the contrary, the Brooklyn native and Fordham University professor, inspired earlier this year by a large-scale testing revolt in his home state, created a Facebook group for discourse among educators like himself who are fed up with federal education policy that he believes casts teachers as villains and as largely indifferent to the crisis in schools.
Within a week of launching the group page last June, nearly 500 people had signed on, and the Badass Association of Teachers had gone from an idea to a movement with a mission.
The group has now grown to nearly 31,000 members with chapters in every state and is planning a march on the U.S. Department of Education next July – 50,000 marchers is the goal.
“We realized, we’ve touched a core like we can’t believe of teachers who are totally fed up with the testing and demonization of teachers from both political parties,” said Naison, the husband and son of public school teachers as well as the recipient of a public school education growing up. “You call us bad teachers and we’ll come back with no, we’re bad ass teachers – we’re tough, we’re resilient, we’re proud and we’re not going to take any crap from you anymore. We’re fighting back. Enough is enough.”
Naison said many teachers’ hopes for a better system under President Barack Obama were shattered by his Race to the Top program, which awards schools millions of dollars for developing curriculum that produces college- and career-ready students and for basing teacher and school effectiveness on student test scores. States were also offered waivers from some of the more onerous provisions of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law – but those waivers, like the RTTT funding, were conditioned on similar requirements.
It’s bad policy, say group members who call themselves BATs, and they want the program scrapped. No more
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL BAT!
Badass Teachers Association
This is for every teacher who refuses to be blamed for the failure of our society to erase poverty and inequality, and refuses to accept assessments, tests and evaluations imposed by those who have contempt for real teaching and learning.
This is for every teacher who refuses to be blamed for the failure of our society to erase poverty and inequality, and refuses to accept assessments, tests and evaluations imposed by those who have contempt for real teaching and learning.