Public School Defenders Launch Movement in Austin
The Progressive March 2014
Deep in the heart of Texas, in the very center of what public-school advocate Diane Ravitch called the “education-industrial complex,” public-school activists from every corner of the United States met last weekend to launch a nationwide movement to defend public education against corporate takeover and phony, test-driven “reform.”
The Network for Public Education: http://www.networkforpubliceducation.org/
founded by Diane Ravitch and Anthony Cody, met for the first time in Austin on March 1 and 2 to sound the alarm about high-stakes testing, mass school closures, and the corporate take-over of public education, and to rally a nationwide movement to resist.
Karen Lewis, the dynamic president of the Chicago Teachers Union joined Texas school superintendent John Kuhn on stage at the Lyndon Johnson museum at the University of Texas, to give a barn-burning joint keynote address:
“There could not be two more different people on the planet,” Lewis said. “John Kuhn is a white male. I am a black woman. John Kuhn has worked as a Christian missionary, and I am a recently bat mitzvahed Jew. John Kuhn is management. Karen Lewis is labor. But I am going to tell you that what we have in common are the values [that] make this country great.”
Those values, Kuhn said, are what led the Chicago teachers out on strike to fight not for themselves or even for their schools, but “to keep the fading light of democracy burning, and to fend off a new generation of robber barons.”
School closings, a “test-and-punish” model of education reform that labels high-poverty districts as “failing” and invites their takeover by private companies, and the replacement of democratically elected school boards with “CEO’s” are among the threats to the basic, democratic institution of public education, Kuhn and Lewis pointed out.
“Where do we go for redress of our grievances once we’ve surrendered our elected school boards and our constitutional guarantees?” Kuhn asked. “Do we march into the board room of a charter management
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