Badass Teachers Assn
By
Ihave been enraged by what has been happening to teachers and public education for at least 7 years. My involvement began in 2007 with school grading and school closings in the Bronx, which drove the history projects I was doing out of the public schools, and victimized many of the great teachers I had worked with.It built up steam when Barack Obama and Arne Duncan unleashed Race to the Top which blamed teachers for the country’s education deficits and required that teachers be rated on the basis of student test scores.
I started writing and speaking about what was happening and got a modest response from teachers and education activists around the country. I spoke at several rallies in Washington, helped found the Dump Duncan group on Facebook, participated in several unsuccessful demonstrations against school closings in NY and found my frustration building.
I became a loose cannon, exploding in rage at dinner parties and family gatherings when anyone attacked teachers, losing many friends in the process. Everyone I thought I was a crazy man when I attacked what Michael Bloomberg was doing in NYC and said what Barack Obama was doing throughout the US was a deadly blow to Democracy and Free Speech as well as Public Education.
Then came the great NY Test Revolt of the Spring of 2013. Parents up in arms about Common Core aligned tests, mostly in suburbs and rural areas, began opting out their children in unprecedented numbers. I was invited to speak in several Long Island communities and in the process met some amazing parents and teachers who were as alarmed about what was happening in education policy as I was. One of these was a parent activist from Oklahoma named Priscilla Sanstead; another was a teacher and parent from Long Island named Marla Kilfoyle. Even though I only knew them from email and Facebook, I found them to be kindred spirits, funny, creative, feisty, ready to fight back against the Billionaire Privatizers and their supporters in both parties using social media as well as more traditional protest methods.
I had never been part of any organization that had grown this fast, much less an organization that had been started with such low expectations.”
I had never been part of any organization that had grown this fast, much less an organization that had been started with such low expectations.”
Then one day, when Priscilla and I were comparing notes, we decided, as an experiment to create a Facebook group called “The Badass Teachers Association.” We had been working together on an innovative site called “The Badass Parents Association” which had amassed a nice following in a few months and thought we might be able to attract a few hundred teachers who were as angry as we were about the testing and scripting and demonization of teachers in America’s public schools.
What happened next took us totally by surprise and changed the course of American education history. Priscilla launched the page on June 14, 2013 at 4:30 PM and we invited several people around the country we had worked with to join, one of whom was Marla. By Sunday night June 16, in part attracted by a recruiting contest Marla had started, we had nearly 2,000 people in the group. No one had ever seen anything like it. Teachers all over the US were pouring into a group with a Badass Teachers Assn:
What happened next took us totally by surprise and changed the course of American education history. Priscilla launched the page on June 14, 2013 at 4:30 PM and we invited several people around the country we had worked with to join, one of whom was Marla. By Sunday night June 16, in part attracted by a recruiting contest Marla had started, we had nearly 2,000 people in the group. No one had ever seen anything like it. Teachers all over the US were pouring into a group with a Badass Teachers Assn: