Van Roekel Tells RA Delegates Bringing Equity to Schools Requires Leadership, Not Just Action
By Tim Walker
NEA President Dennis Van Roekel delivered his final keynote speech at the 2014 Representative Assembly on Wednesday with a passionate and stirring exhortation for educators to lead the movement to bring equity and excellence to our schools. Success in ridding the system of high-stakes testing and the influence of corporate reformers, creating higher standards, and building a quality workforce will depend on nothing less, Van Roekel told the assembly.
“A strong future for public education for our association depends on leading an agenda focused on student success and educator quality, not as an afterthought, but as our first priority.”
NEA Vice President Lily Eskelsen García and NEA Secretary Treasurer Beckly Pringle introduced Van Roekel with a heartfelt and humorous tribute, good-naturedly ribbing him for his boundless optimism, but also praising his courageous leadership. “It truly is the end of an era,” Eskelsen García said. They then invited Van Roekel’s 100-year-old mother, Marie, a retired teacher and lifelong NEA member to invite her son to the stage.
President Dennis Van Roekel delivers his Keynote Address during the 2014 NEA Representative Assembly
Reflecting on his long and storied career as an educator and union leader, Van Roekel took the opportunity to look at where the NEA and public schools have travelled in the three decades since he attended his first RA in 1980. It has been, he said, a proud but tumultuous time for the organization, marked by three key transformations: the growing importance of social justice to NEA’s work, the shift toward union-based political action, and the monumental changes following the release of “A Nation at Risk” in 1983.
The landmark report contained some solid recommendations that went ignored. What happened next, Van Roekel said, set the stage for where we stand today: many politicians see public education not as a shared national value, but as a problem, and an army of corporate reformers see schools as profit centers, not places of learning
“Ideas and recommendations materialized that were never mentioned in the report. Vouchers, tax credits, privatization, merit pay – a whole new generation of so-called reforms,” Van Roekel recalled.
The verdict on these schemes is abundantly clear. An onslaught of testing triggered by No Child Left Behind has robbed a generation of students a substantive and valuable education and imposed a punitive accountability system that has punished teachers and students alike.
“Plain and simple, their strategy has failed America’s students, especially students who are poor and students of color. It is not acceptable to continue down this path. The direction must change!” Van Roekel declared to applause.
“We must not allow politicians to define the terms of change and ‘accountability’ to yet another generation of students,” Van Roekel said. “Accountability is not about what the test scores are–it is about what the system did, in every way possible, to help all students succeed. This is about equity.”
To neutralize the influence of the corporate reformers and move equity front and center in the national Van Roekel Tells RA Delegates Bringing Equity to Schools Requires Leadership, Not Just Action | NEA Today: