WANTED: Progressive Candidate With the Guts to Stand Up For Public Education
Wanted:
Progressive presidential candidate.
MUST SUPPORT PUBLIC EDUCATION.
No. Not just the words. Not as a soundbite. Must actually support policies that help public schools – not tear them apart and sell them away piece-by-piece while you smile and brag about how much you support education.
This means you must:
1) Repudiate and Vow to Repeal Common Core State Standards
-Must know how they were created by unqualified partisans with little input from real educators.
-Cash strapped states were coerced into accepting them – in many cases even before they were done being written – as a condition for increased funding.
-They have never been proven to help kids learn and are in fact a massive social experiment at taxpayers’ expense and students’ peril.
-They are a huge payday for the testing and test prep industry who provide the new standardized assessments and new textbooks necessary for their implementation.
-They are developmentally inappropriate, demanding all students to learn at the same rate and at a time frame that is inconsistent with the way children cognitively develop.
2) End Annual Standardized Testing
-Must promise to end policies forcing public schools to give standardized tests in reading and math to all students in grades 3-8 and once in high school. Ideally, standardized tests should be completely eliminated.
-Must understand that standardized tests are poor assessments that have never been proven to measure academic achievement. However, they do an excellent job of demonstrating a student’s parental income – rich kids do well, poor kids less so.
-Must realize these tests are nothing but a money-maker for private industry and are used as an excuse to close under-funded schools predominantly serving children of color.
–MUST REPUDIATE THE MEDIA NARRATIVE OF FAILING SCHOOLS, which is not supported by facts and merely the propaganda of an industry feeding off of our public taxes and children’s misery.
3) Stop the Expansion of Charter Schools
-Must understand how for-profit charters siphon away public money for use as private profits. Charters reduce services for children to increase the bottom line.
-Must vow to protect funding meant for traditional public schools that is lost when charters open in the district.
-Must know that no research has ever shown charters to be better than public schools, and many studies have shown them to be drastically worse.
-Must appreciate the lack of transparency charters are afforded feeds the growing plague of national charter financial scandals.
4) Work to Stop School Segregation
-Our public schools are more segregated now than they were before Brown vs. Board of Education 60 years ago. This is intolerable and makes it easy to disenfranchise students of color.
-Must not only recognize this, but have a plan to solve the problem.
5) Promise to Increase Public School Funding – Especially to the Poorest Districts
-Must understand that nationwide, rich schools spend on average 15.6% more than high poverty schools. Being born poor should not mean you get a worse education. In fact, impoverished students have greater needs than wealthy ones. It costs MORE to educate them.
-Must champion an effective plan to address funding inequalities with an emphasis an equity.
6) Have a Plan to Address Child Poverty
-Must understand that more than half of public school students live below the poverty line.
-Must have an effective plan to help children, parents and families rise Badass Teachers Association:
ELA TESTS - DAY 2
THANK YOU TO LONG ISLAND OPT OUT FOR SHARING AND ALLOWING BATs to PUBLISH AND GET THE WORD OUT. Yesterday was Day 1 of NYS ELA CC testing. We will be posting the Day 2 and Day 3 stories in coming blogs. Stay tuned and share!!
You can join LIOO here https://www.facebook.com/groups/Longislandoptout/
You can get NY test refusal information here at NYSAPE http://www.nysape.org/
You can get National test refusal information here at United Opt Out http://unitedoptout.com/
Today's third grade ELA had passages from Drag Racer. Grade level 5.9 and interest level 9-12th grade.
The second reading in 6th grade exam given today was titled A Master Teacher by Helen Bledsoe. It was a story about Confucius and how he was credited with the exam system in China.
Printed in bold letters on the second page was: Let exams do the ranking
It spoke about how people had to take exams and how those that did well received positions in government based on the results.
We were appalled and angry that this found its was onto the exams today. To us it spoke to how little NYSED and Pearson care about parent wishes, students and the testing climate and quietly "attacked" it yet again.
Today's 4th grade assessment had a passage from "The Clay Marble" from Mingfo Ho. Jeanette Deutermann googled it. Here's the grade level:
Grade 7: Excerpt from Under the Lilacs by Alcott. Published in 1878. Included 10 footnoted vocabulary, some with 2 in one sentence. It also included "old" English such as "recognising", Badass Teachers Association: