Activist teachers challenge Sen. Bernie Sanders on corporate school reform
Earlier this month, a group of activist teachers wrote an open letter to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is running for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination against front-runner Hillary Clinton and who has gained some unexpected support around the country. These teachers support Sanders but are concerned about his views on public education and wrote to him to express their disappointment with at least one vote he cast recently in the Senate during the debate over rewriting No Child Left Behind.
Back in May 2001, Sanders voted for No Child Left Behind in the Senate, but in December of the same year, voted against the final bill, one of the few members of Congress to do so. In a recent statement to the American Federation of Teachers, he said:
I voted against No Child Left Behind in 2001, and continue to oppose the bill’s reliance on high-stakes standardized testing to direct draconian interventions. In my view, No Child Left Behind ignores several important factors in a student’s academic performance, specifically the impact of poverty, access to adequate health care, mental health, nutrition, and a wide variety of supports that children in poverty should have access to. By placing so much emphasis on standardized testing, No Child Left Behind ignores many of the skills and qualities that are vitally important in our 21st century economy, like problem solving, critical thinking, and teamwork, in favor of test preparation that provides no benefit to students after they leave school.
But during the debate last month in the Senate about legislation that seeks to rewrite NCLB and slash federal involvement in education, he supported a measure known as the Murphy amendment, which would have kept alive some of NCLB’s punitive, federally mandated actions against schools considered to be failing based on standardized test scores.
The letter by the activist teachers was published on Huffington Post by Arthur Goldstein, an ESL teacher and chapter chair of the United Federation of Teachers at Francis Lewis High School in Fresh Meadows, N.Y. A Sanders aide responded to the letter, sending an e-mail to Goldstein. With permission, here is the open letter to Sanders from the teachers, and then the Sanders campaign response, which Goldstein published on his Facebook page.
Here’s the open letter, with an introduction by Goldstein:
Many of us, public school teachers and parents, have enthusiastically supported Senator Sanders for President. We were encouraged by his opposition to NCLB, but disappointed when he voted for the Murphy Amendment, which would have imposed many of the conditions we’ve consistently opposed. Our students have been through more than enough of this already. Therefore we’ve written the following:Dear Senator Sanders,We are educators and supporters of yours, from across the country. Many of your positions on the issues that are the most significant facing the American populace resonate with us, inclusive of but not limited to economic inequality and the plutocratic maldistribution of political power.In addition to being supporters and organizers for your campaign and the issues above, we are also some of the educators who are fighting against the privatization of public education and the test and punish philosophy that has become pervasive with far too many politicians. We champion this fight because our students,Activist teachers challenge Sen. Bernie Sanders on corporate school reform - The Washington Post: