Let's Make 2016 a Progressive Year for our Schools and Communities
How can we make 2016 the year we reinvent public education? It’s a tall order. But if we set a few key intentions for our work, we have a shot at making real progress.
For starters: let us please, PLEASE not get so caught up in the Presidential race that we ignore state and local elections. That might be hard, given that the 2016 election basically started in 2014, and has only gotten uglier and weirder as the months wear on. But progressives have long had the bad habit of over-focusing on federal and Presidential politics at the expense of down-ticket candidates and the important public officials who work in state and municipal government. This is a problem in all issue areas, but it’s a particularly big deal in education, given the intensely local nature of school governance.
Especially now that the Every Student Succeeds Act has replaced No Child Left Behind as the law of the land, we need to focus on recruiting, developing, and electing local- and state-level officials who are strong advocates for full and fair funding of schools, and for equitable education policies. Likewise, we need to vote out anyone who is not making our students and our schools a top priority. Are your school board representatives turning public schools over to private interests? Organize them out of a job. Is your city council authorizing tax breaks for big business while local schoolchildren don’t have a library? Send them packing.
Make no mistake: whether it’s a local, state, or national race, it’s hard work to elect a candidate, and even harder to unseat or recall bad electeds already in office. But we draw on the same time and energy to do any of those things, and it’s our local and state leaders who ultimately control what happens to our local
- See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/01/188495/lets-make-2016-progressive-year-our-schools-and-communities#sthash.Jn8sm9Vn.dpuf