Support Real Education Journalism
I am here to ask for your support. Not for me-- my brand of faux journalism costs little to produce. Instead, I want you to help out with Jennifer Berkshire's (Edushyster) latest project.
Berkshire is working to fill one of the gaping holes in education journalism. Well, two holes, actually. The first is the need to hear voices that have gone too long unheard. The other is to literally make those voices heard by podcast.
Podcasting journalism done right is neither cheap nor easy. You need equipment, both for gathering material and for putting it in a nice production package. And you need to travel, to go where the people are who need to be heard and who, in many cases, have gone unheard for too long. For example, the first episode of the Have You Heard series, which gives voice to the African-American opt out parents of Philadelphia.
Watch their pitch here.
I don't make this kind of pitch often, but this is a project I believe in. I believe that there is a need for this kind of journalism in this kind of format, and I believe that Berkshire is just the woman to do it. She has an incredibly deft touch with an interview, and she remains fair and open without giving up her own convictions about public education. In a fair and just world, she would be making the kind of money that the big boys in the Gates-funded thinky tanks pull down. The advantage of the reformsters remains a huge mountain of cash and people who work full time, ready to be dispatched to any corner of the world that calls for them. In this world, Berkshire and French need some help from all of us.
So if you have thought periodically that you would like to do something, something to help the cause of public education in this country, here's a chance to do something that you can accomplish without moving form where you're sitting to read my words. Click on over to the Beacon site and give her a hand.CURMUDGUCATION: Support Real Education Journalism:
HYH: Urban Opt Out Is a Thing
Have You Heard is a new podcast series from Jennifer Berkshire (Edushyster), one of the handful of edubloggers who does the work of a real journalist.
For her first episode, she and blog partner Aaron French have traveled to Philadelphia to talk to some Opt Out activists who are not suburban white soccer moms, but urban African-American parents. It's a group that has been largely invisible in mainstream coverage of the opt-out movement, in particular because the narrative of the Testocrats has been that the Big Standardized Test is an important civil rights tool, opposed only (as famously suggested by Arne Duncan) a bunch of white suburban moms who are mad that the BS Test reveals their children to be less brilliant than they supposed.
But Philadelphia activists like Robin Roberts, Will Thomas, Shakeda Gaines and Tonya Bah reveal another picture.
Their growth as opt-out activists has been gradual, in part because Philly school authorities denied that opt out exists in PA, that parents have no such rights. The first time Gaines took her opt-out letter to the school and was denied. Says Thomas, "They'll look you right in your face and make you believe that what you're feeling isn't real."Yet Pennsylvania clearly has an opt out law on the books, allowing any parent to opt out of just about any educational activity based on religious objections-- and there is no requirement for them to explain the nature of that religious objection.
These parents see the stakes as large, and throughout the interview it becomes clear that they see the issue of testing as part of a larger assault on their schools. Schools that are already on starvation budgets still keep the testing no matter what the budget cuts. Resources are lost. Thomas asks if
HYH: Urban Opt Out Is a Thing