United Opt Out National Fifth Annual Event in Philadelphia, Feb. 26th - 28th
United Opt Out National is hosting their fifth annual event. This year’s sold- out conference, “Transcending Resistance, Igniting Revolution,” takes place in Philadelphia from February 26th to 28th. Keynote speakers include Antonia Darder, Chris Hedges, Bill Ayers, Stephen Krashen, and Jill Stein. In an effort to include the greater Philadelphia community, a pre-conference United Opt Out Town Hall will take place on Thursday, February 25th. Place and time will be posted on the website.
United Opt Out, vehemently opposed to the components of the Every Student Succeeds Act ( ESSA) that are tantamount to a Black Friday sale of public education, will take this opportunity to voice concerns and refine plans to push back against the privatization efforts this bill attempts to secure. Unfortunately, it continues the failure to secure an equitable learning environment for all children as it continues the damaging ranking, sorting, and maligning of children. During this conference, attendees will dig into each component of the bill, clarify its purpose for the public, and brainstorm demands and direct actions to advocate the changes needed to end the continued punitive and exploitive aspects of the federal law. Additionally, the conference will organize a diverse body of educators, support staff, students, parents, and citizen volunteers into working groups to devise solutions that promote healthy curricular innovations, that promote the attraction and nurturing of qualified and career focused people into the education field, that promote the implementation of appropriate and safe technology infusion, that promote wrap around support services, abundant materials support, and symbiotic public/private partnerships absent of one-sided exploitation. Philadelphia, one of the hotbeds of the privatization effort, is the perfect locale to critique current legislation and brainstorm for direct actions that coordinate with the following organizational goals adopted by United Opt Out administrators:
1. Push legislators to embrace “the original intent of ESEA, which was to facilitate equitable, thriving, and successful public education for all schools via distribution of funding free of strings attached other than need and a comprehensive and viable game plan for success.
2. Push for the collection of data that reveals how well resourced and integrated individual schools, districts, and states are, in an effort to appropriate state and federal funding that negates the harmful effects of racism and poverty.
3. Push for protections for the teaching profession and public school funding that ESSA policy attempts to tear down via the implementation of faulty alternative teacher certification programs and the unregulated charter industry.
4. Continue to develop and engage in opt out campaigns with a special focus on engaging non-whites, students with disabilities, second language, and impoverished communities and assist parents and students in the resistance to Competency Based Education (CBE) that involves too much unsafe student engagement in screen time, too much opportunity for data collection and privacy violation, and too much sub-par pedagogy.
5. Educate established civil rights groups as to the underlying harm in supporting policy created by those who serve a corporate agenda that ultimately harms students and their educators and encourage them to join the resistance that fights for creative, non-status-quo inventiveness coming from those most impacted: teachers, non-Whites, women, and special needs, second language, and impoverished students.
6. Join the campaign to end Citizens United, the unrestrained corporate spending used to tear down democratic thought, action and any semblance of a country which believes in the common good; facilitate election campaigns for school boards, federal and state legislative bodies, PTA /PTSA, union leadership, and local community leadership; and join with other like-minded organizations to alert local, state, and national groups to vote in leaders who support public education and demand that ESSA be returned to its original intent.
Over the last four years United Opt Out has been successful in making Opt Out mainstream. It has not done it alone. It is only through collective effort and unyielding resistance to the corporate take-over of public education that an equitably funded, democratically based, anti-racist, desegregated public school system for all Americans that prepares students to exercise compassionate and critical decision making with civic virtue can be realized.
PRESS RELEASE from United Opt Out National for Immediate Release: February 12, 2016: Fifth Annual Event in Philadelphia, Feb. 26th - 28th - UNITED OPT OUT: The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform:Posted on February 12, 2016
Contact: United Opt Out National
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Website: www.unitedoptout.com
