Candidates: How Will You Fight for the Children?
We are America’s public school teachers. We are the parents of America. As American citizens we have the fundamental civil right to a strong, free, and appropriate public education system. Yet public schools, public school children, and public school teachers are under attack by special interests on both sides of the political spectrum. These relentless attacks are occurring upon the very same public school teachers that are our society’s first responders against ignorance, poverty, and injustice. Our nation’s public school teachers take body blows, mental blows, and sometimes even bullets, in order to protect and educate our children.
From preschool to 12th grade our public education system is a target-rich environment for corporate privatization by education reformers using tactics worthy of insider trading to sell school “failure” as a way to market quick fixes and hedge fund solutions. Corporate privatizers use the word reform to work in tandem with politicians dedicated to removing racial and cultural equity from our society. ALEC—working under everyone’s radar–systematically authors laws to amplify fear so that the failure narrative has surged. “School choice” privatizers applied union busting “right to work” logic that has been used for decades.
A Nation at Risk even blamed education and educators for the problems of poverty in an attempt to divert the nation’s attention from the truth. The truth is that too much corporate interest has pushed its way into public education, preventing our nation from creating true solutions to poverty and inequity.
Too much corporate interest has pushed its way into public education, preventing our nation from creating true solutions to poverty and inequity.
Too much corporate interest has pushed its way into public education, preventing our nation from creating true solutions to poverty and inequity.
Poverty is deeply understood by American teachers because we address the real effects of poverty every single day. Census data tells us that 20% of children in the US come from impoverished homes and live with inadequate nutrition and poor hygiene in homes where there is little room to support academics due to high priority of these survival issues. Our public school teachers work hard to mitigate the effects of poverty. Yet the reality is our children and our teachers are not thriving. The agenda to systematically defund our public school institutions has left our educators with the daunting task of always having to do more with less.
Public education is one of this nation’s best weapons against poverty, and can play a major role in fixing poverty IF schools are fully funded and resourced. Corporate privatization that deflects full funding from public education will not help. Authoritarianism will temporarily silence the realities of poverty, as evidenced in Ferguson. But it will not fix cruelty and injustice. School privatization reinforces heinous pathways of segregation and cultural bias.
What may be most egregious is that, in spite of our efforts, public education has become part of the school-to-prison pipeline because the systemic roots of poverty have not been addressed.
This must stop.
Currently our United States Department of Education promotes charter privatization, even though “rigor” and “no excuse” policies have been proven to be ineffective in addressing behaviors that can stem from poverty. In a majority of states, charter schools are not held wholly accountable for Candidates: How Will You Fight for the Children? - LA Progressive:
How will you join us in this fight? How will you help us to reverse the damage that has already been created? How can we help you find the remedies that historically have and will continue to work? How will you restore the checks and balances to what has become unchecked by those who have initiated and forced these systemic imbalances?How will you fight for the children?
Marla Kilfoyle and Melissa Tomlinson
Badass Teachers Association
Badass Teachers Association
