Thursday, May 10, 2012

The Left Wing of the Possible - Bridging Differences - Education Week

The Left Wing of the Possible - Bridging Differences - Education Week:


The Left Wing of the Possible

Dear Diane,
How best to fight back? That is the question.
The answer: Many ways. And maybe it includes people who aren't left-wingers!
SOS (Save Our Schools) is holding a "People's Convention" Aug. 3-5 at the Marriott Wardman Park hotel in Washington D.C. Our plan? To come together around a small list of actionable planks—ones we wish the two political party conventions would adopt. We're not pretending they will, but we are also not claiming they couldn't. Our purpose: To begin to outline what the "other way" might involve if we turned away from No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, our standardized testing obsession and, above all, the gradual privatization of the American public education experiment.
The task is not to include everything we believe in, but focus on the ones that can create the biggest tent consistent with the four principles that SOS settled on last summer. A task that many PTAs, union locals, et al