Walking 400 miles, activist stops in Mount Airy on mission to reform education
Jesse Turner, right, also known as the Walking Man, chats with Cindy Rose and her son, Ben, during a stop Tuesday afternoon at the Mount Airy Library during his walk from Connecticut to Washington.
Jesse Turner walked into the library in Mount Airy on Tuesday, his baseball cap cocked forward, and a T-shirt that read: “Someone has to tell Washington, D.C. children are more than just a test score.”
Turner, also known as the Walking Man, was making a pit stop during his near 400-mile route from his home state of Connecticut to the nation’s capital. He walks to make a statement about the contemporary education system in the United States, hoping that his trek captures the attention of the public in the same way as marches led by civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr.
On Tuesday, Turner met with an education activist in her own right. Frederick resident Cindy Rose will appeal to the Frederick County Board of Education in late August to argue that her children should be able to opt out of state standardized tests, or allow her to do so on their behalf. One of Rose’s children, Ben, has severe cerebral palsy, Rose said. Part of his brain is missing, and he possesses no verbal function.
As Turner walked into the library for his meeting, he shed an orange vest he wears so drivers can spot him from the road, and set aside his wooden walking stick.
“These people are the story,” he said as he knelt in front of 10-year-old Ben, who sits in a wheelchair. “Not me.”
Turner, by his own count, has taught for more than 40 years, both in the New Jersey public school system and in higher education. After a slew of federal education reforms, namely No Child Left Behind, which Turner said was purely testing-focused, Turner said he embraced the role of an education advocate.
He referred to the contemporary education policies handed down by the government and the state legislatures as a “regime.” These policies are “abusive” to students, who expend too much energy learning a curriculum geared toward standardized tests, he said as he looked over test questions that Ben was asked on the state Alternate Maryland School Assessment. The alt-MSA is the test administered to some special education students.
Even the rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act being tossed around in Congress does not solve the problem, Turner said.
Parents should be able to opt out of these tests without a fight, he said. He rattled off a laundry list of initiatives the federal government could have explored rather than the enormous check they wrote to support the reforms.
“We could have hired a quarter of a million literacy specialists, a quarter of a million math specialists,” he said. “We could have done things so differently.”
Turner, now the director of the literary center at Central Connecticut State University, is in the midst of his second walk, which he started on his 60th birthday, June 11. His first walk, back in 2010, helped catapult the issue of Walking 400 miles, activist stops in Mount Airy on mission to reform education - The Frederick News-Post : Policy:
