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Sunday, September 2, 2018

Wendy Lecker: Public education as a political movement - StamfordAdvocate

Wendy Lecker: Public education as a political movement - StamfordAdvocate

Wendy Lecker: Public education as a political movement

NPE Action - The Network For Public Education  - http://npeaction.org/ on @NPEaction


My 18-year “career” as a public education parent ended in June as my youngest child graduated from high school. I am witness to the profound effect my children’s teachers had on their development as students and human beings — nurturing their passions, providing life lessons, sparking their interest in subjects they had never considered, and challenging their world view.
Events this past year have shown me just how much of an effect teachers have on all of us — not just those they teach.
Those of us who have been fighting for years for strong, adequately funded, integrated public schools and against reforms that are damaging to children, communities and democracy sometimes feel like we are banging our heads against the wall.
For years we presented facts about the harm of bad education policy and the benefits of good education policy. Yet politicians ignored us and continued to push failed policies. They dismissed calls for adequate resources in impoverished schools, branding these claims as “excuses” or “maintaining the status quo.”
The media narrative has also been impervious to facts, blaming impoverished schools for “failing” children when our politicians deprive them of essential resources to serve our neediest children; and accusing public school teachers of incompetence and selfishness when students do not perform well on standardized exams that were never designed to measure school or teacher quality.
This toxic public discourse seemed unending. Until teachers across the country took to the streets last spring. Teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado and Kentucky walked out of their classrooms to protest the miserable conditions in which they had to work and their students had to learn.
And the public stood with them all the way. Parents brought their children to state capitols to support their teachers, supplied food, and participated in the protests. A new Phi Delta Kappan poll reveals that 78 percent of public school parents support teacher strikes for higher pay.
Once these protests began, the media focus changed. Cameras showed deplorable conditions in impoverished classrooms, including crumbling textbooks, broken desks and chairs. Newspapers reported on the four-day school weeks in Oklahoma resulting from years of budget cuts, and the severe lack of basic educational staff and services in the states where the Continue reading: Wendy Lecker: Public education as a political movement - StamfordAdvocate