In Open Letter, Network for Public Education Asks Joe Biden to Be a Champion for Public Schools | janresseger

In Open Letter, Network for Public Education Asks Joe Biden to Be a Champion for Public Schools | janresseger

In Open Letter, Network for Public Education Asks Joe Biden to Be a Champion for Public Schools

Yesterday, Diane Ravitch, President of the Network for Public Education (NPE) and Carol Burris, NPE’s Executive Director published an open letter pressing Joe Biden, as a candidate for President, to provide strong leadership for justice in public education: “Our public schools and their students desperately need a champion.  We hope you will be that champion.  For two decades our schools and their teachers have been micromanaged by misguided federal mandates that require states to judge students, teachers, and schools by standardized test scores, as though a test score could ever be the true measure of a child, a teacher or a school.”

Ravitch and Burris remind Biden of his promise on December 14, 2019, when seven candidates for the Democratic nomination for President appeared at a Public Education Forum 2020.  The meeting, sponsored by the Alliance for Educational Justice; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the American Federation of Teachers; the Center for Popular Democracy Action; the Journey for Justice Alliance; the NAACP; the National Education Association; the Network for Public Education Action; the Schott Foundation for Public Education-Opportunity to Learn Action Fund; the Service Employees International Union; and Voto Latino, was one of the most inspiring events I have attended.  It followed a series of Presidential debates all fall in which not one of the candidates had been asked to speak to the complex and fraught political implications of two decades of test-and-punish school reform.  The sponsors had brought more than 1500 teachers, organized parents, and public school students on a winter day to a convention center overlooking the Allegheny River. I don’t think I have ever been part of a crowd that was so wonderfully diverse. I found myself sitting next to a woman who has been serving for 30 years in a public school on the Navajo Nation as a special education teacher.

Now that he will be this year’s Democratic nominee for President, Ravitch and Burris CONTINUE READING: In Open Letter, Network for Public Education Asks Joe Biden to Be a Champion for Public Schools | janresseger