Marie Corfield: A Letter To My Students

Marie Corfield: A Letter To My Students

A Letter To My Students

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

Dear Students,

Oh how I have missed you! I've missed your noise and your chaos and your smiles which are hidden behind masks, and your laughter and your hard work, and even your frustrations and tears. I have missed your creativity and how you never cease to amaze me with it. I have missed your fearlessness and your fearfulness, your good choices and your not-so-good ones. I have missed you because without you, there is no school. 

Many people who don't know much about what you and I do together call you 'lost'. But, you are not lost. Far from it! All of you who have diligently showed up on Zoom every day have been working so hard learning how to use computers and software in ways we teachers never imagined. You've been taking more responsibility for your learning, working independently, and learning from this global experience! 

Some of you have really struggled with this, and I want you to know that you are not alone. So many other students and, yes, even teachers (myself included), are struggling too. This is not easy work we are doing. It's really hard sitting in front of a computer for hours on end, not being able to talk to friends or eat together in the cafeteria or enjoy assemblies or play at CONTINUE READING: Marie Corfield: A Letter To My Students

Open Letter: Cancel the Standardized Testing Mandate for Spring 2021 | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Open Letter: Cancel the Standardized Testing Mandate for Spring 2021 | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Open Letter: Cancel the Standardized Testing Mandate for Spring 2021

The Schott Foundation is proud to add our name, alongside our longtime partners and allies, to this open letter to Dr. Miguel Cardona, President Biden's pick for Secretary of Education. It's time to follow up on candidate Biden's promise on standardized tests: cancel the spring 2021 testing mandate.

To: Secretary of Education Nominee, Miguel Cardona

​Dear Dr. Cardona:

On December 14, 2019, President Joe Biden participated in the 2020 Public Education Forum held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Early childhood expert, Dr. Denisha Jones, explained the damage done by standardized testing and then asked, “If you are elected President, will you commit to the ending of standardized testing in public schools?”

Joe Biden's response was immediate, direct, and clear. “Yes.” He continued, passionately declaring that “teaching to a test underestimates and discounts the things that are most important for students to know.” As you listen to his full remarks regarding why he is opposed to standardized testing, you will hear the authentic response of someone who is not only married to a teacher but who, growing up with a disability, may have felt the brunt of standardized testing himself.

We, the undersigned understand that the pandemic has inflicted enormous social, emotional, physical, and academic harm on America’s children. We also know that the consequences of the pandemic have not fallen equally on some children’s shoulders. Those who were disadvantaged prior to Covid-19 are bearing a disproportionate weight from CONTINUE READING: Open Letter: Cancel the Standardized Testing Mandate for Spring 2021 | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Open Letter to Dr. Miguel Cardona On The Future Of Public Education And Indigenous Resurgence – Wrench in the Gears

Open Letter to Dr. Miguel Cardona On The Future Of Public Education And Indigenous Resurgence – Wrench in the Gears

Open Letter to Dr. Miguel Cardona On The Future Of Public Education And Indigenous Resurgence

Dear Dr. Cordona,

I am writing this open letter as the parent of a young adult child who spent thirteen years in an under-funded urban school district, a district targeted by consultants, corporate interests, and predatory philanthropists who sought to leverage the challenges faced by our city’s vulnerable children and families as sources of “social impact” profit under the guise of benevolence.

Being the parent of a Philadelphia Public School District student changed my life in ways I could never have imagined. It connected me with fierce, big-hearted activists across race and class who took strong stands for the rights of children to be celebrated as cherished gifts rather than packaged as perceived deficits profiled on data dashboards with assigned growth metrics attached.

The decade since the last economic crash has been about normalizing the idea of an inevitable global gig economy where work is meted by artificial intelligence. Who will get microwork? Well, it will be determined by stackable credentials in a person’s online learning locker combined with social-emotional learning behavioral compliance scores. They’ll call it “anytime, anywhere learning,” or “lifelong learning.” This competency-based education system will ultimately be detached from neighborhood schools and outsourced to community partners through public private partnerships. Navigating these “learning ecosystems” children will be programmed with playlists of “free” Open Education Resources (OER) consumed in virtual reality headsets or games built on behavior modification and persuasive computing. They will collect badges for projects tracked with wearable technologies and pay for them using digital vouchers set up to deliver performance data.

It’s a scary prospect given that the next phase of globalization involves not just platformed labor, but remote-robotic work in advanced manufacturing. Future workers are meant to don haptic suits in co-working spaces in “Zoom-towns,” or living rooms depending on health status, to complete against one another to build and secure CONTINUE READIN: Open Letter to Dr. Miguel Cardona On The Future Of Public Education And Indigenous Resurgence – Wrench in the Gears

Open Letter to SC House and Senate Concerning Bill 3613 – radical eyes for equity

Open Letter to SC House and Senate Concerning Bill 3613 – radical eyes for equity

Open Letter to SC House and Senate Concerning Bill 3613

I am contacting you with an urgent caution about Bill 3613 and the historical failures of addressing reading in South Carolina through micromanaging legislation that has not resulted in improving home, community, individual equity or learning outcomes for students living in poverty, Black students, Emergent Bilinguals, or students with special needs.

Currently, I am in year 37 of being an educator in SC, serving as a high school English teacher at Woodruff High for 18 years before moving to teacher education at Furman University for the past 19 years. I entered education in SC in 1984, the first days of the accountability movement in our state.

Despite changing standards and high-stakes testing multiple times over the past four decades, political and public perception remains convinced our schools are failing, and that our students are, specifically, failing in reading achievement.

Read To Succeed was a serious mistake at its inception since it misreads both how students learn to read and how best to teach reading. Reading growth is not simple, and test scores are a stronger measure of poverty and social inequities than the state of student learning or the quality of teaching.

Bill 3613 is making the same mistake political leaders have been making since the 1980s, tinkering with prescriptive legislation aimed at our students and CONTINUE READING: Open Letter to SC House and Senate Concerning Bill 3613 – radical eyes for equity

J4J Open Letter to President-Elect Biden | Schott Foundation for Public Education

J4J Open Letter to President-Elect Biden | Schott Foundation for Public Education

J4J Open Letter to President-Elect Biden

The Journey for Justice Alliance (J4J), a grassroots education justice organization with dozens of local chapters across the country, highlighted candidate Joe Biden’s pledge to be “the best friend of public education” as they urged the President-Elect to choose a Secretary of Education committed to education justice. J4J’s open letter emphasizes the importance of the moment to undo the damage caused by years of disinvestment and privatization and to enact a positive vision of equity and education justice. Like J4J, Schott has been clear that the next Department of Education should center community voices and work to undo the effects of resource inequity and structural racism on our public education system. (Click here to see Biden's education promises at the historic grassroots education forum.)

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
November 23, 2020
Contact Jitu Brown (773) 317-6343

Letter to President-elect Joe Biden

President-elect Joseph Biden
1401 Constitution Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20230
 
Dear President-elect Biden,

On behalf of the parents, students and community organizations that make up the Journey for Justice Alliance (J4J) in over 30 cities across the United States, we congratulate you on your historic election victory. Your incoming administration has an enormous opportunity to prioritize equity for Black, Brown, and Indigenous families to address deep-rooted systemic racism in housing, health care, policing, the environment, and especially public education. 

Over the past 20 years, our communities have suffered through thousands of school closures, punitive standardized testing, students funneled into the school to prison pipeline and the expansion of the for-profit and non-profit charter industry as the government ignored the harm to our students and as the inequity created an apartheid system of education in our communities. The evidence is clear; 5 out of 6 Americans want their neighborhood public schools improved and not closed and an overwhelming majority of the public want fully resourced, equitably funded public schools as opposed to the charter industry and vouchers that have drained billions from our public schools.

The next Secretary of Education should not only be an educator but firmly committed to racial justice and uniting education expertise with community wisdom to finally create education equity in the United States.  Appointing another pro-privatization Secretary of Education would cause more harm to Black, Brown, Indigenous and LGBTQIA students and would be disrespectful the struggle and sacrifices of the education justice movement. J4J co-sponsored the historic presidential forum that you attended last December in Pittsburgh, Public Education Forum 2020; Equity and Opportunity for All which was attended by over 1000 people and viewed on MSNBC. It was clear from the forum that Black, Brown, and Indigenous parents, students, and educators across the U.S. are calling for equity: not the illusion of school choice.

At that forum, you told us that if you were in the White House, we would “not ever have a better friend for education.” We are eager to see the results of that promise, beginning with the critical selection of the Secretary to lead the Department of Education.

We are recommending the following people for Education Secretary as they have the expertise and the track record that would be a beacon of light for our communities.

1. Dr. Judith Browne Dianis-Executive Director of the Advancement Project.  Dr. Browne Dianis has consistently championed the civil rights of public education students and stood with communities in the struggle for education equity.  Dr. Browne Dianis is hailed as an expert on voting rights, education equity and is a pioneer in the struggle to end the school to prison pipeline. The Title VI Civil Rights complaint that her office filed with parents from Newark, New Jersey successfully proved that school closings harmed Black students.
2. Dr. Julian Vasquez Helig, University of Kentucky College of Education Dean-Dr. Vasquez is an award winning, teacher, researcher, leader, and dynamic voice for equity in public education.  Dr. Vasquez is a leader in the NAACP as well as a board member of the Network for Public Education. 
3. Dr. John H. Jackson-President of the Schott Foundation for Public Education. Dr. Jackson has been a leader in moving philanthropy to support Black-led community organizing for education justice.  He has been a leader in the NAACP and was appointed by President Clinton to be a senior advisor for the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.  He is from Chicago, a product of Chicago Public Schools and a graduate of HBCU, Xavier University of Louisiana.
4. Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers-Representing over 1.7 million educators across the United States, Mrs. Weingarten has over 30 years in the classroom and stood side by side with Black and Brown communities to expand evidence based education strategies such as sustainable community schools and resisting harmful practices such as school closings and the expansion of the charter industry.  She has demonstrated the ability to hear our communities appeals for racial justice and education equity and responded as a friend to public education.      

President-elect Biden, Black Lives Matter must mean more than slogans, marches or the take down of confederate statues. For us, it means transforming how institutions function in Black communities and dismantling educational racism. You have an enormous opportunity to transform public education and we humbly, yet vehemently assert that any of these selections would be a courageous step in the right direction. We welcome the opportunity to discuss this matter with you and your team.

Onward!
Jitu Brown
National Director
Journey for Justice Alliance

J4J Open Letter to President-Elect Biden | Schott Foundation for Public Education