Seattle and Silverdale to Join other Cities in National "Save our Schools" Day

Editor: We have published several posts on this blog about the National "Save our Schools" March that will be taking place in Washington D.C. on July 30th.  There will be similar events taking place in cities across the country.  Below is some information on events that will take place in two cities in the state of Washington: Seattle and Silverdale.

For our readers in Washington state, we are providing some information from the Washington Education Association here in Washington.

FROM THE WEA:

On July 30, educators, parents and concerned citizens from Seattle to Silverdale to Washington, D.C., and in many cities in between, will gather to reclaim control of our public schools.

The event, endorsed by NEA and WEA, is known as the Save our Schools (SOS) March and calls on Americans everywhere to demand:

Equitable funding for all public school communities.

An end to high-stakes testing for student, teacher, and school evaluation.

Curriculum developed for and by local school communities.

Teacher and community leadership in forming public education policies.

The D.C. event is just one of many that will be occurring across our country this Saturday. In Seattle, supporters will meet at 6 p.m. at the south side of the International Fountain at Seattle Center. Supporters will begin walking at 6:30 p.m. to join the Seafair Torchlight parade at Fourth Avenue and Denny Street. In Silverdale, supporters will participate from 10 a.m. to noon at the Silverdale Whaling Days.

The public is encouraged to show support for public education by wearing "Red for Public Ed" to the local events.

This is a day for people to stand up and be heard.

This is a grassroots movement. It is not funded by billionaires. It is supported by teachers, parents and citizens around the country who have a passion to be heard.

More information is available at SaveOurSchoolsMarch.orghttp://www.saveourschoolsmarch.org/. Please contact Washington's coordinators about local events: Renton teacher Becca Ritchie (who is handling questions west of the Cascades) and Yakima teacher Jane Watson (who is handling questions regarding events east of the Cascades).

See you Saturday!

Grassroots “Save Our Schools” March on Washington & National Call to Action on July 28-31

This blog has tried to follow some of the grassroots movements in this country as a balance to the official messages coming from Secretary Duncan and the U.S. Department of Education that are often reflected in the mainstream media. We have learned about a march on Washington that will take place July 30th.

This grassroots movement of parents, teachers, students, community activists, and “everyday working people” has been endorsed by educational voices like Diane Ravitch, Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, Joel Spring, Rethinking Schools' editors, David Berliner, among many others. Diane Ravitch will be one of the speakers at the DC rally. Prior to the march and rally in the park, participants will be able to participate in a number of seminars, workshops and advocacy meetings hosted by American University.


Here is their call to action:

DEMAND JUSTICE FOR OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM

For the future of our children, we demand the following…

Equitable funding for all public school communities

• Equitable funding across all public schools and school systems
• Full public funding of family and community support services
• Full funding for 21st century school and neighborhood libraries

End to economically and racially re-segregated schools

End to high stakes testing for student, teacher, and school evaluation

• Multiple and varied assessments to evaluate students, teachers and schools
• No pay per test performance for teachers and administrators
• End to public school closures based upon test performance

Curriculum developed for and by local school communities

• Support teacher and student access to a wide-range of instructional programs and technologies
• Well-rounded education that develops every students’ intellectual, creative, and physical potential
• Opportunities for multicultural/multilingual curriculum for all students
• Small class sizes that foster caring, democratic learning communities


Teacher, parent and community leadership in forming public education policies

• Educator, parent and community leadership in drafting of new ESEA legislation
• Federal support for local school programs free of punitive and competitive funding
• End political and corporate control of curriculum, instruction and assessment decisions


Finding the current educational policies destructive and their own efforts to speak out largely marginalized, the organizers explain the motivation behind the movement:

Getting to this point has been a long journey. For the last few years, thousands of teachers and parents have been calling for action against No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and, more recently, questioning Race to the Top (RTTT).

Teachers, students, and parents from across the country have staged protests, started blogs, written op-eds, and called and written the White House and the U.S. Department of Education to try to halt the destruction of their local schools.

Numerous efforts have been made to get U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Obama to listen to US – the teachers, parents, and students who experience the effects of these disastrous policies every day. WE know that NCLB is not working. Unfortunately, it has been almost impossible to make our voices heard. Although we have the knowledge, the expertise, and the relationships with students that make education possible, we have been shut out of the conversation about school reform.

We, like all teachers and parents, want better schools. For our children’s sake, we are organizing to improve our schools – but not through the vehicle known as NCLB. It has been a disaster. Although there are various opinions about the many issues involved with school reform, it is now time to speak with ONE VOICE – that is, No Child Left Behind must not be reauthorized. We reclaim our right to determine how our children will be educated. We are organizing to revitalize an educational system that for too many children focuses more on test preparation than meaningful learning.We demand a humane, empowering education for every child in America.

For more information, go to: http://www.saveourschoolsmarch.org/

Community Organizing Group Compiles Studies on Charter Schools

A community organizing group based in Mississippi, the Southern Echo, has compiled a list of studies on the charter school movement on their website. The studies include those by the Rand Corporation, Stanford University, Teachers College, Columbia University, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and others. For our readers who would like to check out the various studies in one place, we are providing the link to the research on their website.

The Southern Echo describes its mission as working to empower the African American community through an intergenerational model of effective community organizing. With the mainstream media always covering educational change from the top down model, our readers may be interested in examining this grassroots movement directed at change.

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
New York Times
Published: March 12, 2010

AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

To read the entire article, go to: New York Times

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The 2011 summer issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy will engage readers in a conversation on "The Education Our Children Deserve." The Times article reports that "there were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings" of the board. It is time for public intellectuals, scholars, and teachers to join parents, community leaders and the general public in a conversation about the public purposes of our schools in a democratic society. We encourage a wide-range of voices to enter the dialogue and to submit manuscripts.

Go to our "call for submissions" for more information.

Education for Liberation Network Launches New Online Community Forum

In an effort to keep readers of the Journal of Educational Controversy informed on the widening conversation about education across the nation and the globe, we will be using this blog occasionally to update you on other movements. Tara Mack has just announced a new online community forum established by the Education for Liberation Network that I mentioned in an earlier post. Check it out at http://edliberation.ning.com/


From Tara Mack:

Dear Educator,

I am excited to announce that the Education for Liberation Network is now launching an online community that includes discussion forums, member profiles, online chats, groups, an events calendar etc. Please check out this exciting new tool for bringing our community together and register today (http://edliberation.ning.com/).

This new forum also offers the network an opportunity to share the latest news from the fight for a more just education. You'll find recent headlines on the Community Home page in the Just Ed and More Just Ed Headlines section. I will be gathering news items and updating that section once per week. But I need your help to make that site a rich source of information.

Over the coming weeks and months please send me timely articles, blog posts, videos etc. related to liberatory education, both in the classroom and in the wider community. More specifically the items should be education, education organizing and youth organizing related news that prioritize the perspectives, needs and concerns of marginalized communities. This site could be great resource for our community, but only if lots of people contribute. I will publish as many of them as I can.

I hope you will become a member of this online community!

Are Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall Too Radical for Our Students?

Having just posted (below) Nino's song honoring the death of Agustin Gudinon, the farmworker who died of a heat stroke in the fields, we happened to notice this petition on the website of the United Farm Workers. In their petition, they alert the public to a debate taking place over the adoption of new social studies curriculum standards before the Texas State Board of Education. Why are figures like Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall even being challenged?

To read the concerns of the United Farm Workers in their own words, go to their website and see their petition: "Tell Texas not to remove Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall from school books." You can also find news clips on the subject at their website also.

Announcing the new Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal

Talk is one thing; action is another. We hope to engage in both. We believe that action without reflective talk is mindless and talk without action is an opportunity missed. Talk is not empty, however, as proponents of the practical and critics of theoretical knowledge sometimes charge. It is merely an opportunity awaiting reflective action. It provides the interpretive frameworks for new ways of understanding, new paradigms for restructuring our experiences, new challenges to older ways of thinking. Sometimes it adds to the growing body of knowledge that has been provided by those who went before us and on whose shoulders we stand. Other times, it confronts the entrenched orthodoxies that blind us and make parts of our experience of the world invisible to us. That is perhaps why John Dewey believed that there was nothing more practical than a good theory.

The journal is a place for talk, a place to look deeply at the tensions, perplexities and controversies of our time. But we also have an activist, progressive arm. In 2004, the Woodring College of Education and the Whatcom Day Academy entered a partnership to explore the role of schooling in promoting and sustaining a democratic society. Our work is affiliated with the League of Democratic Schools, a project initiated by John Goodlad. Our newly formed Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal incorporates our work in developing the journal and our work with the League. In a special section of our website, we share ideas and innovative practices for democratic schooling. Readers can also view our YouTube clip below of Whatcom Day Academy educator Vale Hartley as she discusses democratic practices in her classroom at the 2008 Educational Law and Social Justice Forum that was sponsored by the journal. Vale wrote the article, "The Elementary Classroom: A Key Dimension of a Child's Democratic World," for the winter 2008 issue of our journal.

On our institute's website, we write that "Our goal is to provide an alternative voice for research and scholarship on the educational controversies and initiatives that arise in teaching and learning in pluralistic, democratic societies." One might ask: an alternative to what? We believe that the language of education today has lost its bearings and its moorings. As I mentioned in my posting of March 27th below, silent assumptions underlying our language have controlled the national debate for decades. The language of the market place has become the language of education. Students are talked about as the human capital that keeps the national economy competitive. Although we give lip service to the democratic purposes of education, the language of the market place prevails and all other discourses are on the edge. In a public school system that serves both democracy and capitalism, the public deserves a deeper conversation of the tensions that exist between these two forces. And educational professionals need more public space to create a learning environment that takes seriously the democratic purposes of our schools.

The Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal at the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University is an attempt to achieve both the goal of talk and the goal of action. It is the home of both the journal and our work in creating a laboratory for democratic practices. The Institute is in its early stages and we will be sharing our progress with our readers of this blog in the future. In the meantime, we would appreciate thoughts and ideas from our readers on what they would like to see from such an Institute. How would it be beneficial to you. Please add your comments to this posting and let us hear from you. Also, does anyone have ideas of Foundations and other organizations that would be interested in joining our efforts and working collaboratively with us?

Education Policy Blog: I blog because I teach

Education Policy Blog: I blog because I teach

For those new to our electronic journal and our blog or those new to blogging itself, I thought you might enjoy this thoughtfully-written reflective piece from the Education Policy blog. One of the goals of our journal and our blog is to encourage scholars, teachers and other educational professionals to enter into the public debate about education as "public intellectuals." Likewise, we believe that a vital democracy requires an informed and engaged public who enters into these serious discussions with those you spend their lives trying to live and understand the deeper meaning of the public purposes of education in a democratic, pluralistic society. As the , blogger in this piece writes, blogging can be a means for "connecting oneself to real debates in the real world."