I will write about this every single day from now until October 17.
Please write your thoughts about what needs to change in federal education policy and send a letter to President Obama by that date.
You can write it now and follow instructions here.
Anthony Cody, experienced middle school science teacher and fabulous blogger, has offered to coordinate our campaign to write President Obama on October 17.
We call it the Campaign for Our Public Schools.
Our campaign is meant to include everyone who cares about public education: students, parents, teachers, principals, school board members, and concerned citizens. We want everyone to write the President and tell him what needs to change in his education policies.
Tell your friends about the Campaign. If you have a blog, write about it. Wherever you are, spread the news. Join us.
Here are the instructions:
You can send your letter to Anthony Cody or to this blog.
Or you can send it directly to the White House, with a copy to me or Anthony.
Anthony will gather all the emails sent to him and me and forward them to the White House.
1. Email your letters to anthony_cody@hotmail.com.
2. Or submit them as comments to this blog. You can respond to this post or to any other post on this blog about the October 17 Campaign for Our Public Schools.
All letters collected through these two channels will be compiled into a single document, which will be sent to the White House on Oct. 18.
In ADDITION to this,
3. You can mail copies of your letters through US mail to The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, 20500
4. You can send them by email from this page: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments
If you choose to write or email the White House, please send us a copy so we can keep track of how many letters were sent to the President.
One more thought: when you write to the President, also write to your Senators and Congressman or -woman and to your state legislator and Governor. Send the same letter to them all.
Let’s raise our voices NOW against privatization, against high-stakes testing, against teacher bashing, against profiteering.
Let’s advocate for policies that are good for students, that truly improve education, that respect the education profession, and that strengthen our democratic system of public education.
Let’s act. Start here. Start now.
Join our campaign. Speak out. Enough is enough.
Diane
Ms. Ravitch,
Another blogger, who writes about NYC education issues, wrote a blog post about a computer tool called Skedula. Here is both of our replies, and it speaks to the education issues, at least in the NYC Public Schools. Keep in mind, in my reply I use the term “magic 24”, that was my reference to the schools that the Mayor was trying to close and reopen under new names to get around the contract with the UFT (a situation to which he lost in court, and continues to try and do in anyway possible) to get rid of as many teachers as he could in those schools.
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TECH GUY
After working with Peter and the Datacation staff over the past two years, I can only say that its been a positive and amazingly incredible experience all along the way. In short, it’s been a transformation in our school’s culture both with the students and teachers. Skedula allows for real time free flowing academic, attendance, anecdotal information as well as a robust communication portal that continues to improve. Best of all, they’re the only company that knows how to use NYC DOE data and make it useable.
Based upon a sneak peek of where Skedula is going and what will be offered next, this is an opportune and vital time to jump on board and “learn” how to use it properly. Based upon your comments, it doesn’t sound like effective training was provided. In a school with technophobes and tech-heads, in a minimal amount of time, we were able to get 100% buy-in from our staff and the secret was that we took baby-steps and offered a lot of PD. We even went the extra mile and bought every teacher iPads to support their usage of Skedula. Like any tool, it requires training, PD, turn-key people and a lot of patience. Digital is the future, which is now . . .textbooks and interactive learning are next (don’t think so . . . read http://www.federalnewsradio.co… at one point used Daedalus too . . . but Peter and his team have proved that they are on the money . . . I can only promise you that once you master taking attendance, entering grades and learn the communications portal, you’ll want to step further in and use the Data Analysis features, Data Driven Classroom and a myriad of other powerful tools that will make your life as an educator, easier. If you need the training and the help . .. simply call them up . . . they are always a phone call or email away.
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1 day ago
TeachmyclassMrMayor
Tech Guy, by your statements, it is obvious that you do not work in one of the “magic 24”. If your school has enough resources for staff to get iPads, and the requisite training, then you clearly work in one of the favored Bloomberg schools. The school I work in has had skedula for a few years now, and I am not against using it, just never really gotten any real PD. And just when I get used to what they were doing, they change it, and I have to start over again. I admit I understand that things change, but change is only good sometimes. Those of us who work in the “magic 24” are lucky we get chalk…iPads. NO WAY.
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Starving schools of resources and making them die slow deaths have been another tool of the “reform movement”. How else would you explain how at some schools all of the staff were given iPads to use, and others had to beg the administration to have access to the supply room more than 90 minutes a week. This is what NCLB & RTTT have done to schools. We won’t even get into the fact that all of the money that is given to the schools by those programs, NEVER and I mean NEVER actually gets to the classroom. It all goes to these “networks & consultants”.
I dare the mayor, the chancellor, as well as the president and his ed. secretary to show us that this money has actually gone to anyone but these big giant companies, and that any of these programs have done anything but force people to teach to the test. I am hopeful that this letter writing and blogging campaign will actually wake up someone in the president’s administration, but I am not holding my breath. The president himself has started to talk about the “evils” of teaching to the test but his administration only does things that force teachers to do it. I like everyone else who reads here, am curious, how did his daughters do on the standardized tests that they had to take?
FIRE DUNCAN! Hire Ravitch
Dear Mr. President,
As an elementary school substitute teacher for the last 11 years, I’ve witnessed the ugly tentacles of a “scripted” curriculum progressively choking kids’ natural love of reading. When I announce that it’s time for “Literacy,” they groan and their eyes glaze over. This is the process, in a nutshell: I shout out a sound or word, they shout it back…over and over…all year long. Actual content is given very short shrift. In some cases, Science and Social Studies has all but disappeared, and the arts and recess have been severely shortened.
This is the supposed forumula for success…except that the test scores, the entire rationale for this sad program, keep going down. Even by its own means of measurement, it’s not working.
My own kids were in the same district a decade ago, before this curriculum was implemented, and they were excellent students who have always loved to read.
Their teachers were allowed to teach creatively, and to adjust the curriculum to best meet the needs of their students. They were valued as professionals capable of making such judgements. No more. They stick to the script – down to the word, down to the minute – or they are unceremoniously forced out like a friend of mine, a consummate teacher of 35 years, recently was.
I urge you to make finding better educational solutions a higher priority in the next 4 years. Our kids deserve better, for their own sakes and for those of the rest of us; they will be making decisions which affect us all, and they will be making them with or without the ability to communicate clearly, to accurately assess situations, and to find subtle solutions.
Thank you,
Debbie Peyton
If my kids were in this district today, my husband and I would be finding an alternative.
Dear Diane, I have sent this letter through the White House site (even though it is a bit long. Here it is for your document as well. Thank you for all of your work. Yours, Amy LV October 17, 2012 Dear President Obama, For the past fourteen years, I have had the good fortune to work as a writing teacher and staff developer in various schools around our country. As a published author, mother of three, and former fifth grade teacher, I have developed a deep understanding of writing craft and of how people learn to write effectively. I read numerous books about writing, learning, and staff development. I have excellent rapport with teachers and children at all grade levels, and I believe in high standards for all students. Standards are not a problem; punishing children and teachers with standards is a problem. It is a dangerous time to be a child in this American public school world of high stakes testing. Here are a few stories from the field: A third grade teacher recently told me that a parent came to Open House crying because her son scored a ‘2’ on a standardized test. This mother felt she had failed because of her son’s struggles and apologized to the teacher for having to teach him; she was sorry that her son would harm his teacher’s evaluation. The teacher placed a hand on each of the mom’s shoulders and affirmed that her little boy was kind, respectful, hardworking, and positive. She assured this mother that her son was more than that ‘2.’ A fifth grade teacher told me that her school has instituted “play therapy” for the kindergarteners in her district. The four, five, and six-year-olds are stressed out from testing. So now, instead of playing, they take tests. Then, they go to therapy. One NY district with has decided that the first graders no longer have time to put on a class play. There is too much testing to be done. Goodbye, tradition. Goodbye, arts. A friend called to tell me that her son’s teacher complimented her son’s high class average and said that “he must be using excellent study skills.” The mother told me that she was dumbfounded because this same son (with special education needs) had told her that the special education teacher “always gives him the answers” so that he does well on the tests. No study skills needed. This system is creating a culture of cheating on more levels than you would believe. In early September, I stood in CVS to hear a middle school girl talking on the phone, “Yeah, we even have to take tests in gym now.” A second grade teacher, moving two grade levels up from kindergarten shared with me that when she switched to her new grade, the house corner was removed from the kindergarten classroom. The new kindergarten teacher would not be allowed a house corner because there is no time for playtime. Then, tears in her eyes, this near-retirement teacher sighed, “Last year I had a little boy who would fight and bully on the playground. When he went in the house center, he would rock the babies…..What will happen to boys like him?” I did not know what to say to this teacher, but we all can imagine what might happen to boys like him. Another friend recently mentioned that her kindergarten child came home from school to see the small round snack table the parents had just purchased for the kitchen. “Oh, Mommy! That can be our testing table.” One teacher shared that the kindergarten children in her school make “goodie bags” for the fifth graders during their testing week in May. This is a way to make testing feel manageable, a way to feel treated during constant tests. If I were a kindergartener in that building, I wonder how much I would look forward to fifth grade, when one must receive a consolation prize for learning. A local middle school near my home has seen a great increase in students who need therapy, students who are worried, afraid, stressed about their numbers. Teachers are running scared. They are looking to find ways to earn more points on their APPR evaluations, nervous about new students (what if they do not score well?) and hesitant to work with student teachers or leave their classrooms for further education. Teaching is becoming a competitive rather than collaborative field. Teachers are afraid, and because of this fear, some do not read aloud anymore, even in the youngest grades. Many do not bring children outside to play. I do not want my children taught in a culture of fear. I want my children, and the children of this country, to develop curiosity, a love of literature and math, an understanding of history through story, a sense of exploration, and an interest in deep and fulfilling work in academic subjects, physical education, music, and the arts. People have different gifts; we must educate them in well-rounded and thoughtful ways, encouraging each to reach for potential in all spheres, not simply the circles on bubble tests. This current culture of high stakes testing tied to teacher evaluation and for the benefit of large corporations (who make testing materials and test preparation materials) is dangerous. Should it continue, we will soon live in a country of young adults who spend their days preparing for tests, losing interest in learning and losing faith in adults who push testing over passion, who feel cornered to act in ways that do not match their beliefs, who sometimes even cheat. It is true that the home is a very important part of a child’s education. Yet, for children who come to us from struggling homes, from homes where televisions blast sewage all day long, where parents are unable to provide healthy learning opportunities, schools must light , and keep lit, a spark of learning — a desire to work, to care, to achieve. With teachers’ and students’ hands tied by testing, I fear that many of these delicate sparks will fade before the children stop believing in the tooth fairy. Education is greater than this. We are greater than this. I ask that you listen to “More Than a Number,” the song that I wrote with educator and child advocate Barry Lane. Please listen and as you do, think about your own two daughters. What gifts do they have that are one could never grade with a 1, 2, 3, or 4? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcjIftvIC3I? It is important that you keep educators’ voices in the forefront of this discussion, this discussion that is so often overtaken by CEOs and politicians. People who work every day with young people know a lot about them; we want high standards. And we want health too. It is not necessary to turn standards into weapons; we can use them as lanterns, and together we can lead. I continue to have faith in you, Mr. President. And I hope against all hopes that your love of your own children translates into valuing all of our children as our most precious resource, worthy of investment and care. Respectfully, Amy Ludwig VanDerwater Holland, NY
Already working on my letter!
Can I post this verbatim on our union website?
Yes yes yes!
Never mind about the previous post. See our post about this here: http://www.myvea.org/wordpress/a-special-invitation-from-diane-ravitch/
Hopefully Vallejo educators will respond!
Christal, May I paraphrase your post to your teaches for my teachers association web sites? I run blog/web sites for two teachers associations, and two retired teacher groups.
Dr. Ravitch and Mr. Cody,
Are you o.k. with me posting these blogs on a facebook event page? On this page you can then invite friends and they can invite friends etc. I’ll put the information up as you post it. If you are o.k., I’ll create a invite and post the link here so all of you can go there too? What do you think?
Yes. Spread the word.
Diane
This is the page. If you are o.k. with it, I’ll start inviting friends?
http://www.facebook.com/#!/events/495795893778500/?context=create
Yes!
Diane Ravitch
Do you have the parent letter example? I have the teacher one posted and am going to try to get a student example.
Does anyone know if Karen Lewis and the CTU are aware of/on board with this letter writing campaign? Illinois is such a blue state that I’m sure Obama has already counted his chickens here, but the threat of losing 20,000+ Chicago teacher votes may possibly wake him up.
I will alert her
Diane Ravitch
It’s not a matter of possibly losing 20,000 votes in Chicago or any votes anywhere – it’s a matter of getting 20,000 + voting! All excellent points here – but can you imagine the alternative: vouchers, privatization far beyond what is on Mr. Duncan’s mind, 47%CLB (as opposed to NCLB), homogeneous charters with counseled-out kids, etc. etc.
How about: 1) Get out the vote, 2) win, 3) then hold them to the fire on these issues
Jere,
Sometimes you have to go out on a limb to make a statement, much like Jill Stein did when she walked with the CTU. Sometimes you have to take a risk for the greater good. If they win, why on earth would they be willing to listen if they haven’t listened yet?
Hey folks, I applaud this effort but I will say there are easier ways of coordinating it. You can for instance set up auto-emailers to go to Obama as well as your own congressperson if someone has access to a program like Salsa or Convio that will automatically track how many letters are sent. In addition Cynthia Liu at K12NN is standing by ready to assist. I recommend using an online tool lest we simply crash Anthony Cody’s email and confuse people with a fairly complicated ask.
Feel free to email me at jesselazbacon AT gmail.com if you have more questions about how these tools work.
with a day packed with lesson plans I heard Diane’s voice call to me this morning.
Dear President Obama,
I am a teacher. I teach pre-k; children who are four and five. They are at a very vulnerable age and their educational lives are being compromised by your policy of Race to the Top.
I voted for you because I believed that you would make great changes in our country that were sorely needed. I didn’t know the changes that you would make would help destroy our public schools.
Public education is a common good. It must be preserved for the United States to flourish. We cannot have a two tiered system of education where some children go to schools like Sidwell Friends where assessments are merely a part of the fabric of the school and students’ and teachers’ lives do not hang in the balance and others go to Draconian schools where a single score on a single assessment can determine one’s entire life.
There are so many things wrong with Race to the Top. Your policies have pitted teachers against each other. Education is a collaborative effort, not a competition. Education is a life long journey, not a race where one sprints to the finish line and learning is over.
I teach in a pre-k through grade 8 school. I read the middle school essays posted on Bulletin Boards at the beginning of the year. Usually the theme is “My Goals”. Instead of writing about becoming an astronaut, a basketball player, a doctor, or an urban ranger these children write about what they can do to become a Level 3 or 4. They no longer think of themselves as people who can aspire to great things. They think of themselves as a number; a number that is artificially created. Is this what you want for your daughters? If not, why do you want this for other people’s children?
Pre-K was once an important grade where children had an opportunity to learn social skills, work as a community, explore and grow. Now my children who have been on this planet for only a nano second of time are expected to perform skills that are beyond most of their abilities. There is little time for learning to share and explore. There is little time to be children. There is no time for naps, bathroom breaks, outdoor play, and just being a child. Those activities take time away from academic rigor. Many of my children show signs of great stress and become frustrated and act out, some just give up and have little affect in my classroom.
I teach in Brownsville, Brooklyn and many of my students know little of the world past the few blocks from home to school. I brought the world into my classroom. We took walks and have conversations about what we saw. We learned to bake bread and playdough and made soup in a pumpkin shell. Now my children must spend time practicing making marks on a paper so they can create the illusion that they can write words. They must learn to add and subtract before they even understand what numbers are. We are building a skyscraper on a foundation of sand.
Your policies on charter schools are draining the public schools of motivated students and leaving behind higher percentages of high needs students for the teachers to teach. Public schools do not “counsel out” students who don’t meet the criteria. Why are you not interested in supporting and making public schools better instead of destroying them? Your Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan has no understanding of child development. I simply cannot understand why you are pushing for the destruction and re-segregation of the United States.
I know you are a smart person and I cannot understand why you are taking this path. Are you in a bubble where you are only listening to people who tell you what you want to hear? Have you decided that money from people like the Koch brothers, and the Walton family help you frame your presidency? I would like to think not but the evidence appears very strong. Just because one has money does not make that person an expert on any and every thing.
Teachers are being managed by people who have no training in education and/or child development. You are a lawyer. Would you allow a business person to tell you how to practice law? Why are you allowing non-educators to dictate education policy?
I am tired and demoralized and feel beaten down but I will never stop using my voice to advocate for my students whose lives are being destroyed with your educational policies. Please consider the school that your children go to and think how you can make every public school just like theirs.
The children of the United States are not “other people’s children”. They are all our children.
Please rethink your educational policies and reverse your course. It is no shame to admit that you changed your mind.
Sheila Schlesinger
Bravo! I think the point that is especially important is the reformers’ total lack of regard for child development. What is being done to the youngest students is actually child abuse. Like you, I don’t understand how Obama can be oblivious to this.
That was brilliant, Sheila.
Well said and you clearly speak for so many of us in the NYC system from Brownsville to my turf So.Bx. – it is the same tune. WE need to keep up the fight because no one else will.
Spreading the word here in Florida ! Wear Red for Ed is on it !! 🙂 Great idea. Thank you !!!
We have contacted about 1000 people via the facebook invite and this is just since last night.
http://www.facebook.com/#!/events/495795893778500/
President Obama,
In 2008 I saw a hope for change. I watched a movement grow and break free from the bounds of traditional politics, something akin to but much more impressive than President Clinton’s original campaign.
I, a registered Republican who has voted such since Ron Reagan, made a choice and sided with the “change” crowd. I never considered it turning my back on my party as my party had been hijacked by an extremist group that was rife with racist, misogynistic birthers who could hang their hat on no other issue than a willingness to be oppositional. Today my party is overwhelmed by those who would attempt to capture the angst of the Tea Party all the while becoming more and more extreme in their “take no prisoners” scorched earth manner of politics.
I realize now that you don’t really care why I voted for you, only that I voted for you. As an educator, I am now faced with another choice: yourself or Mr. Romney for President. Being an educator, my major issue is, so obviously, education. The problem I now face is: Mr. Romney will sell out the future of our children to those corporate greed-heads who will simple care for the money and not for the children. The vast wasteland that Chairman Minnow referred to will cease to be broadcast and will become the future of our country, our lives. The other choice is, sad to say, yourself.
Your educational policies are egregious, to say the least. Race to the top is simply a formula for a race to mediocrity. The curriculum based on more high stakes testing will not teach critical thinking, will not teach problem solving, but will teach skim and locate (the new reading technique of our children today).
Michelle Rhee is not a teacher and only after the money and power she can garner pressing her “ed reform” and “politicians first” agenda. Having her represent you is one of the biggest mistakes of your career. Were she to walk into my class, I would ask her to leave immediately…were she to hesitate, I would; caring for the safety of my students; escort her out physically.
Forcing teachers to be judged by the efforts of students when we’re not allowed to reach and to teach them is ludicrous. Forcing children to take more and more tests is counter productive. The greatest minds of our generation were not products of a testing society, they were the products of a society that allowed and nurtured differences; that held people accountable for their work; that judged people on what they could do, not what they were supposed to do according to a chart drawn up by some mid-level manager in a corporation who’s goal is profit.
Sir, you have a choice at this moment: I am a member of the NEA and will NOT vote because they turned over and offered up to you that “endorsement” when you have done NOTHING for education in your first term…my vote is currently aimed at Rosanne Barr (yes, she is on the ballot here in Florida and may very well compromise the bulk of the “undervote” among teachers in this swing state) and unless you make some serious concessions in the area of education, you will most assuredly lose my vote for your second term.
Sincerely
Bryan Bouton
an Educator
bouton60@yahoo.com
Please include Romney campaign address as well — BHO and MR seem to be clones on misguided education reforms.
Dennis Weber, President
Longview (WA) Education Association
We will go after him if he is elected.
Right now, the effort is to persuade President Obama to switch gears on RTTT
Diane and Anthony, Thank you so much for coordinating this. I think it’s a great idea and hope it has a real impact on President Obama. Here’s the letter I wrote:
Dear President Obama,
I am sure that you truly want all children in America to have the same stimulating, comprehensive, enriching, and creative educational opportunities that your beautiful daughters have. Regrettably, your policies and the policies of your Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are having the opposite effect. The serious adverse unintended consequences of the No Child Left Behind Law are widely recognized, but despite the best intentions, the Race to the Top initiative and waivers for states from the most onerous conditions of NCLB are making the situation worse. The over-reliance on standardized testing, and the misuse of the results of this testing for evaluating teachers and schools, are demoralizing teachers and students, causing the best teachers to leave the classroom, and resulting in very ill-considered school closings that negatively impact the poorest neighborhoods. Surely you followed the Chicago Teachers Union strike. As a former community organizer in Chicago, you must be aware that parents and neighborhoods were behind the strike, because they understand that the education “reform” policies that your former Chief of Staff, now Mayor Rahm Emanuel are pushing are actually harmful to children. How many hours that could have been used for instruction are now being used to pre-test, practice-test, and post-test children, now children as young as kindergarten age? How many millions of dollars are being spent on this testing and data collection that could have been better spent on social workers, nurses, and libraries? (As to data collection, why are for-profit companies like Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation negotiating with states to amass a huge national data-base of student information without parental notification or guarantees of confidentiality safeguards?)
As a recently retired, long term teacher of the deaf, most recently teaching hearing children in an after-school program at a “low performing” school in Providence, RI, I wholeheartedly (pun intended) agree with an article by Mr. Sam Chaltain, printed by Valerie Strauss in her Answer Sheet column in April, 2012. (“Sam Chaltain is a D.C.-based educator and strategist. He was the national director of the Forum for Education & Democracy, an education advocacy organization, and the founding director of the Five Freedoms Project, which helps educators create democratic learning communities.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/how-school-reformers-elevate-the-wrong-hero/2012/04/05/gIQAFwWayS_blog.html)
He makes the point that has been made by others—not everything that can be measured is important, and not everything that is important can be measured. From my teaching experience, I especially concur with this paragraph:
“We elevate the wrong hero in school reform every day when we overvalue the importance of academic learning and assume that merely focusing on better curricula and clearer standards will carry the day. Yet the research suggests otherwise, affirming what sociologist Pedro Noguera and others have said repeatedly: ‘unmet social needs become unmet academic needs.’ ”
Children need to be taught from where they are—what matters to them—so that they can make connections and integrate learning into their long-term memory. A standardized curriculum in preparation for standardized testing rides roughshod over this real learning, and defeats its own stated purpose. We need to educate students for thoughtful civic engagement, and this requires empathy—understanding and appreciating the other’s point of view—as well as knowledge. This is especially true for children with special needs, English language learners, and children from high poverty neighborhoods. These are the very children who are bearing the brunt of the testing mania, who are having their schools closed, who are being subjected to teacher churn—all in the name of world class standards.
In particular, students with special needs have to have their special needs met—that is the point of the I.E.P., which is mandated by federal law (although I have read that the reformers are trying to do away with this). There is no point to instructing and testing students at a reading level far above what they can handle. It’s futile and damaging. Of course all students need to be challenged, but there is no way they can learn if the materials they are supposed to be learning from are inaccessible to them.
For anyone who is truly observant of the current reform efforts in public education, it is unmistakable that there is a powerful agenda aimed at reducing teaching and learning from a humanistic process performed in relationships that should be based on mutual respect, to a technocratic process that devalues human differences and will have long-term damaging effects on our children, particularly our most vulnerable children, and our democratic society. (For proof of this, there is the statement by a key developer of the Common Core State Standards (David Coleman at a NY State Department of Education presentation, April 2011) decrying the overemphasis in American schools on the reading of literature compared to informational reading, and on personal essays rather than informational essays: In the adult world, no one gives a sh-t what you think or what you feel. To his credit, he added that opinions need to be back up with verifiable evidence, which is certainly important for students as well as other groups, such as politicians.) Furthermore, as a lifelong Democrat, I am dismayed and disheartened that Democratic leaders are being co-opted (knowingly or not) by the cynical corporate agenda to privatize public education for ideological and mercenary ends.
The main problem facing our public schools is the poverty of so many of our communities, which is a national disgrace. Further narrowing the curriculum to boost invalid and unreliable test scores pushes America in the absolutely wrong direction. There needs to be a moratorium on everything connected with high-stakes standardized testing to allow knowledgeable education professionals to provide to the public the overwhelming evidence that highlights the inappropriateness of such testing as used in American public schools today. Certainly all children can learn; certainly children with special needs or from high poverty neighborhoods should be challenged to reach their full potential. There is an essential place for thoughtful assessment of student progress on an ongoing basis. It does not follow from this truism that the answer to the need for assessment is mind-numbing testing tasks that result in reams of data that tie teachers in cognitive knots and do not benefit actual children one iota. Meaningful assessments are time and labor intensive, and for special needs students may need to be done on a on-to-one basis, not in a mass administration. Please listen to actual teachers and teacher educators, and re-evaluate your education priorities for what I hope will be your second 4-year term as our President!
Sincerely, Sheila Resseger, MA in Education of the Deaf, Cranston, RI
Maybe these letters could be forwarded to journalists that we can trust. Since the voice of the reform movement is everywhere, this war needs an army on all fronts. Besides Bill Moyers, are there any other journalists with clout and an open mind?
Watch the segment with the ex-CNN reporter, Amber Lyon, whose story about Bahrain was censored and not even shown on CNN International. She says that the corrupt government of Bahrain is a paying customer of CNN to air favorable footage about their state! It begins at the 16.21 min. mark. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTlz_L34Vpk&feature=youtu.be)
“Complacent journalists are killing journalism…there are a lot of people within the network and I’m sure within a lot of U.S. main stream media networks that see what’s happening but think ‘Oh I’m just a peg in the machine, I’m not really causing this, I’m just the one taking the phone calls, or I’m just the one editing the reports, and they see the systematic censorship yet they don’t speak out against it.
Well, everyone is eventually responsible and in the end they”re gonna come out on the wrong side of history because now we’re even starting to see these main stream media outlets propagating a potential war with Iran,…and I really fear that the unassuming U.S, public is being led into approving a war with Iran. The writing is on the wall..”
“..Obama has a war on journalists and whistle blowers right now. He’s criminalized journalism for going after journalists for not revealing information about their sources, with subpoenas. ..As a reporter it’s become more and more difficult out on the streets to cover these protests.”
Dear President Obama,
I am writing to you today to express my views on public education and the effect of Race to the Top on our schools. I have voted for you in the past and already cast my vote for you this past week in Ohio. I cannot say that my colleague will do the same. Teachers do not feel your education policies will benefit their public schools.
I am concerned with the shift in the department of education from supporting public schools to embracing the “reform” effort to privatize schools. Mr. Duncan’s Race to the Top initiative was soundly declined by members of my Teacher’s Union due to the required changes to our bargaining agreement. The money offered was small and the price was too high.
I have taught for 35 years in a small city in Ohio. When I began teaching in 1977 I had 60 minutes of planning time a week. I had 33 first grade students in a building that was built in 1898. There was no air conditioning and was often over 90 degrees in the fall and spring. I had to park my car on a nearby street because bricks from the school bell tower often fell into the parking lot. I was required to do all playground duties and ate with my students. My salary was $9,000 per year. I paid 10% of required retirement contribution every payday. I had great healthcare. I was transferred 8 times due to low seniority but it made me a better teacher as I gained knowledge of various grade levels. But I loved my job and made the best of a bad situation.
My union worked tirelessly to improve my working conditions which in turn improved students’ learning conditions. By the time I retired last June, I made $61,000 with 2 master’s degrees and 35 years’ experience. The seniority I was provided due to my experience allowed me to fight for what my students need without fear of jeopardizing my job. I did fight for better textbooks, more speech therapists, an art teacher and a faster referral process to get students the help they needed to succeed. I fought for more school counselors, better school lunches, more technology and a stronger home school connection. I fought for my students and most likely would have been let go if not for the seniority clause in my contract that required “just cause” for my termination. Race to the Top threatens that important protection for teachers like me who want what is best for their students.
I also served as President of my Teacher’s Union through the NEA/OEA organization. I quickly learned how the system works. The budget is the focus of all public schools especially today in Ohio. Governor Kasich has taken great steps to weaken Ohio’s public schools by slashing state funding and increasing the state voucher program. Many of his biggest campaign donors own for profit charter schools here in Ohio. These charter schools are not held to the same state standards that our public schools are required to achieve. Their owners are not held accountable for failing charters schools. They are closed and reopen in a month under a new name, same owner. Race to the Top is feeding into this failing system.
Race to the Top promotes using testing as a means to evaluate teachers which is increasingly being disputed by educational experts. It requires bargaining agreements to weaken their seniority clauses. The requirements far outweigh the money attached.
It is missing the point when you look at overall effect on student achievement. Do you really want to churn out students who are being force fed test answers so the teacher can keep a job? The final 5 years I taught were defeating and painful. Testing took place every 6 weeks. Interventions took another 2 weeks. Meanwhile valuable teaching time is lost as we reteach test items to show growth. I missed being able to spend time discovering, imagining and teaching students to think independently. I was reduced to a test monitor and each year that passed I saw students lose that excitement for learning that drove my instruction.
The money spent on testing since NCLB took effect is staggering when you consider it was an unfunded mandate. Every year when the mountains of test booklets arrived, I would wistfully imagine what wonderful things we could have purchased for students. The constant testing does not improve instruction. It does not show if teachers are effective at delivering instruction. Testing does not create a love of learning or inspire students to strive for something better. Testing stifles creativity and breaks the spirit of both teachers and students alike.
I retired on June 1, 2012. I retired because I just could not teach this way any longer. I could no longer do test prep instead of raising monarch butterflies, studying bats and making applesauce. I felt defeated, uninspired and truthfully unnecessary. I still enjoyed the children but teaching had become drudgery. My students were less enthusiastic and I could not blame them. Test prep booklets were not much fun.
So I prepared to retire. I gave all of my supplies to new teachers hoping they might have time to use them in the future. Then I began to receive emails, phone calls and cards from former students. I was overwhelmed with the genuine respect and love I received from my former students. I was visited by numerous former students now in their early 40s. It made my heart swell as they told me about their various careers and shared pictures of their own children. I never expected to see these former students as many of them live out of state. But they came to see me when in town for a family visit. I was shocked as they recounted activities they had enjoyed in my classroom years ago.
President Obama, I doubt that the young teachers of today will have this same experience. Teachers can no longer take the state standards and plan creative, interesting lessons to teach them. They are being forced to prepare for tests created by a few testing companies. They are being judged by the performance of students with no control over the conditions that affect those students. They have to work longer for less pay and less retirement. They pay higher premiums for insurance and have little job security. They watch as charter schools get more of their state funding while they work harder with less. Please take a good look at what recently happened with Chicago Teachers. Teachers are reaching a breaking point and something has to change. I do not feel that Arne Duncan or Rahm Emanuel are promoting effective reform. Your support of their agenda is like a slap in the face of every hard working American Teacher.
I left the teaching profession because I felt it was keeping me from actually teaching. I now work for a local college supervising student teachers. It is my sincere hope that I can mentor new teachers to teach creatively and fight for their profession.
Sincerely,
Debra Fedyna
Dear President Obama,
When I supported you in your bid to be President four years ago, you said that “No Child Left Behind” had alienated teachers and principals rather than inspiring them. I believed you when you said that you would take a “new and better direction.” But I have been very disappointed. The education policies that you have pursued have been no better than President Bush’s. In fact they have not been very different.
I had so much hope in your leadership as a person of intelligent reflection on the issues facing our country; however, on the issue of education, one that is of great personal importance to me, I have been surprised at the lack of insight you have shown. The policies that you and your Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have pursued follow the precepts of misguided education “reformers.” I am surprised at your failure to see the errors of these policies despite the warnings of so many experienced educational experts.
I am surprised at your failure to understand the that the business model is not a model that will work successfully in the complex world of education, and at your adherence to business principles espoused by “reformers” who have little understanding of the perplexing education issues they purport to address.
In this election year you have portrayed yourself as the champion of ordinary people in contrast to Mitt Romney’s allegiance to the wealthiest citizens in our nation. Yet the policies you pursue favor moneyed interests at the expense of ordinary citizens. They undermine the equal opportunity of public education for all the children of our nation. They favor draining money from public schools to fund charter schools run by corporations.
Public education was meant to be an equalizer, so that every child growing up in our country could have an equal chance to develop the skills and abilities that lead to a life of fulfillment. That ideal has never been a complete reality. There have always been haves and have-nots in education, but our goal should be to ameliorate that situation, and I feel that instead, with money being drained out of true public schools into charter schools along with budget woes in so many cities and states, the situation is becoming much worse, so that soon only the children of the well-to-do will have access to a good education. You have said that promoting education is the cornerstone of improving the standard of living for all citizens, and yet the policies you support undermine education.
Your Race to the Top program is misguided and destructive. You have said that you do not believe in “teaching to the test.” Yet your Race to the Top program has had the effect of forcing schools and teachers to spend an inordinate amount of time doing just that, much to the detriment of student learning and motivation. Schools should be collegial communities of learning, where principals support teachers, teachers support each other, and all support students’ understanding, motivation and personal growth. Instead, they have become anxiety-ridden places where principals and teachers exhaust themselves in an effort to produce the data that will prevent their schools from being labeled “failing.” And authentic educational experts assert that the data being pursued is flawed at best. Yet it is driving the educational process all across the nation. Race to the Top has become an abusive program that undermines the efforts of educators to do their real jobs of fostering critical thinking and creativity in their students.
Education has not become a true priority during your Presidency any more than it was during the previous eight years. You have said that we have “an obligation and a responsibility to invest in our students and our schools” and to ensure “that people who have the grades, the desire and the will, but not the money, can still get the best education possible.” But little has been done during the past four years to fulfill that obligation and responsibility. In fact, resources have been taken away from public schools and funneled into privately run charter schools that have not been shown to be more successful. Resources that were not available to support public schools suddenly and mysteriously became available to support these corporate enterprises.
People say that throwing money at a problem does not solve it. However, taking money away does exacerbate problems, even if money is not the only thing needed to solve them. The task of educating children takes considerable resources. As a nation it is not only our duty, but it is in our best interests to provide the considerable resources necessary to give all children the opportunity of a good educations. That is why it is a matter of priorities. Your words made me believe you understood this, but your actions have not.
Instead of addressing the many complex problems that contribute to our national education crisis, the problems in education are being blamed on “bad” teachers, while it is said that what we need are “great teachers.” But great teachers and potential great teachers will no longer be willing to serve in the teaching profession if they continue to face the mistreatment and lack of backing that educators are currently experiencing. If you really believe that great teachers can make all the difference, then the government should do all in its power to attract and support great teachers. It should provide them with the aides, resources, class sizes, technology, in-service education, and all other assistance necessary to help them do their job. And it should pay them like the professionals that they are. It should accord teachers respect rather than heaping abuse on them. Again, your words seem to agree with this, but your policies do not.
I have also been disappointed in your failure to champion unions, including teacher unions, which have done so much to support you. You yourself have said that the labor movement helped secure so much of what we take for granted today, and that “the cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label.” Yet you have failed to support the unions that supported you.
I am writing this letter as part of a rapidly growing movement of educators, parents, and concerned citizens who are coming to understand the necessity of vast changes in our government’s priorities and its policies before the ideal of public education for all American children becomes another casualty contributing to the demise of the “American Dream.”
President Obama, I am appealing to your considerable intellect and good heart to listen to the concerns of this movement, to seek a better understanding of the true nature of the education crisis facing our nation, and to make changes in your education policies. Please make it a priority to save public education which has made such an important contribution to the greatness of our country.
Sincerely,
Diana Rogers
Eight Grade Language Arts Teacher
Peter J. Palombi School
Lake Villa, Illinois
We have developed a web site to archive the letters to President Obama. When you email your letter to Anthony, please copy and paste your letter at http://campaignforourpublicschools.org/.
If my letter is at the archive, do I need to send it to Anthony as well?
Please do
Diane Ravitch
October 17, 2012
Dear President Obama,
I have repeatedly heard of late that education is the civil rights issue of our time. That statement frightens me. Education is the civil right of all time. It has been slowly and gradually eroded for the last thirty years. After the Civil Rights Act of my youth, children of all kinds were welcomed into our schools. I know. I was there. I was at the forefront of bringing education, real education, to students who had been excluded, marginalized, and generally dismissed for the entire history of education. Finally, in the early ’70s all children had a desk in the classrooms of America. I was so proud.
During my foreign language study abroad in those early ‘70s, I visited schools in France and Sweden. I was curious about how other countries served all students. It was an informative and enlightening experience. I recommend such endeavors to anyone interested in education. Looking outside of ourselves usually clarifies our views of ourselves. It helped me immensely. I, then and now, strongly advocate for free, appropriate, PUBLIC education.
When I hear of privatization of schools, I shudder. My experience with private schools, and even charters, has been one of a public school teacher receiving the students who were counseled out of private/charter schools. They were not able to meet their needs. Without a vibrant public school system students have no place to go when the private cannot or will not serve them. Yes, this is a civil rights issue.
When I hear the argument on the right that private businesses have the right to refuse to serve minorities, I tremble. Then I hear the drum beat of privatization and charters and vouchers. If a private entity has the right of refusal, where does that put the students I have fought for and taught for decades? Yes, this is a civil rights issue. It is once again the civil rights issue of our time. One I thought was moot.
We, the people, have a duty to educate all students to the best of their abilities. This is called PUBLIC education. It deserves to be well funded, not diminished one whit. It is part of that basic infrastructure that has been neglected for decades as we accepted the business, free market approach to the public. Those functions done for We, the people, are not proving to be well done under free market principles. The current condition of our infrastructure proves the point. We, the people, need to accept responsibility for the public.
I believe you know that education is the basic building block of opportunity.
I believe you know that a well-educated citizenry is the foundation of citizenship.
I believe you know that education needs to be free, appropriate and PUBLIC education.
I believe you know that the best governance of schools is done by strong local ELECTED boards who can be responsive to the community and can be held responsible for their decisions to the community.
I believe you know that a quality teacher is one who is trained extensively in content, pedagogy, and child development.
I believe that you know that a professional teaching corps deserves to be compensated commensurate with their training, expertise and, yes, effectiveness.
At this time I find it difficult to see these beliefs in the direction your administration has taken. Your Race to the Top program has taken too many decisions out of the hands of locally controlled and responsive school boards. It has not supported a professional teaching corps with the DOE’s support of a group of inadequately trained short term teachers. We need committed teachers who desire to serve long term in classrooms with students. It is vital that the rights of these teachers be protected from capricious attacks from supervisors with inadequate supervision skills. RTTT has been called NCLB on steroids. I agree. The data have shown the failure of NCLB. More testing has been the result of RTTT along with many other directives from the DOE that are not supported in research. Please return the control of our local schools to their true locus of control, the local stakeholders. Please return the mission of the DOE to its original mission. We, the people, request this for the sake of our children, grandchildren, and generations to come.
Mr. President, I have been a Democrat since the age of nine, when, much to my father’s dismay and anger, I hung literature on doors for President Kennedy. I have supported Democrat candidates all my life. I am having a real crisis of conscience over your administration’s stance on education. The alternative is much worse and the third party candidates have little chance of success. But, I waver. I voted for you in 2008 enthusiastically. But this year I can’t say I feel that way, especially because of this particular issue. I feel a vote for you is a betrayal of my life’s work.
Sincerely,
Pamela K. Wall
wallfam@charter.net
2538 Damon Street
Eau Claire, Wisconsin 54701-2649
I’ve already sent this via snail mail to The Whitte House and I’ve copied Anthony Cody
President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
205004
Dear President Obama:
“Won’t Back Down”. The name of a not-so-popular movie, which has also become the mantra of public school teachers across the United States. President Bush’s education policies, followed by YOUR policies, the vitriol toward teachers from ALL politicians, Democrats included (Governor Andrew Cuomo), the lack of support for the very unions which support teachers – these are just but a few sparks that have kindled the flame of unity of teachers across the United States of America.
When I listen to you speak it is clear to me that you have no clue about what it’s like to be a teacher, nor do you care. I believe “education” to politicians is one of those terms that is used to either fuel the anti-union fire or to appease the parents across the US who care about their child’s education. If you truly respected teachers and wanted the best for public school children, you would have actual teachers with many years of experience in the field advise you or work with you to develop policy.
Due to your support of charter schools (which is a code word for BIG BUSINESS); due to your support of flawed standardized tests (which is code for BIG BUSINESS); due to development of Race To The Top (which is code for the privatization of public schools), I have not supported you in this election either financially or with my time and energy. During your last campaign I worked hard for your election. I campaigned. I worked phone banks; I contributed money, not only through my PAC contribution but extra money on top of that.
I have NOT worked for you this time. But I will be honest. I was waiting. Waiting. I waited while watching what was happening in Wisconsin. I was holding my breath and waiting during the Democratic National Convention for you to FINALLY come out and speak in behalf of teachers and the UNIONS, which support them. I was on the edge of my seat thinking, “Now it’s coming. Now he’s going to say it.” But it never happened. Still, I hoped. During the Chicago Teachers’ Strike, which was a strike for ALL of us, I waited to see you address the teachers. Even though you promised to walk the picket line a few years back, I didn’t expect that would actually happen, for security reasons. However, I waited for words of support. They never came. Being the optimist that I am, I continued to wait. I watched your debate, eagerly anticipating those supportive words. If saying you were going to hire “100,000 new math and science teachers” would somehow make me FEEL better, you couldn’t have been farther from the truth. I’ve seen the paperwork for those recruitments. I was Union President of my district, until I retired in June to escape the madness, after 34 years in a profession I adored. For those that might not know, those “math and science teachers” are one of the many steps your administration has conceived meant to divide and conquer us. You see, you are recruiting those teachers with grants to districts, through RTTT, by offering them more money than, say, a music teacher or an English teacher. Well, before I left, I made sure that wouldn’t happen in MY district but I wonder how many other Presidents are in the dark or are buying into your plan.
And while we’re on the subject of music…do you have any idea (or do you care) about what your plan is doing to the arts? Do you understand what standardized tests are doing to phase out music, art, drama, and theater instruction? There is no money left after districts buy these test prep kits, buy the tests, pay to have them corrected, and then schedule children into unnecessary remediation. Do you know that your policies are prejudicial? Do you realize that in many inner city schools, children who score a “1” or a “2” are removed from their specials and forced to sit in test prep? Do you care that a suburban parent might have the resources to make sure their child has private music or dance lessons but that parents in poverty do not have these resources? We are discriminating, because of YOUR policies against poor children and children of color. It’s a crime and it’s NOT what I went into teaching for. I did not go into teaching to make PEARSON or any other company rich. I became a teacher to enrich the lives of children.
I want you to know, that due to your policies and those of Andrew Cuomo, I have switched my party affiliation to Independent, after being a lifelong Democrat. I did NOT contribute to your campaign, nor will I. I have WITHDRAWN my PAC money from VOTE COPE and have urged my colleagues to do the same. NYSUT and AFT (my parent unions) might be supporting you, but the average teacher is NOT. I have called on Mr. Iannuzzi to represent MY feelings. I’m sure I’m one of thousands of NYSUT members calling for the same. I am an education activist and will continue to rally teachers across the US. Your silence has been deafening but perhaps it is what we needed to wake us up. To shake us into action and to fight for this thing that we all love-public education.
Respectfully Yours,
I have been reading many of these letters today. Yours echoed my experience quite strongly. I too have not supported the Presidential Campaign this year for the same reasons. I too have newly registered as an Independent. Thank you for your words and your efforts.
Dear President Obama,
One year ago I moved 4,382 miles so I could teach. This December I will move back 4,382 miles and not be returning to the teaching profession. I cannot bring myself to return to a system that is so utterly broken and using our students as fodder in political games. Continuing Bush era policies couched under a new name (Race To The Top) hasn’t made them work better or improved learning conditions for millions of American students. By failing to offer a truly new vision of education policy, your administration has failed to grow hope where it has been sorely eroding; public schools.
In 2008 when you were elected, I was teary eyed and renewed as an American. Hope was back in town and as a then first-year teacher I hoped I would be able to continue in my profession and grow as a professional. Instead, in the three following years, with ever mounting pressure from unchanged NCLB policies, my freedom to inspire and create was frayed and eroded. I got very good at teaching math and reading because those were the subjects that were tested. I taught 4th grade; the grade that counted for Adequate Yearly Progress. I attended a wonderful and inspiring graduate program and was following in the footsteps of my parents whom together taught a combined 80 years.
Much like my students I do not revel in being constantly prodded and tested. I want to learn, grow, create and be the best teacher I can be. Under NCLB and its predecessor, Race To The Top, a toxic environment has been created in public schools. The joy of discovery has been replaced with test prep most notably in the districts that serve low-income and minority populations.
If your administration wants to create a 21st century education system it is time to let go of policy created when A Nation At Risk was the seminal work. We’ve had plenty of time since 1983 to discern that education policy has been on a crash course by an ever fevered call for standardized testing. Though politico types like to brush aside the absurd idea that NCLB and RTTT has caused a narrowing of the curriculum, I can attest that it has cut time for crucial subjects.
Do you know how absolutely heart breaking it is to have a 9 year old ask when they get to do art, science or social studies? It is inexplicably painful to look a 9 year old in the eye and reply “Sorry sweetie, I’m not sure we have time,” because every single minute of the school day has been regulated to getting test scores up.
Making mistakes, I tell my students, is how we learn. I also teach them, Mr. President, that it takes courage and vulnerability to admit our mistakes and as long as we don’t keep making them we’re doing pretty well.
Creating Race To The Top was a mistake and continues to leach the public out of public schools. It is time to take responsibility and own the mistake.
A 21st century education system won’t be built in a day but the sooner we abolish outdated policies that have left our children farther behind, the sooner we can learn from our mistakes.
Sincerely,
Kristen Sluiter
Playas del Coco, Costa Rica
Dear President Obama,
One year ago I moved 4,382 miles so I could teach. This December I will move back 4,382 miles and not be returning to the teaching profession. I cannot bring myself to return to a system that is so utterly broken and using our students as fodder in political games. Continuing Bush era policies couched under a new name (Race To The Top) hasn’t made them work better or improved learning conditions for millions of American students. By failing to offer a truly new vision of education policy, your administration has failed to grow hope where it has been sorely eroding; public schools.
In 2008 when you were elected, I was teary eyed and renewed as an American. Hope was back in town and as a then first-year teacher I hoped I would be able to continue in my profession and grow as a professional. Instead, in the three years that followed, with ever mounting pressure from unchanged NCLB policies, my freedom to inspire and create was frayed and eroded. I got very good at teaching math and reading because those were the subjects that were tested. I taught 4th grade; the grade that counted for Adequate Yearly Progress. I attended a wonderful and inspiring graduate program and was following in the footsteps of my parents whom together taught a combined 80 years.
Much like my students I do not revel in being constantly prodded and tested. I want to learn, grow, create and be the best teacher I can be. Under NCLB and its predecessor, Race To The Top, a toxic environment has been created in public schools.The joy of discovery has been replaced with test prep most notably in districts that serve low-income and minority populations.
If your administration wants to create a 21st century education system it is time to let go of policy created when A Nation At Risk was the seminal work. We’ve had plenty of time since 1983 to discern that education policy has been on a crash course by an ever fevered call for standardized testing. Though politico types like to brush aside the absurd idea that NCLB and RTTT has caused a narrowing of the curriculum, I can attest that it has cut time for crucial subjects.
Do you know how absolutely heart breaking it is to have a 9 year old ask when they get to do art, science or social studies? It is inexplicably painful to look a 9 year old in the eye and reply “Sorry sweetie, I’m not sure we have time,” because every single minute of the school day has been regulated to getting test scores up.
Making mistakes, I tell my students, is how we learn. I also teach them, Mr. President, that it takes courage and vulnerability to admit our mistakes and as long as we don’t keep making them we’re doing pretty well.
Creating Race To The Top was a mistake and continues to leach the public out of public schools. It is time to take responsibility and own the mistake.
A 21st century education system won’t be built in a day but the sooner we abolish outdated policies that have left our children farther behind, the sooner we can learn from our mistakes.
Sincerely,
Kristen Sluiter
Playas del Coco, Costa Rica
Reblogged this on Sow. Cultivate. Bloom..
Whoops, I posted my letter twice. Sorry about that, Ms. Ravitch. Also to toot my own horn for a second, I think your readers might enjoy hearing about life without NCLB. (Oh internets, you’ve made me shameless!)
Check out my all too brief reflection of it here: http://cultivatehopeineducation.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/living-without-nclb/
Thanks for continuing to be an inspiration! I enjoy your work.
Dear President Obama,
I am a lifelong educator who has worked at with students at every level – from preschool through graduate school – and am now a teacher educator at the State University of New York at New Paltz. I realize that, in the eyes of many school reformers, this experience brands me as a “protector of the status quo” and a resistor of efforts to improve education for all. These descriptions could not be further from the truth. In reality, I have dedicated my life to improving public education, and it sickens me to be put on the defensive with respect to a field in which I am a practitioner and a scholar.
The current political climate is marked by powerful attacks on public institutions, including schools, colleges, universities and public employee unions. These attacks are dangerous because public education is an essential component of an effective democracy: for citizens to self-govern, they must be able to engage in the process of recreating society in meaningful, intentional ways.
Today, your administration’s education policies threaten the ability of public institutions to foster critical, thoughtful, active citizens. Education is being viewed as a commodity and the labor of teachers and students – at all levels – is being exploited as a means to generate data for private entities which then, more often than not, use those data to confirm the perceived ineffectiveness of the public institutions themselves.
Public education is the foundation for developing the minds, attitudes and values of students to become informed decision-makers able to engage in effective democracy in meaningful ways. A system organized around teaching to tests will not provide students with the skills and dispositions necessary to have a meaningful voice in a democratic and just society.
Please stop the implementation of curricula and examinations that will be used only to reinforce conditions of injustice and corporatization and undermine the quality of our public education system. Education is neither a business nor a competition. People are more than data points; education is more than a number. Privatized, standardized reforms create systems in which the expertise and energies of students, teachers, and administrators are expended in order to provide data that enriches private entities and impoverishes public schools. This works against the efforts of dedicated educators and threatens our democracy.
Public schools have always been charged to fulfill complex multifaceted sets of goals –cognitive, physical, social, personal, cultural, and economic. Teaching and learning are complicated, intensely human endeavors that cannot be reduced to a number, nor should they be aimed exclusively toward the needs of business leaders. Throughout your political career, teachers have supported you. It’s time for you to return the favor – not for the teachers, but for future generations of children.
Sincerely,
Julie Gorlewski
Dear President Obama,
I have been an elementary school teacher for 13 years, and I am alarmed by the ongoing changes that I am witnessing in public education. I just finished reading an article in Psychology Today that finds creativity in children declines as testing increases. This is a trend that I fear is true, and must be reexamined if we want our students growing to become creative thinkers and problem solvers, not just good “test-takers.” My great concern is the amount of standardized testing used in our classrooms, which is fueled by your Race to the Top incentive.
I teach in New York State, and school districts all around our state have experienced a decrease in state aid. An article by Christopher Leahey finds that The Alliance for Quality Schools reports New York state government cut school aid by $2.7 billion in 2010 and 2011, forcing many rural and urban schools to choose between tapping into their reserve funds or cut teaching positions, pare down arts and preschool programs, close schools, and create larger class sizes for all students. These cuts in school aid, combined with a property tax cap and rising costs in health insurance, gasoline, and food have placed public schools in dire straits. I have experienced this first hand in my wonderful school district, Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda. We have tapped into our reserve funds, cut teaching positions, and worst of all, closed schools. I am heartbroken that the doors of my beautiful school, Thomas Jefferson Elementary, are closing for good in June. Jefferson is lucky to have an incredible staff, and has formed a beautiful community with parents and students. It is a tragedy that this is coming to an end. Our district is faced with tough choices as we have a declining population and costs that we can’t afford with our current budget. Race to the Top is not helping us, and it is not helping the students.
I find it insulting that in a time when so many public school districts are faced with financial distress, the New York State Education Department is willing to pay Pearson millions of dollars for their testing contract. Pearson has created poorly written state tests that force my third graders to sit for 90 minutes for six testing days (3 for ELA, 3 for Math), not to mention all of the testing preparation time that is required to ensure students are ready for these tests. We are told that we must work on “building test-taking stamina” as students have such a difficult time sitting for such a long period. I truly feel that this is not a fair assessment, and should not be the most important focus in my classroom. Requiring an 8 year old to focus for this amount of time is unreasonable. It does not give the best picture of my students’ capabilities. I certainly believe that there is merit to evalutating a student with tests, and I am in agreement that teachers should be evaulated as well. However, I have a difficult time accepting that these state assessments are the tool we currently use. Race to the Top has forced us into this situation. Most parents don’t realize that these tests have nothing to do with promotion to the next grade, nor is it a graduation requirement. I have witnessed the terrible amount of stress these tests create for parents, students and teachers. They have no meaningful part in our student’s education, as I feel they take away from the curriculum that men and women in KenTon have worked so hard to create. We want our students to be critical thinkers, to be “college and career ready,” and the format of our current state assessments does not help us acheive these goals.
My job as an educator is to ensure that my students are receiving the best education possible. I work countless hours afterschool correcting papers, learning my students’ strengths and weaknesses, planning lessons accordingly, communicating with parents, reading teacher manuals to learn new programs, exploring resources online, etc. I devote my time, my heart and my soul to this job, because I truly believe in my students and the future of this great country. This is why I must speak out about my feelings about Race to the Top and the negative impact the increase in standardized tests is having on our Public Education system. The tests have becoming too overbearing, too great of a weight in our curriculum, and I believe this can be changed in a way that best helps our students if our American citizens can come together and speak up for what we know is right.
Sincerely,
Mary Bieger
Buffalo, NY
Dear Mr. President,
I’ve been teaching for 19 years (my entire career) at South Side High School in Rockville Centre, NY. By many accounts it has been, and continues to be, one of the finest truly public schools, not only in New York State, but also in the entire nation. According to U.S. News and World Report’s Best High Schools of 2012 we are #22 in the U.S., #2 in NY and #1 on Long Island.
For more than a generation, the Rockville Centre School District has systematically, and successfully de-tracked students in order to increase access and equity to quality education for all. Our International Baccalaureate program is one of the largest programs in the U.S. It is not selective, with all students having access to this program, and most importantly it is successful.
For my entire career, I’ve worked in a district that has sought to achieve the goals of RTTT long before RTTT existed. We’ve narrowed the achievement gap, and access to our best programs and resources is open to all students regardless of race, gender, or socio-economic background.
Sadly, when RTTT was being developed, no one came to South Side High School to learn from us. Instead, millionaire hedge fund managers, failed superintendents, and bureaucrats, with little to no experience in public schools, are shaping policies, based on unproven data, that now jeopardizes what we’ve worked 30 years to achieve. While unproven charter schools are exempt from many of these federal mandates and as they take more money away from truly public schools, my school, with a proven track record of success, is subject to policies that can harm our children, as resources get further squeezed.
I invite you to visit our school. I’m confident if you spend just one full day with our administration, teachers, support staff, students and parents; one full day listening to our story, our journey – you too will believe in public education. Public education is not perfect, but it also is not universally flawed. There is real data that can help improve our nation’s schools and you can find some of it in Rockville Centre, NY.
Sincerely,
Keith Gamache
Art Teacher, Parent, Concerned Voting Citizen
Dear President Obama,
Please wake up and see that the education policies your administration is promoting are decimating our public schools, harming our children, demoralizing our teachers, and threatening the future of our democracy. Worst of all, your policies are promoting inequities in our education system and diminishing the opportunity every child in the nation should have for an excellent education
Your mandate for more charter schools is fast creating a three-tiered education system in our country. Children of the wealthy and privileged such as your daughters attend elite private or public schools. Children of less affluent families who are relatively able students with better informed parents increasingly find their way to charter schools, many of which have access to private funding and greater resources. But the third tier is left for the majority of poor or working-class children who must attend underfunded, under resourced, mostly inner-city public schools.
I am an early childhood educator and I can say with certainty that your policies are impacting the early childhood field in many negative ways, but that the greatest harm is falling on our nation’s poorest children. They are getting the worst of test-based, restrictive, standardized, rote instruction, while children in more affluent communities continue to benefit from more play and activity-based curriculum. More often the teachers in lower income communities have less training and are therefore more dependent on the standardized tests and scripted curricula that are a result of your misguided policies.
Standardized tests of any type don’t have a place in early childhood. Children develop at individual rates, learn in unique ways, and come from a wide variety of cultural and language backgrounds. It’s not possible to mandate what any young child will understand at any particular time.
Early childhood teachers are leaving the field in great numbers. They can’t teach using their professional expertise and many detest having to follow prescribed curriculum that they don’t agree with. As one teacher said recently, “I see kids with eyes glazed who are simply overwhelmed by being constantly asked to perform tasks they are not yet ready to do. I finally had to leave my classroom and retire early.” (www.deyproject.org).
Please look closely at how your education policies are impacting children, especially our youngest and poorest children. Your focus on competition and market-driven reforms is resulting in greater inequities in our education system and an undermining of our public schools. A vibrant, flourishing public education system is the cornerstone of our democracy. Please be willing to re-examine and reverse the direction of your approach to education. Please don’t be the President who abandoned our nation’s children and our public education system.
Respectfully,
Nancy Carlsson-Paige
Professor Emerita
Lesley University
Cambridge, MA
Dear President Obama,
Four years ago when I voted for you in 2008 it was with great pride that I cast my ballot. I was hopeful and looking forward to change. I am an educator. I have been teaching science in the Chicago Public School system for 12 years. I have seen many changes to education policy. All in the name of reform. This reform is not true reform because it is not being driven by teachers, parents, students or others who truly care about education. This reform is being driven by people who make standardized tests, run charter schools or who find other ways to make profits off the backs of our young people. I was saddened that you had no comment when I was walking a picket line and marching in the streets of Chicago with 20,000 educators to “fight for the soul of public education”. Your silence spoke volumes to me. I was saddened that the signs asking you to put on your comfortable shoes were ignored. You did not live up to your word. What good is a man who does not honor what he says by matching his actions to those words?
It is nice that you said there is too much emphasis on standardized testing and test prep. You are right there is too much. You say we should not do that. And then you extoll Race to the Top. You are not an idiot. Neither am I. I know better, and I know that you know better too. Race to the Top is a way to make states use standardized testing to evaluate teachers and “hold them accountable”. By endorsing Race to the Top and by appointing Arne Ducan as Secretary of education you have put emphasis on test prep and standardized testing and you have reduced teacher voice in curriculum development. Again, your words and actions do not match. You are a smart man. You are a well educated man. You know better and you should do better. People tell me to vote for you or Romney might take the White House. My response to them is, “So what if he does. They are the same.” President Obama I am disappointed in your record on educational policy. I am saddened by your actions and wish you had lived up to your words. You have lost my vote.
Sincerely,
Michelle Klein
Science Teacher
Dear President Obama,
I was wondering how Sasha and Malia are doing in school. Is their school undergoing fundamental changes like my son’s public school is as it has been turned upside down by Race to the Top and Common Core changes?
My son is in 7th grade. He attends a highly regarded suburban middle school in Long Island that offers a rich academic curriculum including music, art, extracurricular sports teams, clubs, all the bells and whistles that make for a well-rounded education. The other day he came home and told me that he took a test in science on things he didn’t know. He was sure he got most of the test wrong but it was OK since his teacher told him it didn’t count.
Welcome to baseline testing where kids lose precious class time instruction in order to formalize with data the fact that they haven’t learned something yet. Supposedly this test will show if teachers are doing a good job since these scores will be compared to test scores taken after the lessons are actually taught.
Huh? Maybe I’m naive, but I’m confident that my son’s knowledge will increase during the normal course of his attending school, doing homework, etc. I guess government doesn’t think so as this is part of requirements trickled down from Race to the Top.
The baseline testing continued in social studies and Spanish this week.
Have Sasha and Malia’a classes been interrupted so they can take baseline tests on material they haven’t learned yet? Is it assumed that their teachers can’t impart new knowledge without tracking it with this unorthodox method?
Since I have a lot more faith in the abilities of my son’s past, present and future teachers to teach than the government does, can I sign a waiver that opts my child out from baseline testing?
Thankfully, my son’s teachers introduced and explained the testing to students in a way to alleviate any anxiety. They were told not to worry and just try their best.
Since education has become all about measuring things, I am wondering how this kindness is measured. Is there a data scale in Race to the Top that measures the humanity of teaching, the caring and kindness?
My suggestion is that your data include measurements of times when a teacher attempts to alleviate the stress and anxiety of high stakes testing, or over the course of a semester, manages to get a shy student to raise their hand and participate, or turns a reluctant reader onto an author or books that make the student more enthusiastic about reading. I am sure there are many other examples of the excellent work that teachers do that cannot and are not being measured by your current system.
In any case, I’m not seeing how these critical things teachers do as part of their everyday experience is reflected in the data the government is collecting. High stakes test grades or increases from baseline testing to end of year scores do not show how teachers truly impact the lives of students and/or give them any credit for doing so.
Race to the Top has affected my son in other direct ways.
Common Core (CC) is a new approach to education that has school districts scrambling to figure it out, buying new materials they can ill-afford, and spending time training teachers and administrators. This curriculum is being enacted in one fell swoop. Students in upper grades are suddenly faced with severe changes in the direction of subjects and, through no fault of their own or their teachers, deficits in what they should have learned had they taken Common Core-based classes in prior years (but Common Core was not being followed or taught then).
For example, my son’s 7th grade math class has new CC standards in statistics which are a continuation of new 6th grade CC standards, which are very different from what my son was actually taught last year when he attended 6th grade. Although he had a very successful year in 6th grade math (as measured by class room tests and high stakes state assessments) he now has to play catch up and learn 6th grade math as well as 7th grade math. At the same time, areas that my son already covered in 6th grade math are now considered new concepts in 7th grade math and therefore he is going backwards in those topics.
Our school district has an excellent math department and program. It allows for students with strong math abilities to be on an advanced track which combines 7th and 8th grade math in 7th grade. These students take Algebra a year early and can then have the opportunity to take a college level math class in high school. My son is enjoying this challenging program but I fear for its future.
Unfortunately Common Core math does not allow for this advancement in math. Under the new curriculum, grade level math is grade level math. Both my husband and I had the experience of particating in an accelerated math program in NYC junior high schools. It put us both on the path to engineering degrees in college. This opportunity must be continued or we as a nation stand to fall even further behind other nations in math.
Does Sasha and Malia’s school follow the new Common Core math standards? Has their math program been drastically changed for every grade level leaving gaps and a concern for how students can play catch up? Have opportunities for advancement in math and college math been taken away from their middle and high school experience? Are they faced with major upheavals in expectations and expected to be backwards compatible to newly enacted standards or is their education following the same consistent path it has been on?
I am very troubled by the fact that the Common Core has no proven track record for actually being better than the standards and curriculum our school district was using previously, which data can show was doing an excellent job. If it ain’t broke, why are you fixing it? I feel that my son is a guinea pig in a large-scale educational experiment that has so far yielded a lot of criticism in numerous publications by experts like Ze’ev Wurman (math) or Sandra Stotsky (English).
My husband and I are products of NYC public schools: PS 79, JHS 194, Bayside HS and PS 184, IS 25, Francis Lewis HS, respectively, all located in Queens, New York. We had wonderful educations including opportunities for advanced math and other college level courses in high school. We were well-prepared for college. We were not subjected to baseline testing or even any high stakes testing until high school level subjects. Our courses followed coherently from year to year. School was a calm, nuturing environment, a place of learning.
Testing has become an overwhelming part of our son’s education. A frenzy overtakes the school weeks prior to high-stakes tests and the after effects include teachers absent as they grade these tests. The testing pressure cooker has now moved into the entire year, starting with baseline testing and continuing with the focus of teaching on high stakes test grades as the main goal.
To add to the anxiety of students, parents and teachers, these tests are largely undefined, unavailable before or after to even see and use as learning tools to help students. If students do not achieve certain levels on math and English exams, they are mandated to take additional support classes. No one even gets to see the mistakes they made. Only vague descriptions are provided. No improvement happens from these tests. Kids who fail these tests are mandated to additional support classes but no one really knows what mistakes they made. Can you imagine failing your road test and not being told what you need to work on before you attempt to take the next test?
My son has become immune to testing. His reasoning is why worry when there is always another test? He would much rather be learning than being tested. His school has been redefined to become a testing center and he is just going with the flow. It’s definitely a new interesting twist for kids to take baseline tests that they are told from the outset do not count.
I wonder how that will affect student attitudes towards tests in general when there are so many tests with different purposes. What will happen to the motivation to perform your best on traditional classroom tests when emphasis is put on high stakes that are mainly about passing or failing. Baseline tests that don’t count and are made up of questions students are assumed not to knoe add to the confusion. What mixed message we are sending students as they are poised with number 2 pencil, ready to fill in circles!
Do you feel that Sasha and Malia are being overly tested? Are their teachers’ job performance related to their test scores on tests no one knows about? Are their teachers being scrutinized with baseline tests? Do they lose instruction time when their teachers absent so they can grade high stake tests?
Mr. President, I’ve asked you a lot of questions. I hope you will think about and compare and contrast the education your children are receiving and how your education policy is “trickling down” to most Americans.
Education is not a one-size fits all system. The problems of inner-city schools are not that same as suburban ones. Your solution appears to be creating additional problems in what is being taught and how all this testing personally affects students.
School has become a test-driven environment where teachers fear for their liveilhoods based on unknown tests in areas that students are joining mid-stream. It disappoints me to find out that my son now goes to school to be tested on things he hasn’t learned yet. I find it insulting to his teachers, disrespectful to him and a waste of time and taxpayer money.
Suburban students are in a better position to handle these sweeping changes as they have more resources to be resilient. Their parents are questioning the negative effects of high stakes tests and curriculum changes on students and teachers. They are boycotting field testing, another interesting by-product of increased testing as kds have take even more tests that don’t count to help create additional tests.
Have Sasha and Malia been field tested? Has their education become more about teacher evaluation and creating and supporting this testing machine than student achievement?
Your most at-risk students are along for the ride and stand to lose the most from being thrust into this Race to the Top and Common Core system they (and their teachers) most probably cannot be successful in. They are already behind and lack the resources, home support and advocacy necessary to jump into new Common Core curriculum mid-stream. Suburban parents will continue to support their kids, hire tutors and do whatever it takes to counteract deficits and changes to make sure their kids succeed. The academic socio-economic acheivement gap lives on, perhaps even widens.
Our middle-upper middle class school district was doing fine prior to Race to the Top and Common Core. Hopefully we will continue to do so in spite of them.
Sincerely,
Stefanie Nelkens
PS I’d be happy to discuss this with Mr. Duncan if you are too busy. Perhaps he can spend a few weeks at a variety of schools across the nation, like Undercover Bosses, and see what havoc his ideas and the new testocracy have wrought.
Dear President Obama,
If you get another four years, I hope you will consider the path that you are taking in education reform. If you hoped to be the president who fixed education, that’s not looking to be the case. I hope that you will talk to those who are experiencing the decay of the public system that your policies are supporting. Your legacy as a president is in danger.
Are you willing to look at how standardized high stakes testing undermines education? You are such a smart man, I find it inconceivable that you don’t understand how a test that determines the welfare of the teacher, the property value of the community, the placement of the student, and the right of the school to exist ultimately is the only thing that can matter to a school, particularly one with a significant poor population. How is it possible that you do not see how this narrows the curriculum and undermines each classroom? You can not change this fact with soft declaiming that teachers shouldn’t teach to tests that you have collaborated in making the sole value in the classroom. You support the billions that Pearson will make while you undermine the social mobility of an entire nation. Who that been raised on a steady diet of tests each year from Kindergarten on can really compete with those educated by a thriving, rich, intrinsically motivating model? Anecdotally, this year is the first year that my value will be determined by the test, and it may be the last year that I don’t teach exclusively to it. Right now, I’m praying that a rich curriculum will prepare my kids for the test to come. But, I know that drilling the test maybe the best way to make progress on a test that does not evaluate the curriculum. If my curriculum does not provide the results I need this year, I will have one year to improve my own score before my job is at risk. As much as I value teaching a rich and meaningful curriculum, I will do what I must to survive. I will become Stanley Kaplan. I will have to get rid of other things in order to do that… including debate, Shakespeare’s sonnets, reading and modeling on great speeches, reading multiple fiction titles, public speaking, non fiction feature writing, persuasive writing, research, cross curricular units, intrinsic motivation and anything else that I must in order bring up my score. I will support test taking strategies, analyzing the kinds of multiple choice questions that arise on a test, looking for distractors, reading short non fiction as a means for analyzing the questions that will be asked, regirgitation of detail for a compare and contrast essay, parsing mediocre poetry by identifying themes that the non fiction paired passage. And I will do it all year long. This is the great value that your test of my value brings to the classroom. Are you excited and proud?
Are you willing to look at charters in the eye? You were on the board of a charter in Chicago. Perhaps you believe that charters are a way of hothousing new ideas and bringing them to scale. But, in practice, you must know by now that charters aren’t about better ideas or better teachers. Charters are about offering parents a way to pick their children’s peer group. No one is waiting for superman; they’re all waiting to avoid the neighborhood thugs. This attracts middle class parents back into the schools in urban areas and the children with the strongest parent support, but it also undermines the whole notion of the ordinary public school as a social good. In 1996, I went to India as part of a teacher Fulbright to see how education works in India and to look at cross cultural connections. While what I saw was not all there may have been to see, what I observed was a dismantled public education system where children who had to go to public schools were taught in one room schools on dirt floors with no books. The corporate funded schools were paragons.. open courtyards, university quality science labs, beautiful grounds. It was a stark and instructive difference in opportunity.
If you look at urban city schools, the charter movement is moving in that direction. Charter schools get the best resources and are given the right to take over resources in public schools at the will of the mayor or governor and once in place, removing them is extraordinarily difficult. Soon, public schools will be the system of last resort and the place where only the least of our citizens will go (at least in areas that have poor children). Charter advocates already understand this and they accomplish their task in the most corrupt and cynical way. Is this the hope we hoped for?
You say we are pursuing a No Excuses approach, but are we really? We’re not supposed to discuss the impact of poverty, parental abuse, drug use, pregnancy, violence and gang activity on performance. Yet, successful charter models are exemplars of using excuses to drive their success. They remove the problem children from their roles through a shocking level of attrition. What public school graduates only 50% of their entering class, calls that 100% graduation and is deemed successful? They refuse admission, counsel and harass out problem kids (Roxbury Charter School recently touted in the NYT as a model school has a 56% suspension rate. I wonder who they are trying to get rid of?). Charters (KIPP) can demand a level of parent participation that can not be required from other public schools. Most charters just don’t happen to have special ed or ELL services. (Go next door.) Is that a model that can be brought to scale or just a means for leaving the least educable student in the public school? So, instead of adequately funding public schools and providing wrap around services to help families that are most in need of support, we roll out some charters for affluent young people to run.. give them better resources and facilities, allow them to dump problem kids, provide them with more private dollars, encourage hedge fund participation and call that ed reform. We engage in competition because competition brings change and innovation. Is this the change you meant?
As charters corrupt the mission of public schools, they open the door for an astoundingly varied collection of abuses. They are the gateway drug for public financing of private ends both financial and social. They provide the notion that testing out of ideas on an uninformed and powerless public is acceptable because isn’t anything better than the status quo? That better thing includes vouchers in Louisiana that will allow public dollars ($4 million of them) to support teaching that the world is 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs and humans co-habitated. It supports the Green Wood charter in NW Philadelphia that is theoretically open to all children but submits application only through a certain country club. That sounds open. It allows entirely online public schools to be paid the same per pupil dollar as a public school that has to have a physical plant and 1 teacher per 30 kids. It turns a blind eye when charters that can and do refuse to provide busing still get the transportation dollars for those students. This is what our charters buy us. Yet, we can have public schools that have 60 kids in a classroom (as is now the case in Detroit). Your name is written on each one of the many abuses because RTTT is the means by which it happened.
RTTT is measuring up to be a social experiment of the entire nation of public schools and the horrendous outcome of their experiments are piling up at your door. This massive attack on public education will outlive your tenure, but you have the possibility of four more years in which to mediate some of its impact. I don’t know what you know about the impact of your policies. I don’t know if you are innocent of it, if the impact is your will, if you are shocked at its disaster, or if the outcome is just an acceptable level of collateral damage in service of some other agenda that you have. I know that you had Won’t Back Down by Tom Petty playing at the convention and that you continue to bring up RTTT as if it is a rousing success. That does not give me reason to believe that you will hear or act upon what you hear. I pray that you are actually concerned with improving education, but if you aren’t or if you can not tolerate backing away from a disasterous and failed policy (much like backing away from Vietnam or McCarthyism), then, perhaps the only justice will be the one that history writes across your tenure. So be it.
Sincerely,
Audrey Hill
Dear President Obama:
It is my understanding that many teachers will be writing to you this week to explain how your educational policies affect their students and them. As a complement to their efforts, I’d like to share a story about your policies that could have a direct impact on you.
The high school at which I teach history is a remarkable one; one of the few voluntarily and happily integrated public schools in the nation. The school graduates students into elite Ivy League schools as well as into social institutions that feed into every American social strata from community colleges, to cooking schools to the US Marines. Before Standardized Testing’s coup d’etat on American education, our diversity used to be an enormous strength when it came to teaching Social Studies. Now, though, test obsession is driving teachers to abandon student-specific education. The current policies have crushed conversations and curiosity, and produced interchanges like the one I’m about to describe.
Last week, I overheard a boy in a tenth-grade Global History and Geography Class speaking to his teacher. The boy asked, “Mr. ____, What is Zoroastrianism?”
“Don’t worry about it,” the teacher responded, “It’s not on the test.”
Most people in America probably wouldn’t consider this conversation the least bit important. But, President Obama, I’m guessing that you think differently. With your brilliant intellect and knowledge about the world — I heard your sister who teaches Global History in Hawaii talk about about the depth of your worldliness — you know that Zoroastrianism was possibly the world’s first religion based on ethical principles set out in a holy book, and that it deeply influenced the development of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. You also know that it originated near, and was the official religion of, the great Persian Empire. The prestige of Zoroastrianism is so great that — as you are aware — it is, despite the fact that most of them are Muslim, still a source of great pride to Iranians, which is what Persians are now called.
Here’s where this story might affect you. The boy in the story is a second-generation Hispanic-American immigrant who dreams of joining the US Armed Services, either through a commission to the US Naval Academy or by joining the US Marines. If you are elected to a second term, next month, that boy might very well be a young-man by the last two years of your presidency helping you carry out American military policy. Because, as you have stated many times in the past, preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon is your administration’s highest foreign policy priority, I reckon that having personnel who are sophisticated about the accomplishments and psychology of a potential enemy would be of immense value. Wars have begun over mutual cultural misunderstanding, before. How wonderful would it be to avoid the mistakes of the past?
Alas, even though it was vanishingly small, an opportunity to invest in that future was missed last week in my high school. It wasn’t missed, however, because the young man who asked the question had a bad teacher. That highly-rated teacher was exactly right — Zoroastrianism, in fact, does not get tested on New York State high stake-tests like the Regents. The only place where it might matter is in a real crisis with Iran. My hope is that, when I vote for you next month, you will reform your educational policies to encourage students and teachers not to drill for Standardized Exams but to prepare for the real tests that lie ahead.
Sincerely yours,
Neal Shultz
New Rochelle High School
900 West 190th Street,
Apt. 11K
New York, NY 10040
National Teacher of the Year for Global Understanding, 2006.
October 2012
Dear Mr. President,
I am writing to you again in the hopes that you will take the time to hear the cries of educators around our nation and pay attention. I previously received a form reply from your office that did not even come close to addressing the important issues that concern not only myself, but countless other public school teachers, and more importantly, the children that we teach. We as teachers have decided to stand together and write to you as a group because this issue is that important, and we know it affects the very future of our democratic nation.
When you first began campaigning for the presidency I didn’t pay much attention. It was my college-age son who convinced me that that we should be part of the change I so desperately wanted for the children in poverty whom I taught every day. You see, my own children, like yours, were privileged enough to attend exclusive private schools. They were lucky enough to be born into privilege. As a public school teacher who has always taught in high poverty public schools, I know how important a quality education is for the future of our children. I chose to send my own children to private school so that they would not be subject to the insane policies of NCLB. I know firsthand how these policies have gradually broken down public education and created a test-driven curriculum devoid of creativity and discovery learning. I have devoted my life to educating children in poverty so that they too might have an opportunity to experience the same type of education that my own children have had. You are in a position to give to other children, what you want for your own girls. Why is it that RTTT is good for other people’s children, but your own girls aren’t required to learn in a test driven environment? There is a place for data, but it should be used appropriately, to drive instruction. NCLB and RTTT have morphed public education into a monster that drains teachers and administrators, while making testing companies rich.
You see, those of us who work in high poverty schools know that poverty trumps all else, when it comes to providing education. We see firsthand the devastation brought to the lives of these children by a life of poverty. Yes, Mr. President, Poverty is indeed destiny for the vast majority of these children. It doesn’t matter how great a teacher I am, I can only play a very small part in the overall success of my students. Their success depends largely on the home lives they go home to, and the support systems available to their parents. It depends on their parents having access to a living wage, and affordable healthcare, and a myriad of other things too numerous to list here.
As a school administrator I work tirelessly with my teachers to keep our students on track and provide them with whatever resources they need to be successful. I learned long ago to work in partnership with their parents and to help them access whatever community resources that might be available to support not only their academic success, but also their health and emotional well-being. Yet all of this is constantly being destroyed by government policies that you and your administration continue to force on us. We are held to unrealistic expectations and constantly being blamed as inadequate, when the reality is, that it is the very policies you force on us that create the current failures in education.
No Child left Behind was to be the answer to all of the ills in public education. We all know that it was based on false premises that were never attainable. You missed the perfect opportunity to acknowledge the unrealistic policies of NCLB and take a bold step forward for public education. The sad reality is that you disrespected those with educational expertise who had actual experience in academia, by leaving them completely out of the conversation to guide educational policy. Instead you sought the guidance of education profiteers who did not understand the realities of educating children from a variety of backgrounds and experiences. Before NCLB came into being, public education was actually on track for improving and providing research based instruction and best practices that were based on years of educational knowledge and experience. We were slowly headed in the right direction and the NAEP scores prove it. All classes of students were slowly improving.
Those who claim otherwise do so with ulterior motives to paint a picture of doom and gloom. The reality is that students from affluent families are doing great in the education arena and children in poverty are not. Check the research, it is clear. This is not the fault of public schools, it is a reflection of the family environment and the larger society in which students live. To place the blame on the education profession is unfair and does nothing to address the real issues faced by society today. The reality is that you and your administration have become a part of a larger conspiracy to allow public education to be taken over by so called reformers who know nothing about education and who do not have the best interest of children in mind when they enact policies that harm children.
When history judges your actions, and it will, what will be your education legacy? Will it say that you played a part in the re-segregation of our nation by allowing profiteers to take over the public good of public education? Will it say that you allowed children in poverty to be left to the wayside while profiteering corporations took over the education of our nations children? Will it say that democracy was eroded because public educators were forced to provide poor children with a curriculum that valued test taking strategies over creativity and problem solving skills. Your Race to the Top Initiative does nothing to improve education and does everything to create a competitive destructive environment that disrespects the teaching profession. Children in poverty require a commitment that most private “education” corporations will not be willing to fund, because it eats away at their profit margin. The research already shows that the difficult to teach children are sent away from most charter schools by attrition rates that would be unethical in public schools.
It is time for you to listen to educators instead of corporate reformers who see profits as their ultimate goal. Billionaire businessmen and so-called education “Deformers” who want to take over public education do not know a thing about what really works in education. They tout easy fixes for complicated problems. If it were that easy, educators would have done it a long time ago. Those of us in education know that nothing this complicated is easily fixed. We understand the long hard road to success for our students, especially those in poverty. Unlike the people you have working for you, we choose to educate ALL children who come to us, not just those who are easy to educate. We don’t push the difficult to educate children aside so that we can improve our test scores. We work even harder with those students to help them to be successful.
As educators we are called upon to fix all of the problems of society. But you see, sir, It is not our job alone to fix society, that is the job of society as a whole. Our job is to educate children. Please step back and reassess your education policies. RTTT is destructive to children and will ultimately erode democracy by chipping away at the foundation of education for ALL children. Please listen to the voices of real educators. We are not in this for profits, we are in this to educate children. We are not afraid of change, and we are willing to do whatever it takes to improve education. What we are not willing to do, is to continue to participate in these unrealistic and harmful education policies that you and Mr. Duncan have inflicted on our nation. Take these harmful high stakes testing and teacher evaluation policies away and replace them with the types of education reforms you would want for your own two girls. Give the children of our nation an education policy that values teachers and allows them to use their professional knowledge to teach a quality curriculum. Put into place support systems that help struggling learners so they can access education on the same terms as more affluent students. The children of our nation cannot wait. Listen to teachers. Speak to teachers. No more empty promises without action. Respect our knowledge. I can assure you, if we continue on this path, our nation will one day pay the price for these harmful education policies. What role will you have played?
Sincerely,
Bridget Bergeron
I’m sending this directly to the White House Wednesday, under my own name, and naming the district in which I teach. Here is the text, though, with those details blanked out. It’s long.
I’m * *, a chemistry teacher at * High School in *. During the 2008 election cycle, I made personal sacrifices to donate the maximum contribution to your campaign, and then continued to contribute through the DNC. This election cycle, my contributions have been devoted to the attempt to turn you from your disastrous course in time to save your second term. It doesn’t look good.
I’m writing to you, one more time, to ask you to step back and look honestly at the results of the education policies your administration has imposed on the students I teach, and the adults who teach them, over the past four years. You’ve presided over a runaway train wreck of arrogance, lies, insider dealing, and fraud that has brought American public education to the brink of disintegration. Was that really your aim, or were you deceived yourself?
* is one of the public districts your DOE likes to claim as a great success. Over a decade ago, we were carefully chosen as a proving ground by the same education entrepreneurs who (as it turns out) helped you launch your political career, and they caused our test scores to rise by the same corrupt methods your DOE now endorses in school turnarounds, through its federal mandates and the leveraged corruption of the Race to the Top..
Corporate “consultants” chose our mixed working class district with a low income population who met the reduced lunch criteria, but weren’t in deep urban poverty. They advised our administrators to aim for low scores during the initial administrations of (state test), so they could later show vast improvement and qualify for maximum state grants. I swear this was explained to me this by my administrator at the time, who thought we were lucky to have insiders at the DOE helping us to an increased share of the school reform pie. We managed to deliberately report the lowest scores in the state.
Then, they held the immigrant, low income, and minority score supressors back in 9th grade until they reached an age where they could be pushed out. After the October count was in, year after year, they weeded the sixteen year olds, and put them out of the building for failure to make academic progress. Sometimes, they even did it retroactively after students had taken the spring tests, and somehow never reported scores for them. My girls came to me in tears, to turn in their text books and be signed out of their public school against their will, with less than a tenth grade education. As award banners filled our halls, my students disappeared onto the streets, and from our rosters, and from the corrupted state data base. Tens of thousands of them, we now know, all over *. That’s the actual “school improvement” strategy validated by our score improvements, and it’s the one your administration is promoting.
Yes, I reported this, but to whom? To the DOE? Yes. To the * * (newspaper)? Yes. To the citizens’ line set up by the Democratic governor I worked so hard to put into office? Yes.
And so, in 2008 I went all out to elect you. Instead of moving forward, though, you’ve set the clock back 30 years, to 1984. My district is a morass of crippling lies, based on servile lip service to “data-driven instruction” and “accountability”. We’re drowning in bubble tests, in mandated data-driven evaluation systems, in scripted RTI worksheet delivery, and in endless browbeating meetings. Arne Duncan has been around a couple of times, to celebrate the empire of the hucksters. Listless students sit trapped in front of computer banks; you can’t turn your back on them, because they’ll walk away from the deadening drivel being vended by your RttT innovators. The bogus test “strategies” classes that were supposedly so successful have evaporated, scores are flat or declining. The push-out policies now deliver the spit-out students straight to the for-profit online corporatists you promoted. There’s no actual accountability, but the piper gets his pay.
Teachers, students, families, and honest administrators do band together to carry on our real mission, risking our jobs in a running guerrilla skirmish to actually teach our students science, literature, math, art and history, and to get them through the obstacle course your accountability hoax has become. The people hate what you’ve done. Don’t you feel it, even behind your shield of hired yes-men?
Is this what you wanted? I’d like to advise you to turn back before permanent damage is done, but permanent damage has already been done. Your DFER tail is wagging the actual president of the United States; you launched your debate by pointing proudly to your betrayal of the most fundamental public trust to your billionaire Race to the Top backers. The corrupt dismantling and sale of our greatest hope and most precious democratic institution, public education, will go down in history as your legacy.
I hope you get a chance, in a second term, to set this right. Your billionaire backers win either way, and will turn their backs on you in a minute. You’re wrong if you think you owe your last victory to them. Do you want the support of the actual people who lifted you to your office, or not? Speak out.
October 13, 2012
Dear President Obama,
I have been a teacher for the Minneapolis Public Schools for twenty-two years. For most of my career I was extremely proud to tell people where I worked, until the pernicious effects of NCLB began to play out in our district. We saw schools in the most vulnerable neighborhoods closed, schools that had been serving communities as far back as the turn of the century. These schools were closed due to a single measure: test scores. These tests were written by far off researchers who had no local or cultural context, no relation whatsoever to our students. Our children are more than test scores.
Now we are Racing to the Top through these standardized tests. The fact that my job evaluation will soon hinge on these test scores is not encouraging, there is no honest data that shows this is effective or reliable. A consequence of this “reform” is that most teachers will be less inclined to work in urban districts. Why not support those of us in urban districts by fighting for more funding, early childhood education, and neighborhood revitalization programs?
Also, why would you weaken our public school system by awarding states that pave the way for charters more money? Only 17 percent of charters are more successful than their public school counterparts. Charters can also resist serving those with special needs, and language and behavior issues. The Minneapolis Public Schools began to destabilize under NCLB, and also when our public officials gave up on desegregation, and let charters proliferate. Charters play a significant role in re-segregating society. There is now more spatial inequality and segregation in our city than ever.
Mr. President, you pay lip service to teachers, but continue to implement corporate style reform that is not inspiring to students or teachers. I voted for you in 2008, but will not vote for you in November. I will be voting for Jill Stein of the Green Party.
Please change your policies, and I may change my mind.
Sincerely,
Valerie Rittler
Social Studies Teacher
Minneapolis Public Schools
Dear President Obama,
Race to the Top is not moving America forward in education. Testing is not teaching, and Race to the Top requires testing and testing preparation that serves little purpose for students except to pit schools and districts against each other for scarce resources. You have said that teachers should not have to “teach to the test”, but Race to the Top simply makes it mandatory.
As if wasting precious teaching time weren’t bad enough, there is a much more sinister side emerging from Race to the Top that will have a destabilizing effect on American society for many years to come: segregation. Race to the Top labels schools and encourages privatization of public schools. The truth is that because of Race to the Top, many schools in poor and minority neighborhoods are closing and the new private schools and charters simply do not take “all comers”. The low performing students, the students who don’t have a way to get to schools out of their neighborhoods, the special needs students and all students considered high needs, the students who do not speak English well or at all, and the students with behavior problems are all turned down by private charters creating a “second class” of learners. Instead of moving America forward, Race to the Top seems to be pushing us back to the 1950’s where separate schools for the “haves vs. the have nots” were the rule of the day.
There are many other aspects of Race to the Top that undermine the educational experience for both students and teachers, but suffice it to say that wasting precious teaching time and the resegregation of America are more than reason enough to end this program before further damage is done to America’s children, and indeed to our system of democracy. No other educationally successful and advanced country in the world does the kinds of things that Race to the Top would have us do. Mr. President, this is far from “moving forward”.
Gary W. Pastoor
Teacher and Principal, (retired)
Our government has done to teachers what Senator McCarthy did to many others in the 50’s. Our country is on the “the witch hunt” for bad teachers. Our government is looking for someone to blame for our education woes. So, it has to be bad teachers, right? It couldn’t be bad policies. It couldn’t be parents not doing their jobs. It couldn’t be the continous break down of morals and values. It couldn’t be any of those things so it must be bad teachers.
Our government doesn’t have the guts to admit and focus on these other issues besides “hunting” for bad teachers. The government won’t do that because they want to be re-elected.
This continued “witch hunt” will cost this country many”great teachers”. How many young people stay in the teaching field after seeing all that works against them.
After the next 12 years, I am getting off this “mery-go- round ” if things don’t change. My nerves can’t take anymore.
President Obama:
First, get rid of Arne Duncan. Stop listening to people like Bill and Melinda Gates and Michelle Rhee. I like Oprah but she is not an education expert. Mark Zuckerberg seems like a nice guy. Why don’t we utilize the knowledgeable education experts in our country like Diane Ravitch, Jonathon Kozol, or Deborah Meier to name a few who have nothing to gain monetarily by sharing their expertise (except maybe some book sales). People who have been there and done that, not millionaires who want to make more money by tying up education with curriculums and core standards and standardized testing and data that starts with them and ends with them making more and more dollars while classroom teachers still have to buy their own supplies and districts have to fill out applications and supply tons of data to race to the top. Why are we racing each other to the top? We should all be helping each other to the top together. Not poor versus rich or private versus public. Americans helping Americans.
Another disillusioned Educator for Obama and Teacher for over 30 years ,
Mary Cairns
Dear President Obama,
I spent 25 years teaching in the area of special education. I am old enough to remember when special-needs students could be found living in the squalor of run down institutions—societal outcasts. It took people like Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, news reporter Geraldo Rivera, and many others to expose such horrific conditions. How proud I was to be a part of a generation that sought to include all children in public education.
We special-needs teachers placed great hope in Public Law 94-142. Many of us believed the individualization sought for children with learning difficulties would permeate to all areas of education. Why not an Individual Plan for every child to learn of their unique possibilities?
I am sorry to say the changes in education today have been devastating, not only for special-needs children, but for all children. Instead of focusing on individuality, the current push is to educate to the narrow middle. Those who now have power in education know little about special-needs children, or children in general, for that matter. They somehow believe all children must learn and will learn the same dull way—by repetitive rote and nonstop testing.
Charter schools were supposed to be a way for well-prepared teachers to develop high-level experimental schools. Now most are run by those who do little that is unique. Special-needs students are no part of this experiment. Shunned due to poor behavior, low test scores, and the inability of the unprepared teachers found in charters and charter operators themselves, to meet their unique needs, special-needs students return to traditional public schools. You must see this sets a dangerous precedent. You must understand that our public schools will turn into poorly funded dumping grounds for the poor, the needy, and those with special-needs.
I might also add that special education includes gifted and talented children. NCLB and Race to the Top have ignored the needs of these children as well. Accelerated Placement and International Baccalaureate do little to address the outstanding skills for which these children are capable.
Consider the decline of the arts in our public schools. The arts benefit all children including those with special-needs. The arts have been sadly suppressed.
I need not tell you that teachers are tired of being blamed for what is really an attack on America’s public schools. There is no reason why these schools can’t be a source of pride for all children including those with special-needs. I leave you with the beautiful words of a Democrat I’m sure you admire:
The moral test of a government is how it treats those who are at the dawn of life, the children: those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those who are in the shadow of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.
—Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey
Please turn it around Mr. President. The time is now.
Sincerely,
Nancy Bailey, Ph.D.
Collierville, TN
Dear President Obama,
There are many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of teachers, who are disappointed in your education policies. Our votes will make a difference, so please consider the following points:
• Stop talking about rewarding and punishing teachers. We became teachers because we want to teach and encourage students to become life-long learners and productive members of society, not because we expected to win a prize for producing higher scores. Teaching is not about attaining a sales quota.
• Reduce or eliminate standardized testing. Standardized testing can be valuable to help drive instruction; however it is a poor measurement of student growth. In addition, the costs of standardized testing have been growing each year. Wouldn’t these funds be better used by hiring additional reading or math teachers?
• Stop encouraging the privatization of public education. Many studies demonstrate that charters don’t get better results than public schools unless they exclude low-performing children. Public schools educate all children. This approach drains much needed economic resource, which benefits not some, but all children.
• Withdraw your support from the failed effort to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students. The American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education issued a joint paper saying that such methods are inaccurate and unstable. Teachers get high ratings if they teach the easiest students and low ratings if they teach the most challenging students. Does this make sense?
• Cease closing schools and firing staffs because of low scores. Low scores are a reflection of high poverty, not an indicator of bad schools or bad teachers. Insist that schools enrolling large numbers of poor and minority students get the resources they need to succeed.
I hope that you reflect upon your policies and evaluate the adverse impact it is having on educating our future leaders.
Sincerely,
Michael
Dear President Obama,
I have been a teacher for twenty years. I am also a grandmother and the oldest of my three grandchildren is now in kindergarten. I am heartsick at what your policies have done to my profession and to the educational opportunities that are being denied to my grandchildren and millions of children like them.
When my children were in kindergarten they learned, but much of their learning was done through exploration and play. I know you are not an educator, nor is Arne Duncan, but research (a term you politicians use all too freely) validates the need for play as a learning experience for young children. My son tells me that my grandson gets to play only after lunch at recess and during his P.E. class – very short periods of time in a very long school day for such a young child. The rest of the time is spent in the kind of “learning” needed to prepare him for high-stakes testing that is the hallmark of your educational policies. The stark changes in the educational landscape in this country are a direct result of corporate education reform – large corporations who see an opportunity for profit at the expense of our most vulnerable population, our children. Whether the agenda is privatization or the profits that can be generated through the creation and sale of testing materials, test prep materials, data collection and sharing, and curriculum materials created to be consistent with high-stakes testing, the greed of corporations has overshadowed the needs of our children. Your administration has been responsible for this drastic change.
No Child Left Behind was a disaster. It was built on a fallacy that our public education system was failing although our students who do not live in poverty meet or exceed those of the nations to whom we are compared. Rather than addressing the real issues of funding inequities, segregation and allocation of resources, your administration has created NCLB on steroids, the debacle of Race to the Top. As every true educator knows, learning is not a race. Education is not a competition. The strength of teachers has always been our ability to collaborate, to join our minds and hearts for the common good of our students. But when our livelihoods depend on outshining each other in a competition that requires us to focus most of our time teaching to high-stakes tests, everyone loses. Children no longer play in kindergarten, no longer do what is developmentally appropriate, because Arne Duncan, a non-educator, has decided that education is a race. Music and art education are being cut because time is needed for test preparation, or because financial resources are being channeled to testing, test preparation or to mandates to satisfy RttT requirements. Corporations such as Pearson are reaping huge profits at the expense of our children.
You have stated that you wouldn’t want an education for your daughters that meant their teachers were teaching to a test. Really, Mr. President? I am hard pressed to understand how or why I should support a leader who believes my grandchildren are not entitled to the same educational experience that his daughters deserve. In January I listened to your State of the Union Speech and thought, “Is this man even aware of his own administration’s policies?” Because, honestly, your rhetoric doesn’t remotely match the reality of what your administration has done to public education in this country!
You have been silent as state after state has destroyed the professionalism and morale of teachers, and neglected to make good on your promise to walk the picket line with union members whose rights were denied. Where was your support in Wisconsin? Why were you silent about Chicago? We teachers were waiting for your support, and without it, why would you think you deserve ours? I receive e-mails almost daily requesting contributions to your campaign, and responded each time with a statement that I would not support you, financially or otherwise, until you removed Arne Duncan and changed the direction of your educational policies. I began deleting the e-mails without responding when my e-mails to you were ignored. It appears that the big money of Gates, Walton, Broad, etc. win favor and the ability to set education policy, but you have no interest in hearing from the real experts – this country’s teachers. Where were the teachers in the education roundtable you held in the summer of 2011? Our voices are silenced in favor of the pseudo-experts from the business world – those who have no business having a voice in this conversation at all.
Your fundraising e-mails convey a sense of urgency – we teachers feel the same sense of urgency for the sake of our students. It is not too late. Please rethink your educational policies and reverse your course. There is no shame in admitting that you have changed your mind. Diane Ravitch did it years ago, and she is an expert in the field. Please follow Ms. Ravitch’s lead, for the sake of our children.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Lynch
Educator & Concerned Grandparent
This is the letter I sent today — thank you for doing this!
Dear President Obama,
I imagine that you know that there are many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of educators, who are disappointed and saddened by your education policies. I also assume that you know that some will vote for you reluctantly, some will vote for a third party candidate, and some will not vote at all. Our votes will make a difference.
Given the choice between you and Mitt Romney, who seems to view public education with contempt, we want to help you win back the hearts and minds of educators.
Here are ways to do that.
Please, Mr. President, stop talking about rewarding and punishing teachers and administrators. Educators are professionals, not toddlers. We don’t work harder for bonuses; we are working our best now. Waving a prize in front of us will not make us work harder or better. We became teachers because we want to teach, not because we expected to win a prize for producing higher scores. Personally, I was a lawyer in a big firm in Boston for many years and went into education because I wanted to make a difference. I have been a principal now for 15 years, and feel that I have had success in creating a school that is a wonderful place for teaching and learning. In the last few years, though, one policy after another, coupled with teacher- and school-bashing, have me depressed and thinking about leaving. It is becoming more and more difficult to run an excellent school, because of paperwork, punitive policies, and the declining trust of the public resulting from the anti-school rhetoric, all of which have become worse during the last four years of your administration.
Please stop encouraging the privatization of public education. Many studies demonstrate that charters don’t get better results than public schools unless they exclude low-performing children. I personally had a conversation with the leader of a local charter school in which he told me that he agreed not to pursue any discipline for a student who was dealing drugs in the school provided that the parents withdrew him and put him back in the regular public schools. There are many stories like that; charters simply exclude difficult students. I have also had conversations with parents of special education students who have told me that the local charter schools told them that they were welcome to apply but that the charter school would not provide particular services. Public schools educate all children. Charters are taking the students who have parental support and are easiest to educate and tearing communities apart. Please support public education.
Please speak out against for-profit schools. These for-profit schools steal precious tax dollars to pay off investors. Those resources belong in the classroom. The for-profit virtual schools get uniformly bad reviews from everyone but Wall Street.
Please withdraw your support from the failed effort to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students. The American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education issued a joint paper saying that such methods are inaccurate and unstable. Teachers get high ratings if they teach the easiest students, and low ratings if they teach the most challenging students. I have personally demonstrated that through my analysis of the numbers for the teachers in my school. In the years when teachers have English Language Learners and special education students, their median student growth scores are low; in the years when they don’t, their student growth scores are high. It’s easy to see correlations between the student growth scores and what has happened in the lives of particular students (a student whose parents divorced during the year has a low score, as does a student whose grandmother died the week before the test, for example); there seems to be little, if any, correlation between student growth scores and the quality of the teacher.
Please stop closing schools and firing staffs because of low scores. Low scores are a reflection of high poverty, not an indicator of bad schools or bad teachers. Insist that schools enrolling large numbers of poor and minority students get the resources they need to succeed. On the latest PISA international testing, U.S. schools with a poverty rate of less than 10 percent were the top in the world. U.S. schools with a 75% poverty rate were below third world countries. Our child poverty rate is the highest among industrialized nations and our international results reflect this.
Please speak of the role of public education in a democracy, schools as the center of communities, with doors open to all. Please speak about the importance of early childhood education and small classes and libraries and the arts and a rich curriculum. Please remind the nation why schools need nurses and social workers and after-school activities. Please recognize that schools work best through collaboration, not competition. Remind the nation why teaching to the test is wrong and why standardized testing should be used to help, not to give rewards and punishments.
Please, President Obama, recognize that your policies are demoralizing educators. Many are leaving the profession. Young people are deciding not to become teachers. Your policies are ruining a noble profession.
President Obama, we want to support you on November 6. Please give us reason to believe in you again.
I am an educator, an elementary school principal, who is passionate about public education and cares about our nation’s public schools.
Linda Murdock
Sudbury, MA
October 17, 2012
Dear President Obama:
Have your educational policies ushered in an Age of Enlightenment? Sadly, no.
Have your educational policies ushered in an Age of Reason? Sadly, no.
Have your educational policies ushered in an Age of Discovery? Sadly, no.
Your educational policies have ushered in an Age of Measurement, and that is sad.
Your policies have sided with those in the educational testing industry, from those profit and non-profit stakeholders who believe that the measure of a student’s education can be reduced to the results of a single metric test. This thinking is simply not the thinking that will propel our nation’s education system forward. Your current policies are a retrograde fit to a system that demands 21st Century skill development instead, with assessments that measure skills needed in our new economy: collaboration, communication, and creative problem solving.
Consider that the reliability of tests used to measure student achievement have been widely disputed because of influences beyond the classroom; poverty, race, the influence of previous teachers, the attitudes of peers, and parental support are influential factors that are not accounted for on single metric tests. Furthermore, the unrelenting focus on testing demands an unprecedented amount of the teacher and students’ classroom time being given over to the collection and review of data.
Our public schools need educational policies that return power to the educational professionals in the classroom. Our public schools need to recruit highly educated professionals to the teaching profession who are paid accordingly. Our public schools need to be re-imagined and reengineered to move from the agrarian school model to year round schools that are flexible in meeting the specific needs of the communities they serve. Our public schools need to serve all members of a community, not the few who remain because of a flawed voucher system.
Mark Twain once stated that, “We believe that out of the public school grows the greatness of a nation.” I believe that is true. I believe that with good educational policies and your support of the ideas I mentioned above we can successfully grow the greatness of the nation. I believe that you can shift from this futile educational emphasis on testing and turn to usher reason, discovery, and enlightenment back into public education.
Very truly yours,
Colette Marie Bennett
Teachcmb56@aol.com
Biography: Colette Marie Bennett is the English Department Chair at Wamogo High School (Region 6) in Northwest Connecticut. She has also served as the Social Studies Department Chair. She has over 21 years of experience in the classroom grades 6-12.
She blogs @www.usedbooksinclass.com
See: A Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World by David Landes.
I agree with you about the idiocy of our Standardized Tests, but most scholars of the rise of Western Europe (and the United States) drew much of its strengths from constant quests for measurement. Indeed, the eras commonly called the Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment, and the Age of Discovery were largely based on constant,verifiable measurement.
Some things can and should be measured, like time and distance.
Others cannot be reduced to a number, like human relationships and learning.
Trying to measure them changes them -and debases them.
Dear President Obama,
‘Twas days prior to election, and all through the schools,
The teachers were stirring; they’re no one’s fools.
The artwork was hung by the whiteboard with care,
In hopes that charter schools would never be there.
Some children were nestled all snug on their meds,
While visions of standardized testing lurked in their heads.
With teachers’ mantra of “I will not stop,”
We were ready for our Race to the Top.
When out in the school yard there arose such a clatter,
We sprang from our testing to see what was the matter.
Away to the windows we flew like a flash,
Tore open the blinds in such a wild dash.
The cast on the pile of the new autumn leaves
Gave a luster of gloom to our long held beliefs.
When, what to our wondering eyes should appear,
But a for-profit foundation, their eyes in a leer.
With well-known profiteers so prevalent now,
I knew in a moment it must them somehow.
More rabid than skunks the profiteers came,
And they bantered and badgered, and called friends by name!
“Now, Jindal! Now Murdoch! Now destabilization!
On Rhee! On Spellings! On privatization!
To the Race to the Top! To education’s great fall!
Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!”
And I heard them exclaim as they overtook sense,
“Happy vouchers to some, but to most, just NONSENSE!”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
K. Homfeld; October 17, 2012
[With sincere appreciation to Clement Clarke Moore, 1822]
I am a retired teacher as of August 17, 2011, which was the day before school started 2011-12. Even though I was an elementary teacher for 27 years, I no longer could force myself to participate in education’s data-driven climate. No longer is it “all about the kids”—rather, it is now “all about the test scores.”
Please listen to these teachers, they are in the ones in the trenches.
Sincerely,
Kathy Homfeld
Lexington, MO 64067
Dear President Obama,
I am not in favor of Race To the Top, nor the ideas that form its basis. We apparently disagree on the very concept of education. First, it is not a race, but a process. Second, I don’t believe we are in the business of producing people who prove their achievement and growth through test scores or other quantitative measures. (Have we really done our jobs if we fail to intervene with a violent, angry child who can do perfect long division?) Rather, our roles involve helping children to grow up well, using the content areas not as ends in themselves, but as metaphors and vehicles for personal growth.
Perhaps I argue this from too much of an elementary education perspective, and the personal growth agenda should best be left to parents’ discretion. The fact remains, though, that during a school term, the teacher(s) will spend more time with the child than the parents.
Government will get what government asks for. It must therefore be careful to choose its request carefully. Academic achievement is, of course, very important. To that end, a fulfilled, centered child will acquire lifelong knowledge more easily than a maladjusted “content machine” can learn fulfillment. If education must be viewed as a race rather than as a process, perhaps fulfillment rather than achievement should be the ultimate goal.
–Martin
Dear President Obama,
I am a recently retired third grade teacher though I still care for the children in my state of New Jersey. I am in a number of grass roots organizations (Save Our Schools March, Our Children/Our Schools, and Save Our Schools-NJ) to fight for our public schools, our children and thus our nation’s future. So I write to tell you that I’m pleased by your attempts to funnel more money into the education system. But not so pleased by your messenger, Secretary Duncan or your delivery. You both tout that the Race to The Top encourages competition and therefore better schools. RTTT penalizes poor districts that do not have the same resources to compete with the rigorous guidelines. That includes the battery of assessments that creates an inordinately test laden curriculum which incidentally also deprives our students from receiving a fully rounded education which includes the sciences and the arts. This unfortunately also affects all the schools in my state and RTTT schools around the country in the same manner.
In addition, your silence on the rapidly expanding pro-business school movement, charter or otherwise, intent upon swallowing struggling schools, communities, teachers and our kids is contrary to the policies of the president that I voted for in 2008. I am extremely worried about future decisions from misguided advice (from your Secretary of Education, perhaps?) or, please excuse my candor, your insufficient grasp of the events that is impacting education in a negative way.
I still believe that your heart is in the right place. Please listen to other informed educators and researchers, not in your inner circle, who are fighting to stem the tide of policies that are inequitable to the schools in poverty districts, stop curricula driven by tests and challenge educational entrepreneurs that are out for profit, not for our public schools and the future of our nation-our kids.
Sincerely yours,
Terry Moore
New Jersey Information Coordinator
Save Our School March http://www.saveourschoolsmarch.org
Honorable President Obama:
It is very important that your educational policies be based on educational principles, not business principles. Private enterprise is based on competition. Competition means winners and losers. Public schools are a public service, none of our children should be losers.
Children are not customers. Our society requires that every child go to school or study an approved curriculum at home, regardless of the wishes of the child and the family. We require that every child be educated for the good of society as a whole. This means that no public school should be allowed to reject any students. If a child is slow to learn, the school system must inspire and assist. If a child is “a troublemaker,” the school cannot send him/her away. The school system is charged with the responsibility to help all our children to learn, to do fulfill their potential, and to become productive adults. If charter schools take money from our taxes, they must not be allowed to reject (“counsel out”) any child.
Because our society requires children go to school, we owe it to them and to ourselves to provide optimal schools. Children are not products. Each child is an individual with a unique combination of personality traits, learning style, and abilities. Children differ in the knowledge and working habits that they bring to the classroom. In addition each child has his or her own values and goals. Every child must be treated with respect. Instruction should be differentiated so that all children can be served. There is no single method that will reach all children. We must provide for children’s social and emotional development as well as their intellectual development so they can be productive members of our society.
School Choice is a cynical false hope. The large foundations vigorously promoting charter schools are openly promoting them as an opportunity for business to tap school funding as a “profit center.” Investors are being told of this high growth sector for making money. Charter schools have been picking and choosing students or “counseling out” children whose scores may hurt their chances. Even with these nasty practices, very few charter schools are doing as well as public schools, and most show weaker student gains.
Teaching is very difficult work. Knowing the subject matter does not mean that a potential teacher knows how to get children to learn. Teachers must learn about child development, cultural differences, the psychology of motivation and learning, and effective pedagogy. This learning must be accompanied by classroom experience. New York state requires potential teachers to have 100 hours of classroom observing and assisting followed by a semester of full time student teaching. Short cuts like Teach for America penalize students. Those so-called teachers do not know what to do, and put a burden on their colleagues. Their attitudes also cause problems.
We must provide equitable funding for schools. Every child needs small classes, well educated experienced teachers, a good school library, a sound school building, adequate technology, and supportive services such as counseling and a school nurse. Small classes and good libraries have shown the greatest effect in closing achievement gaps, both racial differences and social class differences.
We must have a curriculum that stresses hands on learning. New ideas must be contextualized. Skills should not be taught in isolation. Children must be taught to apply what they learn to novel situations. They must be taught to read between the lines and analyze information. They must be taught to figure things out by themselves. We must teach problem solving and encourage creativity.
Business models can be useful, for business, although putting self interest ahead of caring for others is often harmful. School policy should be based on the expertise of educators, not economists or businessmen.
Sincerely yours,
Rosalie Friend
Dear President Obama:
My name is Hilary Frambes and I live in Plain City, Ohio. I’m an artist and community art educator. I’m the proud mother of two wonderfully creative children, Grant age 12 and Maddy age 9.
Yesterday, I had the good fortune of being able to attend a conference in Columbus on the importance of public schools. Dr. Diane Ravitch was the keynote speaker. I won’t go into every detail of what she said yesterday, although she said many, many significant things regarding the current misguided trajectory of education reform, including the emphasis on high stakes standardized testing. There was one thing in particular that she said regarding Race to the Top that truly moved me.
“What if a child cannot walk? How is he or she supposed to Race to the Top? What about the dreamers? They’ll be crushed.”
In an instant, those words shot through my heart like a laser. I knew exactly what she meant and I felt like she was speaking right to me. You see… I’m a dreamer. And guess what? My two children are dreamers as well. I was lucky enough to go to public school long before all these reforms. You see, in today’s schools there really is no place for dreamers. Your administration’s reforms have narrowed the curriculum, often cutting out the arts, which gives dreamers the opportunity to flourish and to find themselves. These reforms are killing creativity and divergent thinking, as students are taught there is only one right answer to every question. What will become of the dreamers as a result of Race to the Top? If innovation, creativity, and critical thinking skills are truly important to you and our country, shouldn’t we be giving children more opportunities to dream and discover? I think of people like Leonardo DaVinci, Alexander Graham Bell, Frank Lloyd Wright, The Wright Brothers, Carl Sagan and wonder… how would they fare in today’s schools? I think we all know the answer to that question. They’d be “crushed.”
Education shouldn’t be a Race to the Top. We succeed as a society when all of us succeed…together. This includes the dreamers. Please consider changing your education policy before it’s too late. I shudder to think of the consequences for my own children, and the other dreamers out there.
Sincerely,
Hilary Frambes
17 October 2012
re: Education
Dear Mr. President,
I am a retired teacher (because of illness) and an Anglican minister. On your first book tour through Denver you stopped the line to talk with my son and daughter. Last week my son and I went to see the First Lady here in Castle Rock. I mention this because you couldn’t have bigger fans than the Herrell’s. I have some very large concerns about education, though.
I have a graduate degree in education, and read research like others read the comics. I am troubled where we are going with education in America. In every lesson we teach as a classroom teacher we ask ourselves, “What is the purpose of this lesson?” We plan from the outcomes back to our opening instructions. We build on prior knowledge, but don’t expect that there is any prior knowledge. We know we can bring a lot of students up to speed by intensely teaching the vocabulary early to build a knowledge base. We have tried to figure out the purpose to “Race to the Top,” as we did with “No Child Left Behind,” we are left with some very large questions.
“Competition will drive innovation!” seems to be one of the greater purposes in “Race to the Top.” Competition works great for March Madness, but is that the purpose of education? I don’t think so. In our schools we are to, first, act for the safety of the child in lieu of parents being with their child. Second, we are trying to build a common sense of community for all citizens. Next is teaching the students how to learn, and then presenting and releasing their abilities to pursue their learning. They need to know how to work as a contributing member of a team. So far I am not hearing competitions in any of these purposes.
I hope you are starting to see the disconnect we in Education have with “Race to the Top.” Our hope and goal in education it to bring all students up to a level that will allow them to be successful, tax paying citizens. We don’t want to create any ceilings that hold anyone back. I hope for a society that values each individual for what they can add to the whole, not to leave behind losers.
“Race to the Top” has allowed an insidious cancer to really take off and begin to destroy school districts and state legislatures: American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC, and now other groups like them, is working under the table and behind closed doors to take some of the mandates of “Race to the Top” whole different level. Let’s just look at removing the cap on Charter Schools. ALEC wants to privatize all schools, and can do that by using your mandates. They want parents to be able to take school dollars, as so sort of voucher, and spend it on any school they like. That includes schools not in the school district. Those state dollars are used to run an entire program of services on just educate an individual student. The accounting of those dollars then becomes almost impossible. ALEC pushes for all of this under the blessing of “Race to the Top.”
Two texts that I would hope will drive your future decisions about education are FINNISH LESSONS: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? by Pasi Shahlberg and The DEATH and LIFE or the GREAT AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM, how testing and choice are undermining education, by Dr. Diane Ravitch. These two books are the clearest picture of where we ought to be going in pubic education. Please, sir, give them some time on task.
We keep getting asked to recreate the wheel of education when we know what is best practice already. The work of Dr. Jere Brophy and colleagues, at Michigan State University, has identified what is “teacher effectiveness,” for example. Any area you go into in education we already have the answers for what is best practice. We don’t need to spend billions on new information. That is a waste of money.
Two more issues need to be addressed: Testing and Unions. I will take them one at a time.
Tests are designed to be used for a variety of specific purposes. To use them for a different purpose usually leads to information that is neither accurate nor useable. To use achievement tests, which are inaccurate in and of them selves, as a tool to advance or retain students, or to give a teacher a raise or a pink slip, is pure ignorance. Every time a student takes an achievement test they may be at a different developmental level, and may appear bright or dull depending on a cognitive development or a growth spurt. Test scores can be influenced by an upset tummy, a fight with a sibling, or a hormonal shift. And teachers get a whole new set of children each year. Some years that could be a very delayed or needy group, and some years they may get a high achieving group. They don’t hand pick them. So how it is okay to use such data to reward or fire teachers? That is silly.
Also, we continue to compare ourselves with other countries and their achievement. We don’t take the same tests, we don’t have the same purposes, and we don’t track our students into college bound and non-college bound. Dr. Richard Allington, in his analysis of comparative test questions, finds we out score others and problem solve like no others. The PISA Test is not given in our state, and if it was it would be given to all students, not just the cream. How do you compare that?
Now Unions have to be discussed. Those of us in unions are under attack. You have to know that. ALEC and their super rich sponsors (like Koch Industries) are doing everything they can to destroy unions. What we hear from Washington is… well, we don’t hear a darned thing. We will remember the silence. Please, sir, protect all unions, including public sector unions and their earned pension obligations, and collective bargaining rights. Other issues include:
-Unions spend $300 million+ on political campaigns each election cycle. Then there is the army of union workers going door to door. Where is the return support? Quid pro quo!
-The Affordable Care Act should mean no need to negotiate health benefits in negotiations.
-Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) – expansion should happen because of lower overhead to employers, actual and projected.
-Taft-Hartley, section 14b- legislatures could make “union shop” illegal, removing the workers’ rights to support various working situations.
-National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)-a need for a procedural change to make organizing easier, and make corporate strike breaking more difficult
-The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is far too powerful and needs to be reclassified as a dangerous lobby group. Their agenda of privatization of schools is bad for local control/home rule and accountability.
Please, sir, I ask that you give these issues serious consideration. We are at a crossroads in America. Will we respect the field of Education and those who toil so very hard in the field? I know it is hard when there are failing schools. When over 50% of school aged children are in less than a dozen school districts, and if any of those districts are in trouble, test results can be pushed one way or the other. Letting big business and industry get their hands on education funding, or pretending that education is a basketball game will destroy what we know can and does work. What is your purpose? I have to ask.
Sincerely yours,
The Rev. Robert K. Herrell
565 Millbrook Circle
Castle Rock, CO 80109
Dear President Obama,
When I helped your campaign in 2008 and voted for you, I knew little of what NCLB even was. My daughter was only 5 years old. In these 4 short years, I’ve come to understand NCLB and RTTT in ways I can’t even imagine. Living the first hand experience of a K-5 public school education in this decade has been like exposure to nuclear waste, the fallout immense. Unseen but pervasive are the pressures of high stakes standardized tests that haunt the hallways of most schools in America today. Threat of school closure, turnaround and charter school invasions like the threats that come from unleased toxins in the air. What ever can you be thinking?
Privatizing education through charters, through testing, through curriculum is paramount to putting our children in the hands of a stranger. A responsible and sensible parent would not do this. Especially a stranger who has habits that are not respectable. You would not do it, nor should we. The crime of disguising these policies as working in the interest of our children is not only shameful but morally corrupt. Have the values of what Democracy is supposedly built on been completely lost to capitalism? Have the hopes and dreams of America’s children been sold down the river in the name of profit?
There is much more to say on this, but as a busy parent who cares deeply about the quality of education for all children and not the profits of the 1%, I’d like to see a change in your policies over the next 4 years.
Good luck with your campaign.
Regards,
Janine Sopp
Brooklyn, NY
(emailed to the President, NJ’s 2 senator and my congressman) Dear Mr. President, Speaking as a former canvasser for your first campaign, it is shameful that your administration purports the myth that America’s education problem is its teachers and their associations when the data is clearly contrary. Mr. Duncan’s office’s NAEP data shows contractual bargaining states over all outperform weakly or non-unionized states. The most comprehensive charter study, CREDO demonstrated the twice as many charter school students under-perform vs. their local unionized public schools and under serve special needs populations. ( http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/MULTIPLE_CHOICE_CREDO.pdf ) When segregated by demographics, our school’s are internationally competitive. Segregated by state, a handful of states’ international mathematics scores, are competitive. (AIR 2009) “Poverty need not be destiny” but better education starts by addressing the problem. National and international data repeatedly identifies poverty as that problem. The effects of poverty are multifaceted, from a toddler’s 32 million word gap to “toxic stress” that “rewires” the brain. Four years ago I knocked on doors in a neighboring state, but now I campaign to save our public schools. I will not ignore policymakers who scapegoat educators or cry impotence over poverty. I remain relentless in my insistence that your administration and state leaders examine poverty’s effects as well as invest in the public schools and support the educators combating them. Our low-income students, half of our student population, depend upon it. Respectfully, Kristina Fallon Tomaino
Dear President Obama,
I have been teaching in the New York State Public School System for over 18 years. My father was a Technology Education (TE) teacher for over 30 years. I followed in his footsteps and became a TE teacher in a great high school on Long Island, New York. He taught wood shop and automotive courses. I teach computer networking and information technology. Similar types of courses, but a different era. Unfortunately, the similarities end there. He had academic freedom to ignite the interests of his students. I have SLO’s and VAM’s (ask your buddy Arne what these are). He had after school clubs. I have irrelevant professional development workshops and test writing. He was given the flexibility to independently develop his curriculum. I must narrow mine to a multiple choice test. He was evaluated by competent administrators and encouraged by peers. I will be reduced to a score generated from a bogus test and demoralized in front of my students.
The earlier portion of my career was probably similar to my fathers. This was a time when students ran to my class to see what cool and different things they would explore and do. It was also a time where I learned as much from the students as they learned from me. It allowed me to become a better teacher, and more confident about my work. But times have changed, and kids don’t run like they used to. They walk, from room to room, wondering what hurdle will be put in their way next. Students used to come to my room and say “what are we doing today? What are you going to show us?” Now they say things like “What is going to be on the test? Is there any homework?”
You might not like to hear this sir, but I blame you. Your implementation of Race-To-The-Top has crushed public schools, not helped them. Arne Duncan and his free market ideas of choice, vouchers, charter schools, accountability and high stakes standardized testing has demoralized the entire profession. The kids, parents, and teachers are now all talking about it. And none of it is positive.
On Election Day, I am going to stay late at school and keep my computer lab open. I’m going to invite my students to stay after and help them do their homework, show them cool things to do with computers, and let the kids beat me at some neat video games. I’m going to remind myself why I became a teacher in the first place. What I will not do is go to the polls. Sorry, but you’ll have to win this one on your own. Perhaps it’s not too late, but…
“’Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better.” – The Lorax
Sincerely,
Bill Claps
Dear President Obama, I am disheartened by the state of education and the course we are heading as a nation. Today, I was forced to administer an assessment which will be used to judge me, as a professional educator. I watched eight year olds crumble under the pressure for fear of getting an answer wrong. I held a young girl who burst into tears because she couldn’t decipher a term she will not be exposed to until January. As a compassionate human being, I reassured her, but deep down inside I was sickened, disgusted and angry knowing this is the path that education has taken. This assessment will be used to determine whether I am highly qualified and effective enough to carry out the responsibilities of my job. This test will be compared with a second assessment given in the spring, created by a testing company led by individuals who consistently demonstrate a true disconnect from the reality of education, as they are more interested in making money than fostering learning centered on the whole child. Gone is the creativity that once ran free in our schools. Walk our halls and you will discover test-taking taught as a genre. You will find children forced to engage in learning for exorbitant amounts of time even though they are not developmentally ready as this builds stamina and stamina is required for the six, ninety minute assessment sessions my third graders will be required to take this spring. If you are lucky enough to witness children on a playground, you will quickly observe they struggle to act socially because time for play has been tossed aside making room for more and more curricular demands. As educators, our plates are full. We spend countless hours beyond the school day trying to plan purposeful and meaningful lessons, correcting the numerous assessments we administer while keeping up-to-date on our forever changing professional development. The state of exhaustion runs rampant in this profession. When I look at my colleagues, I see the flame of hope and empowerment slowly fading away because we are being forced to make miracles from the six hours we work with children full knowing when a child is at home his greatest teacher, the parent(s) is making the most profound effects on his future. It is time to reconfigure education and make decisions based on sound educational research. A school is not a business; we cannot expect children to perform above and beyond their intellectual abilities. Educational decisions must be made with the voices and knowledge of those on the front lines, in the classrooms, working with the children and communities to whom we serve; the teachers. Respectfully submitted, Robyn Brydalski Third Grade Teacher Kenmore, New York
Dear President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, When the education of another human being is boiled down to a number, a data point in the universe, a weapon to be used against you, and you have no control over that number, who made up that number, and how or why they are assigning you that number, then we don’t need it! The education of a human being is personal. The learning belongs to the learner. You cannot quantify another human beings thoughts. Sorry, but no one can. The US Department of Education is full of crap! Didn’t they accuse teachers of cheating on standardized tests by using some kind of erasure analysis re: pencil pressure? I heard something about how the machine could detect differences in pencil pressure and how heavy the kid makes their mark. I have a left handed child. Right handed people pull the pencil across the page when they write, but left handed people push the pencil. Left handed people put more pressure on the pencil and they have more smears because the left hand is covering what they just wrote. I bet you a million bucks that the testing companies based erasure analysis on righties with no consideration for lefties. But, since they do not collect data on which child is left handed and which is right handed, they have no way to determine anything regarding erasures or pencil pressures. The testing companies are full of crap. REPEAL NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND!! END STANDARDIZED TESTING! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stJfmT2SjHw&feature=results_video If you’d like to know more about the movement against standardized testing, please check out Parents & Kids Against Standardized Testing on Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Parents-Kids-Against-Standardized-Testing/117479641627357 It no longer matters to me who belongs to what party. I cast my votes for the individuals who will be good people to run this country. No more random bubbling. If there are no good choices for an office, then I’m leaving it blank. Sincerely, Melissa Platero
I hope you’ll include the smart information in this post http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=16889 that explains why we can’t blame teachers or think more testing will result in success for youth. Instead we have to address the realities that come with poverty. I also hope you’ll share with him all the reasons that standardized tests SUCK laid out in this post http://12most.com/2012/04/09/unconventional-reasons-to-opt-out-standardized-testing/ And, finally, expose him to alternatives to standardized testing like those laid out here http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/2012/04/8-ways-to-assess-without-standardized.html So happy you’re doing this.
In addition to the letter to President Obama that I sent to your blog, today I sent the following message to the Whitehouse by email:
Please pay attention to the voices of educators, parents, students and concerned citizens who are pleading with you to change your destructive education policies under the leadership of Arne Duncan. The Chicago Tribune had an article on the differences in positions between you and Mitt Romney. Shamefully, on the issue of education the positions were pretty much the same. If you recognize the harmfulness of Romney’s elitist outlook on other topics, you must recognize that Race to the Top is a harmful program that will destroy public education in this country. Listen to the real experts, not the businessmen who see an opportunity to make money on the problem. Listen to those of us who really know what is going on in the schools and know how high stakes testing, “value-added” evaluation, competition rather than collaboration, and draining public school resources to open charter schools has hurt our students. I have read many of the letters that will be sent to you today, and I am getting angrier and angrier that the person I have supported in his bid for Presidency, a highly intelligent and seemingly caring man does not see the truth of what is happening. I hope you will actually read and think hard about every one of the heart felt letters that are being directed toward you today.