Great news!
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.
Anthony previously ran his own campaign called “Teachers’ Letters to Obama.” He is a champion for teachers, kids, and public education.
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. Ask them to join us. 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
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The White House website is super easy. Just Google: Contact President Obama and you’ll get to the right place. Your letter is limited to 2500 characters, but that’s enough. Thanks!
RE: Campaign for Our Public Schools
At what point in the campaign do the participants familiarize themselves with the duties of the officeholder they hope to influence? Or the resources available to achieve the desired results? (The results desired by parents for their children, that is.)
We are parents? What is your point?
Delete the first question mark..typo. Too early.
The parenthetical meant to address the following ambiguity: Does “desired results” mean results for the teaching profession or results for the kids. Not everyone agrees those are the same thing–hence the marketing slogan: “Teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions.”
How is the public education doomsday clock affected by a mass repudiation of President Obama’s flagship education program in mid-October?
Mitt Romney wouldn’t borrow money from the Chinese to coerce states to comply with Ed department policy preferences.
And the President has no opportunity to (or inclination) to craft a RttT get-well plan before election day.
Eric,
I think the point is that the standardized test culture does not serve students, whether or not it serves the interests of teachers, which have always been those of the students. It is true that we have a union that represents us on issues of pay and benefits as well as work rules, but if you’re seriously suggesting that the Person company has as their central interest learning rather than profit and that teachers have as their central and abiding interest something other than trying to foster learning and a love of learning in their students, the same love of learning they have themselves, then you are very much mistaken.
I won’t even go into the fact that all of these so called reforms are to take control away from the people who should be in control. If you think that corporatizing education is going to get parents more involved, you are again mistaken. The Person company is not interested in parent input unless they can use it to make money. Education is a public good and should be funded and controlled by the public and its practitioners not by corporations and bureaucrats without classroom experience.
Eric,
Writing to the President of the United States is an exercise in democracy, an idea the Republican party seems hellbent on transmuting into a plutocracy.
On your second point…I find it interesting that you speak about available resources to achieve desired results. No Child Left Behind, initiated by former Republican President George W. Bush, has NEVER been adequately funded yet students, teachers and schools have been held hostage to its whims. As for the current Rep candidate for President, he would like nothing better than to dismantle the federal Dept of Education altogether which will destroy any possibility of ensuring educational equity and sound approach across fifty diverse states.
Third – In your insinuation that parents and teachers don’t have the same interest in achieving results for their children, you reveal your hostility towards public education or some personal grudge you hold against a teacher from your past. Teachers usually care as much and oftentimes *more* than parents in the educational outcomes for their children. And they work to achieve those goals day in and day out – not perfectly but earnestly.
Hope this clarifies things for you.
Or we can just mail them to the white house directly , no offense but I think everyone writing letters and mailing them in red envelopes and emailing will be way more effective . 🙂
Other than Xmas cards, where does one get red envelopes?
http://www.paperpresentation.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=PPN&Category_Code=TENB
Thanks. I found these on Amazon. Free shipping…are they a supporter of charters and privatization? Probably.
http://www.amazon.com/Quality-Park-Envelope-Traditional-11134/dp/B001UOVN56/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349527361&sr=8-1&keywords=red+envelope
Linda,
Since you asked, YES, Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, is among the worst of the Billionaires Boys Club. His ideas on education are absolutely horrible. He’s stated publicly that he wants to do away with public schools—and almost the entire public sector—given his so-called “libertarian” leanings. (Some would call them “sociopathic” leanings.)
Bezos has dumped a ton of money into the awful ballot measure I-1240, which Washington citizens will vote on next month. We opponents—spearheaded by parents like myself—are being outspent, quite literally, 50 to 1. That’s right: Fifty To One.
So. I have only used Amazon.com as a database in the last few years because I don’t like Jeff Bezos, but more importantly, I worry about a future in which all content—all of it—is in the hands of a few individuals who then decide what’s “profitable” to publish, and what isn’t.
If you’re interested, you can help us fight against privatization by going to http://no1240.org and donating and/or passing along this vital info. Thanks!
I’m in for Oct 17 Letter to the President & will tweet and post to fb for teacher friends to do the same.
All instructions reposted. Thanks!
I love the idea of using a red envelope.
But will we mail it on the 17th or a few days before so they are received by the 17th???
PS: Diane you should include links to the parent and teacher drafts you set up.
sample letters set up? where?
I plan on writing a letter to the Presudent and/or emailing him. If I sent it to him on my own, I would sign my name. If I send it to this blog for you to forward, I would want to use my “alias”. Is this ok?
yes.
Tweeted.
great idea, we can be heard in numbers.I think we all need to be somewhat consisant and to the point, and not get into a bitch session A few sample letters would be a great resource.
This is a copy of the e-mail (minus my address) sent to the President via snail mail:
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 just wanted to say how much I liked your letter, Gail. I have only been a registered Democrat since the day after G.W. Bush’s reelection, but I think a party switch may be in order for me as well. These policies are geared only to help a very specific group of children, a group that my own children are not a part of. For the first time in my life, I find myself considering homeschooling — not because I think I can do a better job than any teacher, but simply because politicians are making sure no one pays attention to my children in the classroom. So far, my school district has resisted, but it’s only a matter of time before they have no choice but to teach just for the 1s and 2s.
While I respect your positions, voting for anyone else will simply hasten public education’s demise. Though far from perfect, Pres Obama has expressed support (not disdain) for public education and teachers. Perhaps it *is* lipservice, but it’s better than voting Republican or for an Independent with no chance of winning but a serious chance of ensuring the President’s non-win. Please consider your votes carefully and without seeking revenge.
Some believe the privatization and faux reform movement will implode faster under Romney…with Obama it will continue to be a slow death.
Your letter perfectly reflects my position. I am a 35 yr. veteran of an elementary classroom in Michigan where support has fallen apart quickly under our newest administration and Republican dominated legislature.
Thank you and well done!
Here is a comic strip I created to get people involved, short and sweet! 🙂
Bitstrips – A Letter to President Obama!
http://bitstrips.com/r/G8VF0 via @bitstrips
I am in a completely red state with no hope it going blue for the election. I teach in Louiiana for the Recovery School District and have seen first hand the havoc this so called ecucation reform wreaks on the kids and community. I am voting for my conscious in this election and voting green. I am letting Obama know that he has lost my vote with his neoliberal education agenda. I encourage others to do the same!
Dear President Obama
Several years ago, I sent you a letter along with 100 of my fellow teachers through Teachers Letters to Obama, asking you to take the money being spent on testing all the students in the United States and spend it instead on early childhood education, making sure that each child was ready for school.As an early childhood education advocate and special education teacher, I know first hand that children need whole child education in order to develop their minds, bodies and souls, to prepare them to learn and excel in school. Nothing in education is as important to me.
I had the opportunity to participate in a conference call with the ‘Teachers Letters to Obama’ Facebook group with Secretary Duncan. I used my four minutes to restate that most important message. He assured me that you and he are committed to early childhood education by creating ‘Promise Neighborhoods’.
However, the testing didn’t stop. In fact, with Race to the Top, it appears to be even worse!
However, I was heartened to see that one round of Race to the Top was to be given specifically for early childhood education. I was even more thrilled to see that my state was one of the states who won a grant. Then I read their winning proposal. They are using the money to create a statewide database to keep records of the development of number and letter sense in three and four year olds. I even heard there is a proposal coming from the Department of Education that would eventually have a federal database following all students, from birth to job, linking all of their education, development and test scores to their life outcomes.
WHAT???? What happened here? I really hope this was a joke. I can’t imagine a more horrible proposition, sounding like the worst of ‘Big Brother’ – a federal government keeping records on all of it’s citizens and using that information to make judgements on the rest of the citizens – those who work with the rest of our citizens, in the trust of public school education.
I can’t imagine a more worse outcome for my pleadings to focus on early childhood education. All students need the opportunity to play, imagine, draw and paint to develop and learn. And all of us need the opportunity to be individuals, developing as our genes, and families intended for us to develop. Some will know letters and numbers early, some in kindergarten, some later. But if pressured to perform early, as well as limiting or eliminating the opportunity for play in preschool and kindergarten, you are dooming many children to never learning at all!
And your proposal seeks to eliminate all privacy from Americans who go through the public school system. How can anyone think this is a good idea? Right about now I would be relieved just to go back to No Child Left Behind. Destructive as it was, your proposals are far worse.
Please, roll back all these Race to the Top proposals which focus on tests, test scores and ranking teachers and children on something they have little to no control over.
Get back to education as an individual right, something that is controlled by local, elected school boards, teachers and parents at their own schools.
Dear President Obama,
I am a teacher, and I’m concerned about what’s happening in American education today. I’m not sure what I can say that will help you listen to me, but please do. Does it help that we share the same birthday? Does it help that I’m a supporter? Does it help that I qualify for Mensa? Does it help that I’ve been teaching Japanese for 21 years in public high school? Does it help that I am for the most part not directly affected by the majority of the testing craze that has engulfed us?
Do you not understand that the testing madness that started with NCLB has now morphed into a full-fledged attack on public education? Now the fight has been joined by big money, hoping to cash in billions on education services and products. My school district spends millions on testing contracts and curriculum systems to support it, yet I have to buy my own board markers.
Moreover, we are being evaluated (well, not me because I teach Japanese, but that’s another story on just how messed up this is), on our value added scores, but no one is scrutinizing the private companies, the K12s, the charters who are siphoning money off of the public system. Their failure to reform or improve is swept under the rug, or hidden in statistics that may sound good, but don’t stand up under real scrutiny. Have you not read ANY of this? Do you not know what Wall Street did to the housing market? Do you not understand that they cannot be allowed to do the same to public education in this country? Do you not realize that they ARE?
Mr. President, this stuff keeps me up at night. You should really see it from the ground. It’s bad out here, and I’m not just saying that because I’m a bad teacher who wants to keep her job and doesn’t want to be evaluated. I’m Mensa. I AM the best and the brightest.
But let me tell you, we do not need only the best and brightest in education. Being Mensa gets you exactly nowhere. It takes much more than being smart to be a good teacher. It takes intuition, compassion, willingness to go the extra mile for a kid and a geeky personality that gets a tremendous amount of satisfaction out of helping someone learn. This job is hard, has always been hard, no matter how smart you are. This is a job in which you could always do better. There is no upper limit, just daily reflection on how you could improve next time. Satisfaction comes in small doses, and sometimes in big ones when you see the success of your former students.
We do not need to beat up teachers. Nothing at all good will come of it, but several very bad things will.
I believe you will have another four years to turn this around. Let’s make it happen.
Linnea Bradshaw
Appoquinimink High School
Middletown, Delaware
A letter to the President will be as effective as a letter to Governor Romney. The attack on public education, unions and the continued austerity are part of the bipartisan attack on the 99%. Yes, there are differences between the 2 major corporate parties. However, there are far more similarities.
I recommend that the supporters of public education. children, unions, etc. vote for Jill Stein for President. Vote your values and convictions.
Mike Heichman, Retired Teacher, Educational Activist, Boston, MA
I am ecstatic to finally see some truth about what is happening to public education. I began teaching when I was 48. I had been through a great deal in my life and wanted to give back. I was influenced by my Sunday school students to do so by teaching. I chose to work in Title I schools where there was a greater need. The first years were hard, but I had help from other experienced teachers. Many of my students needed far more than I could give them in terms of counseling or social work. Unfortunately, none of the Title I schools have enough counselors or social workers to assist our students. (Hint: job creation area) Some of the students I had over the years were so disruptive that none of the behavior techniques I was constantly learning worked. After working a number of years, our school hired the fourth principal in an eight year period. This principal came from wealth, so I don’t think he truly understood our population. He loved NCLB and used it against his teachers whenever he could. The end of my first year with him, I asked him how our student population (which included special education students) was going to achieve the high scores that NCLB was requiring. Wrong question. The next year my class was stacked with many behavior and learning disabilities. (I know it was stacked, because the office secretary told me that he had done so.) When I tried to take these students up for child studies to get them and myself the assistance that was needed, I was told I could not. Excuses were always made. I tried everything I could to help my students and keep peace in my class. I had several students that I thought had ADHD or ADD, one that had autism to the point that the student would bolt out the door and try to run over any kind of change, students with reading and math disabilities, etc. I was given very little assistance, except from other teachers and assistants giving me ideas. I should have had a full time aide in this class. (By the way, in England, almost every teacher in a school like our Title I schools have an assistant in their classes–job creation.) The end of this year I was excessed. (Chosen because they were decreasing the number of the teachers at the school.) Before I went, I was degraded by this principal. I did seek assistance from our Association ( no unions in Arizona due to being a right to work state). The President of our local was sent to have a meeting with this Principal, a District person, and me. Unfortunately, the president of our local did not have negotiation skills to compete with the principal or the District person.
The next school I went into in the District had problems, as well. After two years, I was excessed again. (I truly believe that once you are excessed, you have a reputation of being the “bad” teacher.) I was told I was chosen because I was newer to the school. The final school I worked at had wonderful teachers, who helped each other and truly worked in teams. Again, I had a principal, who made everyone’s lives miserable. She would target a teacher and harrass her/him until they would quit or go to another school. I had a very difficult class the second year at this school. I was concerned that one of my students was being sexually abused at home (the student’s behavior in class was unbelievable) and another student who was extremely defiant, as well as other problem students. Again, I tried to help them the best I could. The defiant child’s mom finally obtained help from a behavior coach, who came to my class 13 times. I met with the coach during my vacation and was told that the administration at my school was not doing enough to assist me. This last year, I worked as hard as I always have to build repore with my students and help them do the best they could do. My partner of 27 years died half way through the year. Our son and I tried to save him to no avail. I went back to work two weeks later to keep myself busy and to make sure my students were okay and not having subs all the time. After an observation that I worked very hard at and had my teammates assist me with, the principal stayed only twenty minutes instead of the thirty she is supposed to stay. During the evaluation, I was ripped apart and told that if my partner had not died, I would have been put on an improvement plan. I retired early. The amazing thing to me is that after this meeting, word leaked out and most of the teachers and assistants came to my room and told me to get out. They were so angry about the way I had been treated.
So, I am angry and hurt about what teachers and students are having to endure. No one is saying anything about some of the horrible administrators we have. Am I a perfect teacher? No. I was always evaluating myself, trying to improve by taking classes and reading, etc. Was I a caring teacher? Yes. I truly cared about my students and wanted them to see that through education, they could escape poverty. Please give this to President Obama. He needs to hear how many teachers are being hurt; and, therefore, students are, as well.
Dear President Obama,
Unlike many public school teachers, I will vote for you on November 6, as I did in 2008, but I offer that support despite my distress over the ill-conceived and destructive education policies that you and Secretary Duncan have put in place. Having cited the failings of NCLB, you instituted Race to the Top, which forces some of the worst parts of that failed program upon every state desperate for the extra federal funding.
The first of these failed ideas is Value-Added Measurement (VAM) based upon standardized testing—a practice that clearly has no legitimacy. I make this claim not merely based upon my decades of experience in public classrooms, nor is it a defensive reaction made out of fear of the evaluations headed my way. It is in fact a claim based on broad-based and replicated research and upon mathematical analyses (which Secretary Duncan must know about but seems to ignore). And while you have repeatedly said that you do not want “teaching to the test” to replace or obstruct a rich curriculum, your insistence on VAM leaves teachers little option but to spend weeks if not months (or even a full school year) drilling kids on tested material or in mind-numbing “bubbling-in” skills. After all, if their students do not perform well on those mandated tests, the teachers face low evaluations, the very great likeliehood of losing their jobs, and the pain of seeing their school closed or “turned around.”
Which brings us to the second great flaw in your education policy: the insistence upon more and more charter schools in place of those traditional schools that have been closed. Public funds thus pour into profit-making corporations so they can build schools that do not out-perform the public schools except when they boost test scores by cherry picking their students and expelling (or “counseling out”) the students who do not thrive. I was a fan of charter schools when they were first being built, as places for rich experimentation and creativity, and whose innovations could be shared with other schools throughout the district, city, state, or nation. But charters are increasingly religious institutions (with public funding!), or little factories of discipline where students (often students of color) are drilled in obedience and “grit,” not in creativity or the critical thinking that it inspires.
I have taught for thirty-eight years and have loved the career. For the first time in that career, I am not encouraging young people, including my own children, to go into teaching. Morale has never been so low. This destruction of joy in teaching is partly a result of our being blamed for the poverty of so many children and, through our supposedly outrageous pay packages, the destruction of the economy. Those absurdities aside, we are depressed and distressed because children are being hurt by policies such as those promoted by your administration. Well over 90% of Chicago teachers voted for the recent strike, and their demands were not primarily about pay or pensions or a longer school day. They were about taking a stand against the “reforms” ruining children’s lives by depriving them of decent school buildings, reasonable class sizes, and rich, creative curricula. And all around the country, we other public school teachers cheered on our colleagues in Chicago.
I urge you to bring to your education policy the same intelligence, respect for research, and humanism that characterize all your writing and so much of your leadership. I urge you to look at the very real and dramatic harm that teachers and students are suffering. And I urge you to fight the widespread conviction that teachers are lazy drones who care about their jobs but not their students. We were actually drawn to the profession out of a love of our subjects and of children. It is that love that inspires this letter.
Sincerely,
Del Shortliffe
Norwalk, CT
Dear President Obama,
Unlike many public school teachers, I will vote for you on November 6, as I did in 2008, but I offer that support despite my distress over the ill-conceived and destructive education policies that you and Secretary Duncan have put in place. Having cited the failings of NCLB, you instituted Race to the Top, which forces some of the worst parts of that failed program upon every state desperate for the extra federal funding.
The first of these failed ideas is Value-Added Measurement (VAM) based upon standardized testing—a practice that clearly has no legitimacy. I make this claim not merely based upon my decades of experience in public classrooms, nor is it a defensive reaction made out of fear of the evaluations headed my way. It is in fact a claim based on broad-based and replicated research and upon mathematical analyses (which Secretary Duncan must know about but seems to ignore). And while you have repeatedly said that you do not want “teaching to the test” to replace or obstruct a rich curriculum, your insistence on VAM leaves teachers little option but to spend weeks if not months (or even a full school year) drilling kids on tested material or in mind-numbing “bubbling-in” skills. After all, if their students do not perform well on those mandated tests, the teachers face low evaluations, the very great likeliehood of losing their jobs, and the pain of seeing their school closed or “turned around.”
Which brings us to the second great flaw in your education policy: the insistence upon more and more charter schools in place of those traditional schools that have been closed. Public funds thus pour into profit-making corporations so they can build schools that do not out-perform the public schools except when they boost test scores by cherry picking their students and expelling (or “counseling out”) the students who do not thrive. I was a fan of charter schools when they were first being built, as places for rich experimentation and creativity, and whose innovations could be shared with other schools throughout the district, city, state, or nation. But charters are increasingly religious institutions (with public funding!), or little factories of discipline where students (often students of color) are drilled in obedience and “grit,” not in creativity or the critical thinking that it can inspires.
I have taught for thirty-eight years and have loved the career. For the first time in that career, I am not encouraging young people, including my own children, to go into teaching. Morale has never been so low. This destruction of joy in teaching is partly a result of our being blamed for the poverty of so many children and, through our supposedly outrageous pay packages, the destruction of the economy. Those absurdities aside, we are depressed and distressed because children are being hurt by policies such as those promoted by your administration. Well over 90% of Chicago teachers voted for the recent strike, and their demands were not primarily about pay or pensions or a longer school day. They were about taking a stand against the “reforms” ruining children’s lives by depriving them of decent school buildings, reasonable class sizes, and rich, creative curricula. And all around the country, we other public school teachers cheered on our colleagues in Chicago.
I urge you to bring to your education policy the same intelligence, respect for research, and humanism that characterize all your writing and so much of your leadership. I urge you to look at the very real and dramatic harm that teachers and students are suffering. And I urge you to fight the widespread conviction that teachers are lazy drones who care about their jobs but not their students. We were actually drawn to the profession out of a love of our subjects and of children. It is that love that inspires this letter.
Sincerely,
Del Shortliffe
Norwalk, CT
Sorry! Of course I didn’t mean to post my letter twice. (It’s too long to begin with.)
Patricia H Graham
P.O. Box 852
Whittier, N.C., 28789
October 10, 2012
Dear President Obama:
First, let me state that I am a voter of the Democratic Party, and I have and will continue to support you as my president. But as I declare this, it is with a sadden heart that I am compelled to ask you to re-evaluate the NCLB act.
I am a graduate student that had also worked in the educational system for five years in the TESOL program. There are more fallibilities than positives with this act. Like great words written upon the sheaves of paper, the layout and form reveals a beautiful portrait of words until these words are actually implemented into a plan of action.
Too many presidents have passed the buck (Reagan, Bush, and Clinton) on this issue, allowing states to define their own state standards while trying to comply with impossible deadlines set by the national government. Administrators and politicians are in charge of educational reforms but they are not suited for the position to determine the needs of students and teachers.
You have spoken in the past about having the need to locate more qualified teachers and placed them in the classrooms. There are many certified and qualified teachers in the United States that are reprimanded because of low test scores. Students are no longer taught the critical thinking skills behind the learning process. Instead, students are now taught how to take test and pass the tests.
These so-called specialists that develop these reforms have never had any experience in education. Politician, lawyers and tax accountants are not the best choice to write reforms for our students. The voice of the parent and community is quite often overlooked; teachers are punished and scared to think outside a box that does relate to a standard. It is unconscionable to think that students entering into a new school in the year of 2013 have to meet full proficiency by 2014. It is not feasible. It appears to me the consumer and teacher that education is NOT the priority for our students.
Let us examine Finland’s educational system. We know that they are number one in the world in regard to education. They have a nine-year compulsory basic comprehensive program. It has the most improved reading, math, and science literacy programs in the world. Teachers are in charge of determining the students’ needs. Most importantly, Finland prepares students how to learn to learn, not how to learn to take a test. The arts are still alive and well in their educational structure, while the U.S. continues to cut away everything that I valued as a child in school, which was many years ago. Standardized testing is mutilating the arts. Teacher incentives come from within, from their own school, and district, not by means of abuse, insults, and degradation by upper management, or fighting over a discard dog-bone whereas, one teacher might get some money for her/his classroom in comparison to your “Race for the Top.”
John Dewey, the founder of a democratic school system and progressivism, did not mean for his plan of education to be reduced to statistics and data. The human factor has been taken out of schools.
I implore you as a man who has come from a middle class background, who has been properly educated, and a father of two children, visit the rural areas of North Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. Don’t look to your advisors; speak with the teachers who are placed under these constraints. Look to the students that cannot write a basic essay (1-5-1 format) by 12th graders. Look to the students that enter college on the first day of class and cannot spell at a basic 6th grade level, nor do they know how to use a dictionary.
Mr. Obama, I believe that your heart is in the right place, but have been poorly advised about educational reform. Do what you do best. Seek out the truth and not what is presented to you.
Thank you for your support.
Sincerely,
Ms. Patricia H. Graham
Dear President Obama,
I have written to you via the White House blog several times on several issues, one of which has been the educational reform movement. I am writing again today to express my objections to two vital issues facing American education today. The first is the massive efforts underway by monied factions to privatize American education; the second, is to rebuke any teacher evaluation method that uses scores achieved by children on a standardized test to rate the proficiency of an education professional.
On the first matter, public education as envisioned by American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer John Dewey is a little over 100 years old. That’s nearly half the history of the US itself! His masterwork, Democracy and Education, outlined what would serve as the basis of public education for decades. If the times have changed and reform is necessary in practice, the message is timeless. A freely educated populace makes for a strong democracy. When everyone has the ability to attend a school of good caliber, everyone in the nation is served. Privatized education has no plan to educate everyone equally and it certainly is not FREE. Moreover, its underlying purpose is Control — control of what is taught, to whom it is taught, how it is taught and ultimately, control of the attitudes and mindsets of the children in said schools by the investors in those schools. This is not what I want for America’s children. That is not reform, sir. It is tyranny. In fact, in a child’s life, the only people who are as interested in their welfare as their families *are* their teachers–guaranteed. One needs only ask a non-teacher if they would consider education as a career. The answer is usually a resounding, “No way!” Yet teachers thrive on their interactions with children and seek to educate them not only in subject matter, but in becoming responsible adult citizens who can think for themselves. Private education will always be available to those who wish it, but it should not come at the cost of the public education coffers.
On the second matter, I have heard you say that you support teachers AND believe that reform is necessary. The two are not incompatible and, on the surface, requiring states to implement said reforms in order to receive federal funding does not seem too much to ask. However, you do not seem to know or care *how* the States are achieving this reform. In most places, teachers are being rated in part by the scores their students earn on a standardized test. In New York State, the plan now *in place* has not been piloted for reliability or validity but is a “work in progress.” That being the case, are the scores of the teachers affected not to be taken seriously since the plan is unproven and thus far seriously flawed? And how is it possible that there are companies (Pearson, for one) who are so well-prepared to SELL school districts lots of goodies to help their students improve on the very tests they create and force the schools to administer? It is suspect, indeed. Moreover, using a test to evaluate teaching (which is both a science and an art) is the fallback position of those who do not know what to look for in a good teacher except for generalities and platitudes. Expert teaching is a honed craft that requires extensive education, experience and personal character. It is an ideal that most educators earnestly seek to achieve. How does one quantify the human connection? It is only done poorly, if at all.
I urge you to remain firm in your commitment to public education and to seriously take a look at how the reform you seek is being achieved. I leave you with an axiom that is simple but appropos — “Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.”
Respectfully submitted with hope for the future,
I despise standardized testing! Here is my letter posted on my blog. I will also mail my letter to President Obama! http://oldschoolteach.blogspot.com/2012/10/my-letter-to-president-obama-october-17.html
Dr. President Obama,
While I was and remain your supporter I respectfully disagree with many of your ideas about education policy. I have been working in education for more than ten years and I can say confidently that high stakes testing does nothing for the low-income, high-need students population I have been working with diligently.
What does matter? Strong relationships with teachers and other adults, supports at the school setting that help them figure out who they are and what they want for their life and people who encourage them to think about college and understand the steps required. Critically needed to make any kind of education possibly is wrap-around support that think about young people holistically, the way I’m sure you think about your daughters. You would never take away art and music classes for them because test prep is more important and expensive. You would never get rid of their sports because of “budget cuts.” You would never allow them to suffer through the pain of watching classmates shot and family members killed without any counseling because there is only one social worker at a school of 2,000 students. You would never tell them learning a 2nd language is a bad thing, so why would ELL students be treated as outcasts and special ed students, when they are already fluent in a second language? You would never allow them to think college isn’t for them because they didn’t know how to pay for it or had been told for years they were not good students because their test scores weren’t high enough. Just a few of my complaints about our current system of education 🙂
If I can give you one piece of advice it’s this – think about what you want for your own children. Would you want them sitting in a class with a scripted curriculum every day designed only to improve their math and reading test scores? Would you want them completing worksheet after worksheet from a stressed out teacher who has been told she will be fired if all of her students do not pass the state test or at least improve dramatically on a test she knows is not testing the right material or the right way, but has to go along with it because she’s “only a teacher.” I know I would not want my daughter in these types of situations. I panic daily thinking about the future of education for my toddler because I know what education can be and I know I can’t afford to send her to a school where she would receive the kind of education I know she needs and I believe is best for her and all students.
I know we can do better. I do. I know it’s possible. I’ve read about other countries doing the right thing. I’ve seen some schools here (many private and almost all in affluent communities, unfortunately) doing the right thing. Know that does not mean I think public schools should be privatized – I don’t think many of the of Charter School Networks are examples of schools “doing the right thing” although they may have become experts at test prep and marketing.
Thank you,
Alison Upton Lopez
This is the wall post that I made when I published the link on FB:
If you are interested in education in America, they you should participate in this letter writing campaign. Quite frankly this should be everyone’s concern, even those that do not have children in school. The schools prepare children for the careers that serve America. Every professional, trades person, service person…virtually everyone is a product of our education system. So if you want well prepared individuals that work for you, then write.
Here is my letter.
Dear Mr. President, I feel like I am playing in the band on the titanic.
http://qmsteched.edublogs.org/2012/10/06/dear-president/
Dear President Obama,
Four years ago, when you were running for president, I was participating in a life-changing professional development program called Summer Institute, sponsored by the National Writing Project in one of its many local chapters near me in upstate New York. It was a heady time, exciting, galvanizing, and transformative. Twenty-some teachers of all content areas gathered to read and study and discuss and write their way to new understandings about teaching writing. It turned out to be life-changing for me, as I soon left my classroom career of 23 years to return to school for a doctorate in education. Now I train teachers at a state college.
While I was there, we wrote daily and shared our writing. One of the writings I shared was a letter to you in which I wrote about the problems NCLB had created with its misguided approach to education. Imagine how disappointed I was when you, too, relied on advice from non-educators whose recommended policies intensified the worst aspects of NCLB! The high-stakes testing, already in place in New York State before NCLB, increased and then with Race to the Top, took over the schools like an insidious terrorism. Data-driven obsession replaced thoughtful consideration of students’ needs and best practices. I saw many students suffer setbacks in their intellectual development because of the changes in the school atmosphere. Because pre-teens and teens are resilient, some may recover from this scourge as adults, to overcome the culture of regurgitation and the mile-wide, inch-deep curriculum encouraged by such a culture. Lucky for us – such recovery has brought us some of our most brilliant minds. But education doesn’t have to be something to survive, and I believe we have made it an obstacle course with this emphasis on measuring learning in narrow ways.
It was also disturbing to watch as the teaching profession, not particularly honored or respected to begin with (certainly not when I began teaching in 1978), become the target of witch-hunters and nay-sayers in our society, on a grand scale. Yes, I know some teachers should not be teaching, just as some politicians should not be in office, some religious leaders should be removed from their churches, some shop clerks make mistakes with numbers. This denigration of teaching was intertwined with anti-union efforts, and though I have never been a huge fan of teachers unions, I have been a member for decades, and I have served when I saw a chance to increase the quality of our professionalism. Teachers should lead teachers to better practices and choices of self-improvement.
Yet we continue to be judged by non-educators. In fact, non-educators spurred this entire movement, in our country’s history, to make schools the newest market, the locus of exploitation and profiteering. This velvet takeover of curriculum and instruction, out of the hands of the experts who have studied and prepared for it, into the hands of publishers and technology marketeers and politicians, is perhaps the biggest indignity. I pride myself on keeping up with what is best for children and helpful in my field, but my expertise was overlooked again and again in my 30 year career in public schools. Here it was overlooked by those who had no connection to schools except the desired connection to the funds that drive our schools. Those funds come from the people living in local communities, taxpayers across the state. The emphasis on testing and the control of curriculum by businesses funnel the funds from hardworking citizens to enormous business interests.
Business owners profiting from massive testing and accountability systems, and the politicians who partner with them, claim they must wrest control of schools away in order be competitive around the world. Even when the flaws in that argument are pointed out (the United States tests all its students, not just the children of the rich and well-prepared), you continue with these policies. These purported solutions will not, cannot be successful, until we solve the complex and difficult problems underlying our spotty performance on any standardized tests: the problems of poverty and inequity. You know that those problems are the knottiest; you spoke of them as you campaigned. For that reason I supported and voted for you, only to watch these problematic NCLB practices continue and worsen.
You stand by as the teacher-bashing continues, even as your daughters study in schools where poverty is not a problem, where teachers are considered the experts who should make the decisions about curriculum and assessment. Meanwhile, in most of the schools across the nations, power is taken away from children through the delivery of the shallow intense curriculum and the massive time spent on test delivery. They no longer have time to develop their literacy and numeracy skills in nurturing atmosphere that encourages mindfulness. The intensity of the pressure on teachers and administrators is passed on to them, and they associate school with all that is awful and anxiety-producing. They do not love learning and they will not be thoughtful, well-informed voters.
We will start to see all sorts of unintended consequences in our citizenry. I only hope that you will stop this madness so that teachers can be freed to prepare our students for active involvement in a democracy and discerning contributors to our economy.
I will send the testimony I presented to the DOE OCR constituency when they visited Detroit in August. It was a very good idea to include your senators and congressmen as well.
Copied my blog post as a word document and sent it to Anthony!! I hope President Obama gets the message about standardized testing! “Standardized Testing Stole Our Day!” http://oldschoolteach.blogspot.com/2012/09/standardized-testing-stole-our-day.html
Dear President Obama,
I am an elementary school principal, and I am writing to you because I have grave concerns about the education of our children in New York State, and all across the nation. I am concerned that “Race To The Top” and the common core curriculum are focused on standardized testing.
In addition to the standardized tests, we are mandated to give pre and post tests. I find all of this testing excessive and oppressive. Instead of expanding and enriching the curriculum, we are spending an inordinate amount of time on test taking strategies and test preparation. We are spending precious instructional time on teaching children how to bubble in answer sheets. Children in third grade are eight years old. Do you recall when Sasha and Malia were eight years old? Their hearts were filled with pride and joy.
School was an exciting environment in which to grow and learn. Imagine, if you will, what an eight year old feels when he/she are told that they have to read a test with seven reading passages which are above their current reading level. Imagine the frustration that they are experiencing when they do not know the answer to the question because two of the answers are so very close that they do not know which answer to choose. Our classrooms are populated with students who have special needs such as autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, fetal alcohol syndrome, or were born with a drug addiction because the mother was a drug addict. These children come to us with dire needs. These children are often two years behind in their reading level, yet they are mandated to take the standardized tests with their age cohort, NOT their developmental age, their chronological age. During the test administration, I have seen children cry, shut down, and refuse to take the test. I have seen children throw up on their test booklets. What are we doing to children? Parents are becoming angry with all of this testing. They see the stress and anxiety this testing is creating in their child. They are angry that their child’s test score will be stored in a state data warehouse and a national data warehouse. All of this testing is unhealthy. It is tyrannical.
Petitions are being signed in an effort to stop the madness. Teachers and principals did not have input in developing these tests. A United Kingdom based publishing company holds a monopoly on designing high stakes standardized tests, textbooks, and workbooks on the common core curriculum. Pearson Publishing Company has been awarded a five year contract for approximately $350 million dollars for New York State alone. Forty six states have been sold this ludicrous bill of goods. We have asked our legislators and governor to suspend high stakes testing at the elementary level and apply the money to help end poverty in our state. There are schools in Buffalo, New York that fill backpacks with dry food (cereal) so the children will have food over the weekend. The only meals that they have are in school.
Please understand that I believe we should measure student learning. However, the current use of standardized testing is NOT a reliable measure of student learning. The reading level of the passages on those tests is at least one entire grade level above where they are reading. A typical classroom in a public school has special needs children integrated in to the population. Imagine how an autistic child feels having to take a test that ends up being three years or four years above his/her reading level. This makes absolutely no sense. Teachers who have these students in their classroom will not have highly effective growth scores. The devastating factor is the very best teachers will not want these children in their classrooms when their job is dependent on a growth score.
At least 71% of the teachers employed in New York State are women. Many of them are the main breadwinner in their family. Many of them have special needs students as well. Many of them have children with fragile health conditions. Many of them are single parents. What are the economic implications for our state if half of the teachers in any given school become unemployed due to a growth score which was created by some “secret formula” created by politically manipulated statisticians?
Please do not forget that thanks to the 19th Amendment, women vote. Twenty six days remain until the presidential election. I am a Democrat. I know that I will NOT vote for Mitt Romney because he supports high stakes standardized testing, privatization and charter schools. Respectfully, Mr. President, you could win my vote and the vote of teachers in New York State if you address the issues of high stakes standardized testing, teacher evaluations based on growth scores and re-assign Arne Duncan. We are aware that a false achievement gap is being created by Pearson Publishing and those who are heavily invested in that company. Otherwise, Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party is looking like a viable candidate.
Sincerely,
Marge Borchert
My letter is printed here on September 30. I hope it will be sent along with the others. Thank you.
Linda Johnson
Diane,
Here is my letter to the President, sent today through the White House email system. I requested a reply, but won’t be sitting by the computer waiting.
Mr. President,
As a teacher and a supporter, I could make this a long litany about the woes of the current state of public education in this country. I would, rather, like to issue an invitation to you, the First Lady, the Vice President, or Sec. Duncan to visit my classroom; not for a brief photo-op, but for at least three class periods. That way, you would get a feel for what goes on in a school that works, without the strangle hold of the current testing-mania. My high school history classroom in a not-wealthy public school district is alive, vibrant and flowing with ideas. No one particularly cares about the state test we have to give once a year. We all do our jobs and score well (top in our county this year). This will all change when test scores mean everything, and that day is coming. Please visit us before then…while we still make a difference.
Sincerely,
Regina Cooper
I like your letter. This is what it’s all about really.
Dear Mr. President:
I’ll keep this short because I believe you are intelligent enough to know what you should be doing. It’s hard to compete with the education policy “experts” who are paid to push the corporate reform agenda forward. I must fight for an equitable and excellent public education system.
I’ve been watching the changes happen: cuts, raise the standards, blame the teachers, give out some money with strings attached, make a noose out of those strings, and finally close the school down or make it into a charter. Teachers are leaving the profession in droves. You cannot fire your way to excellent. Be the intention noble or destructive, the end results discriminate against the poor and people of color.
You will have my vote, as the alternative is worse. The lines are blurring between political parties. What has either party done recently to help education? We are not broke, our priorities are just off.
Pat Muller
ELL Teacher
Here is my letter. I will mail a copy, because it is too long to cut and paste into the message form on the White House website.
Dear President Obama,
I am a teacher. I am also a parent. I am passionate about public education, and I feel helpless.
I feel helpless, because the conversations about education are being dominated by high-stakes accountability, charter schools, privatization, and anti-unionism. I feel helpless, because I do not know how else to help us focus instead on equity and inclusion, collaboration and professional development, ownership and empowerment, community support, and democracy.
Please know that it is not that I, as a teacher, do not want to be accountable for my work, but I am distrustful of being judged by a system that is not reliable or valid. High-stakes accountability assessment and merit pay have not been shown, by research or experience, to improve learning outcomes, and in practice these policies in fact erode conditions for high quality teaching and curriculum. It is not that I think charter schools have no place in our system. In fact, I think they can serve as labs for new best practices and sometimes as niches to serve unique groups of students, but charter schools are not a solution to an equitable, public system of education (nor are private schools via vouchers). Charter schools do not typically outperform public schools, and, unlike public schools, their doors are not open to our students who are most in need.
While it is no longer what defines me as an educator, I feel that I should mention also Teach For America. I am a TFA alumna, and while I value my experience ascorps member and the people I met through it, I worry still over the cost of that experience to the community I served. Enthusiasm and a self-sacrificing willingness to work long hours, does not make one a skilled teacher. It takes time. As TFA grows its impact outweighs the cost of the program to struggling districts and communities. Like charter schools, TFA is not a solution to building a sustainable, high-quality, professional teaching force for our public schools. While TFA as an organization has very good public relations and you may not know it, I am not alone. There are many TFA alumni out there with contradictory feelings about the organization and the policies it promotes. I feel demoralized that TFA as an organization has more say regarding the education reform agenda than experienced, professional educators.
At a conference several years ago, I heard the insightful, education scholar Gloria Ladson Billings speak. She described a metaphor of people standing on the banks of a river, watching as babies began floating by. Horrified, the people waded in, trying to catch the babies and bring them one by one safely to the shore. But more babies floated down the river, more and more, until the people were only able to save a few, while others slipped through and disappeared downstream. Then while some people remained in the river, trying to do the best they could, a group of people went up river. They went up river to see how the babies were falling in in the first place.
Mr. President, we need to send some people up river. Maybe I am naĂŻve, but I believe that you and many of the educators and policy makers promoting the reforms I mention above are good-hearted people who are doing the best they know to do, but they are working down river. Charter schools, rigid test-based accountability measures, privatization, and short-cuts in teacher preparation and professional development are downstream attempts to improve our system of education, and Race to the Top just doubles down on these policies.
There are voices that offer different perspectives. You will find them in the classrooms, the leadership of our schools, and the homes of our communities. You will find them in advocates for public education like Diane Ravitch, Deborah Meier, and Linda Darling-Hammond. I know you will receive many other letters today sharing such perspectives. Please hear us. Please, please reconsider your administration’s approach to education reform and support public education.
Sincerely,
Sarah A. McKinney
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Dear President Obama,
I am elementary school principal and a former classroom teacher. My mother was a teacher, my mother’s mother was a teacher, and my mother’s mother’s mother and father were both teachers. I am writing to you because I am deeply worried about the fate of the teaching profession, the fate of our public schools, and the fate of our students. Let me tell you why.
Back when I was a classroom teacher, I received a memo from my Assistant Principal addressed to all of the teachers in the testing grades at the school:
With the New York State Language Arts test just five weeks away, the memo read, all teachers need to suspend math instruction and focus solely on literacy. Math instruction can resume after the English Language Arts test.
I ignored the memo, and shut my classroom door and taught math anyway. I felt I had a moral obligation to do so. My students in that South Bronx elementary school were already facing plenty of obstacles ahead of them, and I refused to add to those obstacles by denying them math instruction – or science or social studies – for more than a month.
The same moral obligation I felt then, I feel now. The more I learn and the more I see about the direction public schools have taken across the country, the more upset I become. It is getting harder and harder to sit around and remain silent while I watch our students, teachers, and schools suffer.
I have been trying my hardest to preserve the integrity of our school, our teachers, and our students amid the misguided priorities of your administration. But I know what is going on across the country, and I believe you do too. We are losing our arts and music programs. We are losing recess. When I taught in the South Bronx, the students did not have gym class, because our day was supposed to be focused around the test. We are losing our ability to think creatively and problem solve. This singular focus on test scores, combined with larger and larger classes, means that students are not getting the social and emotional guidance they need from their teacher, who is under tremendous pressure, and is already stretched too thin. Our schools are not producing caring citizens ready for the challenges of the next generation. Instead we are producing test takers who are masters at filling in bubble sheets.
On your watch, the quality and depth of education in schools across the country has deteriorated.
I’m not just worried about the harm being done to the children during their time in our school system, I’m also worried about the children entering schools already damaged, and how the misplaced priorities of our schools only make this worse.
Our childhood poverty rate – 23 percent — is the second highest among developed nations, after Romania. Science is beginning to shed light how poverty impacts learning. I encourage you to learn more about how the brains of children living in poverty with toxic stress and poor parent attachment look different than brains of children growing up without those stressors. These children struggle to connect with adults. They struggle to control their emotions. They struggle with executive function skills. And they struggle with paying attention and following directions, which shouldn’t be surprising when you learn that research has shown that growing up in these circumstances can significantly impair a child’s working memory.
There are children sitting in our schools who have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, I’ve heard you show compassion when discussing PTSD in speeches to veterans. But I want you to just think about this – there are children in our schools, whose upbringings and home lives have altered their brain chemistry in ways similar to those who have served time in combat. That is what the toxic stress of poverty can do.
Now think about what these fragile young minds need to grow up to be responsible and respectful adults. These children need a nurturing, child-centered environment, just like the ones your daughters experience at Sidwell Friends, not the cutthroat, competitive culture of Race to the Top. They need recess, and the arts and extra-curricular activities, not a day full of rote learning and practice tests. They need to feel that school can be the sanctuary they never had.
But instead, we ignore all of the components of a full education that these children need, and we put them into a school that only adds more stress. And how do they respond? They resist. They argue with teachers. Or they just stop showing up all together. Our neediest students are falling further and further behind, and this is not a problem that can get fixed through more tests or national standards.
I imagine that your emphasis on accountability comes from a good place – that you don’t want to see children slip through the cracks. Perhaps there are specific memories and specific children from your time as a community organizer that you think of when you think about improving education. And I respect that.
But let me be as clear as I can about one thing: this intention is harming our students across the country.
If indeed you are motivated by the notion that you don’t want children slipping through the cracks, and that has been your desire to continue with your focus on high-stakes testing accountability, then consider this:
How many kids are slipping through the cracks because their class sizes are bigger than they have ever been before, and they are not getting the level of personal attention they need?
How many kids are slipping through the cracks because school has become a place where only reading and math count, and they never get a chance to develop a passion for anything else, including music or the arts?
How many children are slipping through the cracks because we no longer value creativity, compassion, or critical thinking, and we don’t give our students the chance to fully develop those abilities?
And how many of our children arrive at our schools already having not slipped, but fallen through the cracks, fallen flat on their faces, through no fault of their own? With their brains scrambled like combat veterans? Is more emphasis on testing really what you think they need?
Mr. Obama, our students deserve better. Our teachers deserve better. Our communities deserve better. Please, take a moment to recognize all the damage that is being done to our public schools. Then, let’s move forward. Let’s re-examine the notion that accountability can only exist through an annual exam. Let’s recognize all that our students are losing out on because of our obsession with testing. Let’s stop connecting teacher evaluations and teacher pay to these flawed high-stakes tests, and let’s stop demanding that states seeking an NCLB waiver must do this. Let’s stop blaming teachers. And let’s stop firing staff and closing schools as a way to fix education.
Our public schools don’t need your punishment. We need your support.
Sincerely,
Stephen Earley
Newport, VT
Dear President Obama,
I am an unaffiliated voter, a teacher, and a parent. I have generally voted for Democrats and I enthusiastically supported you four years ago. I will probably be voting for a third-party candidate this election, however.
Over the past several years I have become increasingly dismayed at the direction public education is heading. In the name of “reform” I have seen schools, students, and teachers labeled as failures based on scores on tests that only accurately predict student success on later similar tests. I have seen the narrowing of the curriculum so that children no longer have art or music classes so they could maximize the time they spent learning the skills necessary to bubble in test booklets. I have seen profiteers greedily eyeing an untapped preK-12 market in which they can make a fast buck all in the name of helping the children. And I have seen the loss of morale in teachers who try hard every single day to do the best they can for their students.
No Child Left Behind was a nightmare. Little did we realize that Race to the Top would be even worse for the children of our nation. The result of labeling schools as failures is the rise in charter schools which skim off the best of students, sending urban schools into a death spiral. The education gap in our cities is widening, not closing. A considerable amount p of money is being spent by wealthy “reformers” to get their hands on our students and their schools. How can this be good for the future of our democracy?
Our childhood poverty rate is shocking. One quarter of America’s children are living in poverty. Why are we not seeking to address this issue? Why are you so quick to blame the teachers for society’s ills? I was appalled when you approved of the firing of the teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Yes, poverty is not destiny, but it still provides a major obstacle to academic success. A child cannot learn when he or she is hungry or lacks medical attention.
I feel that you have turned your back on the children of the United States and their teachers. Please reconsider Race to the Top. Please stop labeling students and their teachers as failures, but instead begin tackling the effects of poverty. Please end the privatization of public schools. Please make all public schools the kind of schools you would want your daughters to attend. Thank you.
Here’s my letter. Also posted on my blog & emailed to Anthony.
Dear President Obama,
I strongly supported you in 2008 and I continue to support you in 2012; however, your record and your policies on education give me pause. Unlike Governor Romney, who by all accounts views public education and teachers with contempt, you have expressed some interest in preserving and improving our nation’s democratic educational system.
Unfortunately, the rhetoric and lip service that you pay public education and teachers has not been matched by the policies of your administration. As a result, I am left wondering if there is any hope for a truly democratic educational system that affords all students, no matter what neighborhood they live in or what their family circumstances, an opportunity for an equitable education.
I teach in Philadelphia, a city that has struggled with violence, concentrated generational poverty, unemployment, and inequality for decades. Further, I teach students who are over-aged (16-21 years old) and under-credited (having fewer than 12 of the 23.5 credits necessary for graduation). My students are teen parents, foster kids, victims of violence, and full-time workers. They have struggled with abuse, seen expulsion from “no excuses” charter schools, and been incarcerated. My students have been labeled dropouts, failures, and delinquents. In spite of these myriad mistakes and roadblocks, my students come to school everyday with more energy, determination, and drive than any I’ve experienced in my entire educational career.
I share this description of my specific population to demonstrate the importance of alternative programs. Unfortunately, programs like this are a dying breed. They are an easy target for budget cuts. Every spring, my colleagues, students, and I wait with bated breath for the District’s decision about the fate of our school. Two years ago, we have saw our doors shuttered, only to be reopened months later after being used as political leverage. However with the mobility and fragility of our population, this experience served as the final blow for nearly one third of our students.
Our precarious position is a direct result of growing privatization in the educational system. Coincidently, this same privatization is the exact reason that the waiting list for my program continues to grow each passing semester.
Privatization within public education is systematically undermining our nation’s democratic educational ideal by siphoning resources from public schools and communities. Additionally, this system of privatization has created a two-tiered reality of education in large urban districts, affording a select few students a high caliber education, while the majority of students are forced to cope with under-funded and dilapidated schools.
More troubling even than the inequitable system created by privatization is the proliferation of for-profit schools. In Philadelphia alone, we’ve seen a staggering number of cases of fraud coming from charter and cyber schools that promise parents and children better opportunities, only to take the money and run. When education becomes a for-profit business, the focus shifts from learning to the balance sheet. Students and parents become customers. Teachers cease to be educators and become merely workers. Education is a public good and must be regarded as such.
In 2008, I was energized by your message of hope and change. Though I recognize the mountain of challenges that awaited you when you took office, I am dismayed by the absence of efforts to address the profound inequality that exists in our education system. It is astounding that in Philadelphia, two schools less than one mile apart see more than a $13,000 disparity in per student funding. The way that schools are funded at the local, state, and national levels is antiquated and perpetuates this two-tiered system of education.
I implore you to push your Secretary of Education and your administration to abandon symbolic actions like “Race to the Top”, test-based accountability, and merit-based pay. Our nation’s educational system requires a dramatic rethinking beginning with funding, teacher training, and teacher retention. All students, particularly those in poverty, deserve highly practiced, compassionate, and committed educators. It is only through an investment in equitable public schools that our nation can achieve a truly democratic system that will serve as a model for the world.
Please, President Obama, recognize that your policies are demoralizing not only teachers, but also the students they serve. They are well aware of the divestment in public schools and turn to their teachers for answers. Almost daily, my students look at me and say, “The city doesn’t care about us. The nation doesn’t care about us. No one cares about us.”
Prove them wrong, President Obama.
Prove to students in Philadelphia and in cities across the country that you have not given up on them. Prove this by ensuring equality in our nation’s public education system.
Thank you very much for your consideration.
Dear President Obama,
My daughter’s elementary school recently received its School Progress Report from the NYC Dept of Education. The school received a “C” for the last school year.
My daughter was in 4th grade last year. She had a phenomenal year. She developed her writer’s voice and honed her skills in interpreting fiction to understand the world in which she lived. She learned to critically analyze non-fiction articles and to write persuasive essays. In other words, she flourished as a competent reader and a writer. Despite the progress she made, her ELA standardized test proficiency level went down by 0.18 points. Am I concerned? No. She was proficient in third grade and she continued to be proficient in 4th grade as far as the standardized tests go. More importantly I know how much real academic progress she made.
The school also had an amazing year and continued to offer a rich arts-integrated curriculum despite the heavy testing pressure. There were classes that choreographed dances working with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. Students engaged in making pottery while learning the chemistry of pottery glazes. There were performances in dance, music, and drama, writing festivals, publishing parties, and classroom museums. Then there were field trips. I myself led several field trips to introduce the students to urban nature. We went seining in Jamaica Bay, a National Park, tested the Hudson River water for dissolved oxygen levels, grew vegetables in a farm in Battery Park and in our small yards, and took a trip to the Catskill forest to learn about the drinking water in New York City.
Unfortunately none of these incredible learning activities were taken into consideration in developing the School Progress Report grade of “C.” This is because the NYC DOE’s School Progress Report is based 85% on standardized test scores in ELA and math and 60% on increasing test scores in these subjects. This is Mayor Bloomberg’s idea of accountability. He tells us he is holding the principals and teachers accountable by giving schools letter grades.
This is just one small example of how the Mayor has corporatized and privatized the public school system in New York City. Since he took office, he has reorganized the 1,500-school system several times, each time creating chaos and leading to a highly unproductive transition period, but all in the name of “efficiency.” These re-structuring of the system made it very difficult to monitor the various educational policies implemented. He has touted data-driven policies but without understanding which data are meaningful or how data are collected. As a result our children are reduced to a set of numbers – mostly meaningless – and humanity is being lost from education. Contracts amounting to tens of millions of dollars have been awarded to private for-profit companies for projects whose educational values are unclear (such as a super database which turned out to be utterly useless to parents or a series of standardized assessments aligned with the Common Core State Standards). He has replaced collaboration with competition where schools, administrators, or teachers are made to compete against one another. By ranking schools or teachers, the Mayor’s system will always produce “losers” regardless of how well they perform. He has also been an unwavering supporter of charter schools and Teach for America and has fought the United Federation of Teachers on nearly every issue.
I share this story with you because I see that Mayor cannot single-handedly take credit for his misguided reform agenda. Many of his initiatives are supported by your administration’s education policies: teacher evaluation based on test scores; merit pay for teachers who raise test scores; increasing the number of charter schools; and implementation of the Common Core State Standards.
Teacher effectiveness cannot be measured by standardized test scores. Good teachers nurture a love of learning, encourage deep curiosity, and make students excited. These are qualities that cannot be measured by standardized tests. A good school produces responsible and compassionate citizens. These outcomes cannot be assigned letter grades. A good education system encourages collaboration, not competition. It lifts all students, not just the select few whose parents are savvy enough to send their children to high quality schools, whether charter or public.
We have a public education system that is struggling. If you are re-elected, I hope you will evaluate your education agenda critically and see it for what it is – eroding of the public education system. Let us start fresh and move forward by developing an intelligent reform agenda working with real educators – those in the trenches – and parents as well as seasoned policy makers. Let us also work on eliminating poverty in our nation so that we can truly improve public education. We need education policies that are holistic and inclusive, capable of addressing needs of the whole community, beyond just the walls of the school. I would love nothing more than seeing every parent experience the joy of watching her child blossom in school with a future full of possibilities.
Sincerely,
Shino Tanikawa
New York, NY
For what it’s worth, this idea seems pretty quixotic and REALLY badly timed. Everyone who supports public education should be doing what they can right now to make sure romney/ryan don’t get elected. Obama won’t be reading your letters.
Dear President Obama,
I am passionately committed to American public schools. My husband and I both benefitted from public education at some of the top-ranked public schools in the ’70s and ’80s. Now, we send our children to a public school in California. The teachers are dedicated, effective, and professional. The other parents are committed and involved, taking on more and more of the burden of paying for or providing “extras” that used to a standard part of publication education: physical education, music, art, extra tutoring. Everyone has made sacrifices as the funding for California’s public schools has diminished, but the schools are still doing their job.
What keeps me up at night, though, is worrying about what happens as the consequences of the horrible legislation of NCLB continue to unfold. We are watching as teachers spend more and more time teaching to the test rather than focusing on truly educating our students. One principal of another school in our district told us that they don’t bother to teach science anymore, since it isn’t tested at the primary school level. As a successful professional scientist, I was horrified.
The 100% proficiency demanded by NCLB is not a realistic goal. And the “remedies” for falling short don’t help the schools or the students — they only seem to benefit those who support the privatization of education. While “choice” and “charter schools” may be buzz-word friendly and play well in movie theaters, there is no evidence that charter schools perform any better than the public schools, all things being equal. Which brings us to the fundamental fallacy of NCLB and those who favor charter schools: that our public schools are failing. Our public schools are SUCCEEDING despite ever-growing challenges of funding cuts, rising poverty, and high-stakes testing. We need to support our schools, our teachers and our students to continue doing what they do best, and stop penalizing them for failing to meet arbitrary and unrealistic benchmarks. Please end NCLB today, and let our teachers get back to educating.
Respectfully yours,
Kimberly Scearce-Levie, PhD
My letter is a song… http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=JfrKDoeG_Gk
I emailed the White house the following: Dear President Obama: I am writing to you today about the state of public education. As a teacher in the New York City schools and a parent of two children in the same schools, I am in the eye of the storm. High stakes testing, started under NCLB and continued under your policies, is hurting our children and our schools in many ways: • “One cannot fatten the pig by weighing it.” We need to figure out how to improve our schools. The current policy does nothing to support teachers and students in the classroom. • High stakes testing encourages teachers to do test prep rather than cultivate critical thinking. • The exams themselves are faulty. Last year’s eighth grade ELA exam in New York included a confusing passage about a talking pineapple that was thrown out after the exam was given. • The tests are extremely long: 90 minutes per day for three days for ELA and another three days for math. • If a student finishes the test early, she cannot do anything. The test then becomes a measure of which kids can sit still the longest. • In addition to losing class time to test prep and test taking, students also lose a lot of time when their teachers are removed from the classroom to score the tests. • Students also lose more time because they sit for field tests for Pearson, a for-profit company. • Although the rubrics are kept secret, many teachers that came back from the grading last year said that the rubrics were poorly designed. • The scoring itself is not transparent. What was a “4” last year might be a “3” this year. • Assessment should be used to help students progress. This is impossible with the current tests because a student never sees her test after she has taken it. So she cannot learn from her mistakes • All of this causes a huge amount of stress for everyone, especially for the students. • Elementary students worry that if they have a bad day and don’t perform well on the test, their teacher could be fired. • Huge sums of money are going to the testing industry instead of directly to the students. • We say we want only the best and brightest to teach our kids. Why would the best and brightest want to enter the teaching profession now? You have my vote. I hope that you will have enough votes to be in office for the next four years. If so, I urge you to make a difference for public schools. Our children are hurting. Thank you very much.
I have read many letters in this letter writing campaign that speak for me. I will not spend my time telling you, Mr. Obama, about the children that I teach or the harm that your education policies are doing to students and teachers in my school. I have reluctantly given your campaign some money. I will encourage my colleagues to vote for you rather than Mitt Romney in a couple of weeks.
If you win, I will organize against your failed policies with every ounce of strength I have left, even after spending sixty hours per week, every week, working for the children and the teachers in my school. Here is a letter that I will be sharing with the 700+ members of my local union in our monthly newsletter.
Education reform over the past ten years has been inadequate, ineffectual and in many cases harmful to children due to the faulty assumptions made by businesspeople and politicians who have approached education reform using a private business, profit centered agenda. There is no doubt that current education policy, which mandates the use of yearly high stakes standardized testing in grades 3-8, has led to huge financial profits for test making corporations like Pearson. However, it is now evident that the goal of reducing the achievement gap between white and minority students, or between those children from wealthy districts and those from impoverished neighborhoods, is not being met. In fact, the greatest gains made in closing the student achievement gap between African American and white students took place between 1970 and 1980, when anti-poverty and desegregation programs were the focus of education reform. Under the neo-liberal education policies enacted by Ronald Reagan during the 1980s, and accepted by every administration since, the more effective programs of the 1970s were slowly dismantled. As a result, the achievement gap has not budged for over two decades even as test-based accountability, under NCLB, declared closing the achievement gap as its central goal. The evidence is beginning to pile up that yearly testing does not improve learning but actually takes away from valuable instructional time and forces a narrowing of the curriculum as teachers are forced to spend weeks drilling for tests that are often poorly written. While there has been little evidence to support the premise that testing improves student academic growth, there has been ample evidence to support the fact that it is a teacher’s professional practice that leads to the best chance for student growth in school.
So how do we in the field of education make teachers’ professional growth central to the discussion on improving educational opportunities for children? First we need to remove the costly distraction created by high stakes standardized tests that are not only proving to be unreliable measures of student learning, but unreliable measures of teacher effectiveness as well. Since most people do not understand much about standardized norms, operational forms, norm referenced items and student operational scores, they have been willing to set aside their own views on testing and listen to the testing experts. But now there is reliable research indicating that there is a serious design flaw in the way that Pearson’s Standardized Tests are created.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/education/texas-studies-suggest-test-design-flaw-in-taks.html?_r=1
Remember the controversial question about the talking pineapple on last year’s 8th grade English Language Arts test here in New York? There were also passages from other grade levels that were poorly written and had questions that had either no good answer or more than one reasonable response. If copies of the tests were made available after the testing was completed, then we as parents and educators could have an honest discussion about the use and the validity of these testing instruments. But the testing companies don’t want that to happen because testing has become a lucrative money-maker for big business. In fact the public doesn’t even know how many tax dollars are ending up in testing company coffers rather than in school classroom. Unfortunately the true cost of the hours spent on high stakes standardized testing every year is the cost our children have to pay. If forcing students to take high stakes tests every year has not lead to a better education for our nation’s children why do we continue?
Those businessmen who initially supported and have a vested interest in the economic gains their companies make under the failed education policies of NCLB are going to pull out all the stops to protect their companies and their profits. Those who have built careers on the failed premise of NCLB will also fight, in tandem with corporate “education reformers”, to maintain their own personal status. Michele Rhee and her Students First organization is the first name that comes to mind but there are many others. Even as evidence of policy failure mounts, we continue to move in the wrong direction in this country because of the private profit motive inherent in the current testing mania and privatization schemes. Fortunately teachers and parents in states across the country are beginning to understand the harmful effects that current education policy is having on our children and our schools. There is beginning to be push back from professionals and parents. In Western New York there is a PTA that has taken a stand against the high stakes testing policies of its district and they are calling for a moratorium on the use of state tests. It is a start! When educating our children is once again seen as a cooperative, community-based endeavor, we will begin to see better results in education. It is time to take education policy out of the hands of corporate CEOs, hedge fund managers and party politicians. Professional teachers, along with involved parents, are the people needed to set up learning environments that are healthy and productive learning centers for children.
Children are not widgets to be quantified! It is time to put a halt to the idea that our schools should be run like a business for private business profit. A free and equitable public education is a right that should be afforded every child, because in the long run, the future of our country and the freedom and independence of our citizenry depends on an educated populace.
Dear President Obama,
I have received an average of three emails per day from your campaign, sometimes signed personally by you or your wife Michelle, over the past several months. You have asked a lot of me in those emails. But most of all you have asked me to have your back.
I’m a team player, but I don’t trust you Mr. Obama.
The emails began when I responded to a campaign call to get in touch with you, as you wanted to be in touch with the American people. I took you at your word and sent you a personal message regarding the state of public education in America. I received a response from someone in your campaign lauding all that you have “done” in support of public education, which unfortunately addressed none of my concerns. At the time I figured that was par for the course – you weren’t worried about the teacher vote – my one vote – so why pay attention to my one voice. I mean, you had already been endorsed by the AFT, and the NEA wasn’t far behind in their endorsement of your re-election.
You see, I can do the math. I am a public school mathematics educator in California. My current teaching assignment is 8th grade math – teaching Algebra to one group of kiddos and doing my best to “remediate” another group with the help of my team (not what we’d like to be doing, but what we have been assigned to do.) While the arithmetic of one voice one vote isn’t true at all in America, the arithmetic works for an incremental increase of campaign contributions over an entire engaged population that has an exponential impact on campaign coffers.
However, cynicism did not win out when your staff response arrived, and I did not lose hope that you would somehow be persuaded to listen to educators, parents, and students who are outraged at your adherence to policy that lines the pockets of corporations (likely the very ones who support your campaign) rather than fulfill a promise, a solemn vow, to our nation’s youth. Inspired again by an email from your campaign, I wrote to you a second time.
Imagine my disappointment to receive the exact same email response, twice.
First time, shame on me, second time SHAME ON YOU.
You have sold out our young by advocating for policy that ignores poverty, that celebrates all the wrong kinds of school experiences, that punishes the very people who ARE America. You have sided with the corporations, the testing companies, and the capitalists who want their fair share of the global $1T education industry. You have allowed rhetoric to reign by engaging with a bipartisan group of eduphilanthropists to tell a false story to American people. You have turned your back on main street by allowing the mass closings of neighborhood schools by corporate demagogues and by supporting the allocation of very scarce resources afforded any marginalized community to be spent far away from the classrooms where everyone else’s kids, but not yours, spend their days. You talk about an education that seizes our future, secures jobs of the future, and insures a stronger future for America, but you put no one qualified to lead that charge in your administration.
You have ignored students, parents, and teachers in our cry for an end to high-stakes standardized testing, an end to the junk science of value-added measurement using those scores, an end to the boredom of the bubble world of teaching to the test, an end to stale curriculum for the poor and children of color, and an end of co-opting of school buildings, with charter amenities for those who “won” the lottery and bottom of the basement conditions for everyone else. You have ignored our pleas for fully funded neighborhood schools, which employ an experienced and passionate staff that provides a rich, whole, and rewarding school experience for every child – regardless of class, race, gender, or ability. The fact is:
YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT US.
Today, I have received 15 emails from your campaign. Each message asks me to financially support you, to campaign for you, to believe in you, to have your back. I ask you this:
What have YOU done for my students, my colleagues, my school, my community, or ME lately?
I’m all about altruism Mr. President, I teach it everyday. But I teach it by example. Be an example as the leader of the free world. Do what is right by our democracy by supporting a public education that embraces education as a right, not a privilege. Fully support a public education of the people, by the people, and for the people so that humanity does not perish from this earth. You are the only one who needs to change, Sir. So please, change now.
With hope,
Lori Walton
Good Morning – I too receive many emails requesting that I donate to President Obama’s campaign. Instead, I will be sending a contribution to Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. I am very concerned and upset with the negative effect NCLB and Race To The Top are having on public education. Attaching growth scores to teacher evaluations is WRONG. Our children are being tested too much at the elementary level and that is WRONG. Pearson Publishing was heavily invested in by the Libyan Dictatorship and made billions– that is just WRONG! I too wrote a letter to President Obama. Friends and family told me I was wasting my time. How sad. Parents are signing petitions against the standardized testing. They are filing law suits against having their child’s test scores being placed in a state & national data base without their signed consent. I applaud their efforts and will try desperately to hold on to the HOPE of that their efforts will STOP the madness.
Marge
A caval donato non si guarda in bocca!
Marge
Dear Mr. President: How did you go so wrong? Did you actually believe the billionaires and corporate educators’ sales pitches? Did you have a grudge against teachers’ unions? Did you solve an equation to maximize swing votes and dollars? What can you win that will be worth the damage you have inflicted upon our children’s schools? Please remove punitive testing that only benefits testing companies and politicians, and support the people that have made it their life’s work to teach other people’s children. Nourish schools, don’t lay siege to them. Support effective programs that fight poverty, addictions, and consumerism. It is not too late to admit your mistakes, appoint a teacher as Secretary of Education, and rebuild our schools. Hoping for a reason to hope again, Mark J. L. VanDerwater Holland, NY
October 17, 2012
Dear President Obama:
I have great respect and genuine admiration for you, but I’m very concerned about the policies of Arne Duncan, your Secretary of
Education and how those policies have damaged our public schools throughout our country.
I mean nothing personal against Mr. Duncan. I’m certain that he’s a decent human being and that he’s sincerely trying to do the right thing. But he is wrong, both on the facts and on the policies he has chosen to implement.
I know that I am one of many people who have sent you letters in the last 24 hours, regarding education. I sincerely hope that everyone at the White House and the Education Department carefully considers our viewpoints and that they become part of the public dialogue.
I’ve never been a teacher; nor has anyone in my immediate or extended family. But teachers were a big influence in my life and inspired me in so many ways. I owe teachers a lot. I respect them and their hard work on behalf of our children. And I am deeply offended by the egregious and unfounded attacks on them and their profession.
Some of these attacks on the people who educate our children are absolutely despicable. They remind me of the very worst racist and anti-Semitic slurs I’ve ever seen. Someone has to stand up and speak out against them.
I’m hoping that you, as our president, would acknowledge the division, the damage and the pain caused by such attacks and denounce them, publicly and forcefully.
I’m a parent of a young child in a public school. The teachers are very good. The principal is involved, smart and caring. But the most important factor in our school’s quality is all of the other parents and students; we all know that we only succeed as an education COMMUNITY; none of us can “make it on our own”. That’s an illusion.
This entire, confused discussion about “choice” and “My Kid” and “test scores” and “numbers” isn’t in the realm of reality. It really isn’t. “My Kid” can’t thrive in isolation. If everyone around him is struggling, or getting signals from their parents that “it’s all about you” and “getting the best deal for my money”, then it implies that only by abandoning the school, and running off to a perceived “better one” can education improve.
Again, schools succeed when parents stick together and demand the best for ALL the children; not just those they live with.
I’ve never seen a single plant bloom and thrive in a garden where the soil is depleted and every other plant around it is fighting to stay alive.
So, we parents, working with our children’s teachers, must all tend to the soil. Make the growing conditions good for all children—not just our own.
But we need your help, sir. We can’t both support you and your administration and fight your educational policies at the same time. It’s confusing, demoralizing and exhausting.
We parents need you as a friend, not an opponent. And we want your administration to change the direction of its education policies. We have to reject the false panaceas called “choice”, “charters”, “vouchers” and the most egregious, “triggers”. All of these are designed to erode and eventually end free, universal public education—and replace it with a private, for-profit (or “non-profit”) system staffed by 23 year old “teachers” and cheap, low-paid, rotating substitutes, who will have no more power and personal dignity than your average Walmart worker.
Please, Mr. President: think of we average income, middle-class citizens. We want the public schools to work. Please don’t destroy them with your policies. Please don’t take them away from us. Please let us retain the control of our schools and allow us to keep real teachers, who are provided with the dignity of a living wage, and a decent set of benefits.
Finally, I understand that fewer and fewer Americans have a decent, dependable job with good benefits and an adequate retirement. However, I don’t see how dragging teachers down to that level will improve things for our children or make them better students. A low-paid, insecure, no benefits “teacher” will never get good results. Please advise your education secretary of this fact as we move forward with this continuing discussion.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Steve Nesich
Seattle, Washington
October 17, 2012
Dear President Obama:
I have great respect and genuine admiration for you, but I’m very concerned about the policies of Arne Duncan, your Secretary of Education and how those policies have damaged our public schools throughout our country.
I mean nothing personal against Mr. Duncan. I’m certain that he’s a decent human being and that he’s sincerely trying to do the right thing. But he is wrong, both on the facts and on the policies he has chosen to implement.
I know that I am one of many people who have sent you letters in the last 24 hours, regarding education. I sincerely hope that everyone at the White House and the Education Department carefully considers our viewpoints and that they become part of the public dialogue.
I’ve never been a teacher; nor has anyone in my immediate or extended family. But teachers were a big influence in my life and inspired me in so many ways. I owe teachers a lot. I respect them and their hard work on behalf of our children. And I am deeply offended by the egregious and unfounded attacks on them and their profession.
Some of these attacks on the people who educate our children are absolutely despicable. They remind me of the very worst racist and anti-Semitic slurs I’ve ever seen. Someone has to stand up and speak out against them.
I’m hoping that you, as our president, would acknowledge the division, the damage and the pain caused by such attacks and denounce them, publicly and forcefully.
I’m a parent of a young child in a public school. The teachers are very good. The principal is involved, smart and caring. But the most important factor in our school’s quality is all of the other parents and students; we all know that we only succeed as an education COMMUNITY; none of us can “make it on our own”. That’s an illusion.
This entire, confused discussion about “choice” and “My Kid” and “test scores” and “numbers” isn’t in the realm of reality. It really isn’t. “My Kid” can’t thrive in isolation. If everyone around him is struggling, or getting signals from their parents that “it’s all about you” and “getting the best deal for my money”, then it implies that only by abandoning the school, and running off to a perceived “better one” can education improve.
Again, schools succeed when parents stick together and demand the best for ALL the children; not just those they live with.
I’ve never seen a single plant bloom and thrive in a garden where the soil is depleted and every other plant around it is fighting to stay alive.
So, we parents, working with our children’s teachers, must all tend to the soil. Make the growing conditions good for all children—not just our own.
But we need your help, sir. We can’t both support you and your administration and fight your educational policies at the same time. It’s confusing, demoralizing and exhausting.
We parents need you as a friend, not an opponent. And we want your administration to change the direction of its education policies. We have to reject the false panaceas called “choice”, “charters”, “vouchers” and the most egregious, “triggers”. All of these are designed to erode and eventually end free, universal public education—and replace it with a private, for-profit (or “non-profit”) system staffed by 23 year old “teachers” and cheap, low-paid, rotating substitutes, who will have no more power and personal dignity than your average Walmart worker.
Please, Mr. President: think of we average income, middle-class citizens. We want the public schools to work. Please don’t destroy them with your policies. Please don’t take them away from us. Please let us retain the control of our schools and allow us to keep real teachers, who are provided with the dignity of a living wage, and a decent set of benefits.
Finally, I understand that fewer and fewer Americans have a decent, dependable job with good benefits and an adequate retirement. However, I don’t see how dragging teachers down to that level will improve things for our children or make them better students. A low-paid, insecure, no benefits “teacher” will never get good results. Please advise your education secretary of this fact as we move forward with this continuing discussion.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Steve Nesich
Seattle, Washington