Two weeks ago, in response to many readers who were frustrated by destructive federal policies, this blog launched a Campaign for Our Public Schools. The immediate goal was to stimulate an outpouring of letters and emails to the President to let him know the views of many teachers, parents, students, administrators, and concerned citizens. A hoped-for additional goal is to mobilize a citizens’ group to speak up for our public schools.
The target date for receipt of letters and emails is today, October 17. You can still send your emails to this blog or to anthony_cody@hotmail.com.
All the letters and emails will be collected by Anthony and posted for public review.
Please raise your voice against high-stakes testing and privatization.
Let the President know, let other elected officials know, let the media know how you feel, what you know, what you believe is the right path to improve our schools and the lives of children.
We must raise our voices. We must be heard. This is democracy in action. Join us.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’d also recommend sending our letters to Obama’s campaign: http://www.BarackObama.com/Ask.
Also, does anyone have an email for Arne Duncan? All I could find was Facebook, which I’m not on.
First Name: ARNE
Last Name: DUNCAN
Primary Phone: (202) 401-3000
Principal Office: (OS) Office of the Secretary
Department of Education Organizational Structure and Offices
E-Mail Address: arne.duncan@ed.gov
Location
Region: HEADQUARTERS
Building Name: LBJ EDUCATION BUILDING
Building Address: 400 Maryland Avenue, SW, Washington, DC 20202
Room Number: 7W311
Thanks!
Here’s my letter (and I blogged about this today, too, urging folks in our Southwest PA grassroots movement to write):
Dear President Obama:
I write the public education research and policy blog, Yinzercation, which also serves as the on-line home for a large grassroots movement in Pennsylvania. I have been invited to the White House twice this year to meet with your senior policy advisors, including Roberto Rodriguez. But when you continue to tout Race to the Top, as you did in last night’s debate, I don’t think you are listening to us parents, teachers, students, and concerned community members who are fighting on the front lines for our schools. Our governor has used your policies – which label our public schools as “failures” – as convenient cover to slash $1 billion from public education.
Given the choice between you and Mitt Romney, who seems to view public education with contempt, we want to help you win back the hearts and minds of the grassroots in this country. Here are ways to do that.
Please, Mr. President, stop encouraging the privatization of public education. Many studies demonstrate that charters don’t get better results than public schools unless they exclude low-performing children. Public schools educate all children. The proliferation of charter and cyber charter schools will lead to a dual system in many of our big-city districts and tear our communities apart. Please support public education.
Please speak out against the spread of for-profit schools. These for-profit schools steal precious tax dollars to pay off investors. Those resources belong in the classroom. The for-profit virtual schools get uniformly bad reviews from everyone but Wall Street.
Please stop talking about rewarding and punishing teachers. Teachers are professionals, not toddlers. Teachers don’t work harder for bonuses. The teachers I know want to teach, they’re not expecting to win a prize for producing higher scores.
Please withdraw your support from the failed effort to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students. The American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education issued a joint paper saying that such methods are inaccurate and unstable. Teachers get high ratings if they teach the easiest students, and low ratings if they teach the most challenging students.
Please stop closing schools and firing staffs because of low scores. Low scores are a reflection of high poverty, not an indicator of bad schools or bad teachers. Insist that schools enrolling large numbers of poor and minority students get the resources they need to succeed.
Please, President Obama, recognize that your policies are demoralizing teachers and undermining the public’s confidence in our schools. President Obama, we want to support you on November 6. Please give us reason to believe in you again.
Kind regards,
Jessie B. Ramey, Ph.D.
ACLS New Faculty Fellow
Women’s Studies and History
University of Pittsburgh
The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20500
October 17, 2012
Dear Mr. President,
I am the parent of adult children and a die-hard public school supporter who is quite disappointed in your education policies. While I support your positions on other issues, I am hopeful that in your second term you will more fully support public education and what the research says.
Education reform is failing. The vast majority of charter schools are performing no better than traditional public schools. Privatization of our public schools is beginning to take a foothold and lacks critical accountability for taxpayers. Adequate funding just isn’t happening. Teachers and teacher unions are being inappropriately demonized. Children are being grossly over tested on standardized tests at the expense of other critical needs for all students of all abilities and socioeconomic groups. No one is adequately attacking income equality or the poverty level of our students.
You can be the change that is needed for our students, schools, and our country. I urge you to read David Berliner’s paper on why education reforms are failing – http://bit.ly/SZ8i3T. I encourage you to talk to parent leaders in Florida like those with Fund Education Now, Parents Across America, and the PTA who work each day to stop the bleeding from reform initiatives and improve our schools.
Very respectfully yours,
Terry Stetson Wilson
Lakeland, FL 33813
Sent through email to Whitehouse. Copy sent to Anthony Cody.
Dear President Obama,
I am a parent to two school-age children in Florida. In 2008, I was a strong supporter of your campaign. Over the course of your first term, however, I became increasingly disillusioned by your misguided policy on Education and have written you several letters stating so. I like to think you have our children’s best interests at heart, but somehow you have lost the ability to hear what real parents so desperately crave and need in our public schools. In 2008, I was convinced that you had an understanding of the pulse of the people… that you would never be one to insulate yourself from real America. Yet somehow it happened. Corporations over people.
During the first Presidential debate, you had this to say about Medicare vouchers:
“Now, in fairness, uh, what Governor Romney has now said is he’ll maintain traditional Medicare alongside it. But there’s still a problem, because what happens is, those insurance companies are pretty clever at figuring out who are the younger, uh, and healthier seniors. They recruit them, leaving the older, sicker seniors in Medicare. And every health care economist that looks at it says, over time, what’ll happen is the traditional Medicare system will collapse.”
My question to you is a simple one. Why is it that you are able to see how the privatization of Medicare would harm our most vulnerable seniors, but you are not able to see that your own policy on Education (namely the increasing expansion of Charters) harms our most vulnerable students? While you stated “…the traditional Medicare system will collapse,” you seem unable or unwilling to understand the parallel to your policies that may very well collapse our public school system. I am deeply saddened and admittedly quite angry at where public schools are headed under your administration, an administration that has only exacerbated rather than helped the ongoing issues within our schools. I urge you to re-examine this destructive path.
Very truly yours,
Debbie Bochi Shaw
Wellington, Florida
Dear President Obama,
As we approach this most crucial election on November 6, Please hear the cry of this teacher. I encourage you to take a bold step to support our free public education by refusing to further the agenda of the current reform movement and the ideas of your opponent, Governor Romney. I speak to you as a young African American male teacher who has taught in the intercity of Baltimore and currently teaches in Carroll County. So I can speak from first hand accounts of schools that work and schools that don’t work. I can also speak for the battle of teachers and minority male teachers.
Mr. President, so often has the voice of the reform movement overshadowed that of teachers who are in the trenches. Our teachers are overworked, underpaid, and demonized daily by the media and bureaucrats. Please become the president who decides to take a stance for teachers.
All of our teachers and students deserve quality working environments that are conducive to learning. Our children are being tested at rates like never before and our teachers are being asked to work miracles without addressing the main issue with inequality in our education system, poverty.
No traditional teacher who I have ever met goes into education because the job is easy and they love the pay. Our motivation for teaching revolves around the love of learning and children. How can this be properly evaluated? What is a measurer of passion and love? Our motivations are the kids not money.
Please stop the privatization of our schools. The reform movement wants to sell the story of failing schools and place the blame on teachers and argue that they have the magic bullet to fix schools. Why use our public schools that are working as models to fix our broken school instead of closing these schools.
Mr. President, programs such as Teach for America and Students First are not the answer. We cannot treat teachers as is they are a plug and play. Our schools need stability to service and TFA does not provide that. We need to push more for our colleges and universities to increase their education programs and foster programs where we are students who want to become teachers. I graduated from Western Michigan University several years ago and at our education job fair we had hundreds of certified teachers looking for jobs who were forced to move out of state. This should not be the case.
As an African American male my story is the same as that of many of my friends. I entered into teaching as a second profession and I am in so much debt. Part of the requirements to keep my certification is to complete a masters program so my debt level will increase while working a job that doesn’t pay as well as others. Please think about this as we try to increase minority teachers. Some cannot afford to teach.
Please recognize the biggest factor in education gap, poverty. Many of the reformers argue that we have to teach the students regardless of poverty but we cannot ignore the direct correlation between the two. It is amazing I worked in Baltimore city and the idea of poverty being connected to learning was overlooked but in my first year in Carroll County we have done more to try to address this issue than I have ever seen.
Please speak of the role of public education in a democracy, doors open to all. Please speak about the importance of early childhood education and small classes and libraries and the arts and a rich curriculum. Please remind the nation why schools need nurses and social workers and after-school activities.
Please recognize that schools work best through collaboration, not competition. Remind the nation why teaching to the test is wrong and why standardized testing should be used to help, not to give rewards and punishments.
Please, President Obama, recognize that the current policies are demoralizing teachers. Many are leaving the profession. Young people are deciding not to become teachers. The current movement is ruining a noble profession.
President Obama, I want to support you on November 6.
Please give us reason to believe in you again.
I am a teacher.
Jesse Harrington
I sent my letter to Obama. I’ll be voting for Jill Stein.
Here’s my letter: Dear President Obama, I have always wanted to be a teacher and have enjoyed being one for the last 26 years. I went through two colleges with accredited teaching programs to earn both my BA and MA degrees in education. I have seen many trends come and go. Some have worked and some have not. HELP! Right now I am drowning in a sea of data collection and testing. I am struggling to keep the light shining in my third graders eyes. I want my students to be excited about learning and coming to school, but every time I turn around I am testing them. “Not another test!” is a frequent refrain I hear. I see them becoming discouraged and frustrated. I just want to teach, and they need the time to learn. HELP! “Race to the Top” had good intentions, but it’s not the answer. The focus has become “the data” and “the test,” not the children. My students are learning how to answer test questions because that is where the high stakes are. Problem solving and creative thinking are suffering as a result. There are so many things that cannot be measured by filling in bubbles! Where is the joy of learning? Where is the music and art, the things that enrich and bring beauty to our lives? HELP! Children are not robots and schools are not businesses. Is competition good? Sometimes – but not in kindergarten! Our little ones are taking pretests in the computer lab when they don’t even know how to use a mouse or read! Is this developmentally appropriate? What does the research say? What data collected is of actual use? Is it valid? Is it an effective use of time for a five year old? HELP! As educators we have many obstacles to overcome. Most teachers I know are dedicated teachers trying to do a very difficult job. We are teachers because we love and care about children and their education. You don’t last in this profession very long if you don’t have that as criteria. We need your support and the support of our government leaders. HELP! Is reform needed? Always – that’s how we grow. Is “Race for the Top” the answer? No. Pitting schools against schools, when all resources are not equal, is unfair. Privatization and for- profit schools are not the answer either. Public schools educate all children. They don’t have the luxury of picking and choosing the “best” students so scores look good. The “one size fits all approach” is not appropriate. Why are we not looking at the schools that are doing well and succeeding? We should be learning from them what works. Please, please look at the research. HELP! Evaluating teachers on their students’ test scores is not a good measure of an effective teacher. There are way too many variables to consider. I know if my past evaluations were based on test scores, there would have been many years where I would have been considered highly effective, and a few years where I might have been evaluated ineffective. The only constant in the scenario is me. The variables were my students and their backgrounds, emotions, and health on test days. HELP! I am struggling within my heart, and what I know from my 26 years of experience to be in the best interest of children. I am struggling with compliance to “reform” and with what I know it is right. It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to implement all of the “changes and reform” that I know is not developmentally appropriate and sound. I ask you to reconsider all of the “reform” being bandied about, and to look at the actual research to see whether the “reform” is valid and works. Before we implement sweeping changes, we need to “test” them first. We must stop the madness! Our children’s future depends on the decisions we make. Four year s ago the choice of who to vote for was a very clear one for me. Today my choice is not as clear. I want to support you on November 6. Please give me some hope and a reason to believe in you again. Thank you for your consideration. Sincerely, Teresa Rienzie