The Campaign for Our Public Schools was a spontaneous effort to gather the candid views of educators, parents, students, and concerned citizens about the state of public education policy today. On October 3, everyone reading this blog was invited to write a letter to President Obama expressing their ideas.
In a brief, two-week period, nearly 400 letters were submitted. There were many that were eloquent, many that were heartfelt, many written from personal experience.
No one was paid to solicit letter-writers or to write letters. No one who worked to bring the letters together was paid. This was an earnest and completely volunteer effort to carry the views of concerned citizens to the President.
Not a single letter of those submitted expressed support for high-stakes testing or for the policies of No Child Left Behind or the Race to the Top.
It was easy for me to ask readers to write letters. Once they began to arrive, I would have been lost without the providential intervention of Anthony Cody, who offered to collect them, bring them together in one place, have them printed, and ship them to the White House. Robert Valiant offered to create a file for the letters.
In short, dear friends, collating and compiling your letters into a single volume would not have been possible without the kindness of strangers. The volume was created by a new community–a community of cyber-friends–and it now exists as a document.
All of the letters that arrived by the end of the day on October 17 are now a pdf file of 430 pages. They may be found here.
This is our work. This is what we together produced.
If anyone has any ideas about how to forward this link to every Senator, every member of Congress, every Governor, every state legislator, every mayor, every journalist, and every foundation, please share the knowledge. Or better yet: Just do it. Let me know that you did it. But you do it. If you can’t send it to every one of them, send it to the ones who represent you and your district.
Take what we have created and publish it to the world to combat the barrage of lies about how happy teachers and parents are with endless testing, standardization and privatization.
Thank you for whatever you do on behalf of your children and my grandchildren and our society,
Diane
Thanks to you and Anthony. Throughout the letters there is a theme of disappointment in a president that so many teachers had believed in. The Democratic Party needs to understand the damage they have done to schools and to educators. As the race tightens, it will be interesting to see what difference teachers, principals and parent activists in Ohio, Pa and Virginia make. After Jan 1, Obama may find he has lots of time to read the letters.
Thanks for doing this Diane and to Anthony for his help! I will keep you informed re: to whom I send these and any responses.
The letters you posted were wonderful.
Thank you for this and all you do for teachers and kids.
Victoria Stevens
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
“All of the letters that arrived by the end of the day on October 17 are now a pdf file of 430 pages”
Note mine. I sent the following letter to Anthony’s email address in the early afternoon of the 17th, before the deadline, but it was not included in the compilation. Sorry if I was too blunt and focused more on the fact that Obama has been ignoring poverty, but as indicated on Nightline last night, we have a very serious problem with violence in low income areas of Chicago, and many dead children as a result, so I thought Obama needed to be reminded of his role in that:
Dear President Obama,
I voted for you to be my Senator and to become my President, and I literally cried tears of joy when you were elected, in 2008, as our nation’s first African-American President. I’m a lifelong progressive Democrat and teacher, who has devoted the last 44 years to making a difference in the lives of children who are at-risk for school failure because of poverty, having Special Education needs and being English Language Learners. I never could have imagined that today, due to your policies on education and economics, I would be very seriously considering never voting for you again.
Over the past year, I have conveyed to you what I think, in probably hundreds of tweets and, though you’ve probably not read any of them, I don’t want to be redundant, so I have just one keyword for you now: Roseland. That is the Chicago neighborhood where you previously worked as a community organizer and this is what Roseland looks like today: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Kids_off_the_Block_Rocks_in_grass_IMG_4815.JPG
I believe you have forgotten the commitment you made to Roseland and all similar communities across America, because you have failed to address poverty. Passing off poverty onto teachers to eradicate and, when they cannot do this all by themselves, requiring that students’ tests scores be tied to teachers’ job retention is irresponsible and unconscionable. It is also very likely to reduce the number of people who enter the field or become career educators. People don’t often mention that many teachers go into war zones on a daily basis. I know because I’ve been there, had beer bottles thrown at my car, had my car window broken and have had people yell at me, “Hey, whitey, get out of here” while chasing me down the street –which occurred twice when the school parking lot was full and there was no choice but to park on the street.
In the debates, only Romney mentioned poverty, which makes me wonder if you are so bound by your corporate sponsors that you are willing to let Mr. 1% get away with looking like he is the only candidate who cares about poor people. As I said in a recent tweet, you need to stop being a slave to your corporate backers and own yourself. If you have no incentive to do so, please think of all of the children, adolescents and young adults of Roseland who have died due to poverty.
If you still feel no responsibility for the poor, please keep in mind that what Americans need most are jobs that pay a livable wage and it is your corporate sponsors who are the very people that detest unions and employ the working poor, including many people who have college degrees –so clearly education alone does not prevent poverty. Your corporate backers prevent workers in the trenches from earning living wages –and while they make billions off the backs of low-paid employees, they seek to profit even further from your education policies, such as companies that benefit from standardized testing, Common Core based curriculum and the privatization of public education through charters and online schools. Thus, you not only ignore poverty and scapegoat teachers for not being able to eradicate it, you are perpetuating poverty yourself.
Please remember Roseland!
Prof W, Non-union Early Childhood Education Teacher, Teacher Educator and Working Poor (with multiple degrees, decades of experience and no academic freedom)
Chicago, IL
I just emailed a letter with a link to the PDF file to “DINO Dan” Malloy. I’m sure it’s already in his email trash. I’m proud of myself: I fought the urge to be surly. I wiill also send it to our two senators, the Hartford Courant, my state senator and representative.
If anyone would like to simply cut and paste, here’s what I sent (my one to “DINO” Dan urged him to change his evil ways, but I said it nicely. Really!):
As you may or may not know, a campaign to write President Obama was begun by Diane Ravitch to protest the negative effects of Race to the Top and high stakes testing. Many people- parents, educators, and students- realize how harmful high stakes testing is for children. I’ve attached a link to the PDF file which contains all letters written to President Obama. Please read them. Please hear our concerns. Thank you.
http://campaignforourpublicschools.org/pdf/letters.PDF
I think what will be most telling is if all the people who sent their emails to Obama compared the emails they got (if any) back in response to see what they said. If Obama is like my Senator Debbie Stabenow, they are ALWAYS the same form letter, no matter what YOUR email to her says.
Thank you Diane and Cody, for giving us a place to raise our voices. I hope something good comes out of it, but at least I got to make my statement. I am honored to have been a part of it.
I’ll be sending this to every Senator tomorrow, via http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
Dear Senator,
On behalf of Diane Ravitch and Anthony Cody, who initiated this campaign, I’d like to share with you 378 compiled letters sent to President Obama.
As Dr. Ravitch wrote in the introduction,
“To my knowledge, not a single letter congratulated the
President for establishing Race to the Top. To the contrary, every letter was critical. Some offered
scathing criticism, others offered constructive suggestions but not a single writer came out and
said, “What a great program. It is surely helping my district.” Not one. Some excoriated the Race
and documented its pernicious effects on students and classrooms.”
The letters are here
http://campaignforourpublicschools.org/pdf/letters.pdf
Dr. Ravitch’s blog post is here.
https://dianeravitch.net/2012/10/20/the-campaign-for-our-public-schools-what-you-need-to-do-now/
As a concerned citizen and educator, I thought every senator should have an opportunity to participate in the extremely important conversation.
Sincerely,
Dr. Suzanne Aurilio
San Diego State University
Thank you for sharing the letters with your elected officials.
Diane
Thank you for all of your hard work. I sent my email letter directly to the president on October 17th. I sure hope someone is reading and thinking there.
I clicked on the link but it took me to a blank page.
This is the link that leads to all the letters submitted in time: http://campaignforourpublicschools.org/pdf/letters.pdf
Just curious, did you send the collection of letters to the White house as email or physically, in an envelope/package?
The letters were mailed to the White House as a package and they are available as a PDF file to send to governors, mayors, members of Congress.
Dear Diane,
Thank you for all of your hard work on behalf of America’s children. I wrote one of the letters you passed on to the President, and today I sent a slew of them to my elected officials here in my Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain (I didn’t send them, though, to my City Councilors, since they’ve heard so much from me, they’ll think I’m a spamming crank. They’ve heard this stuff plenty, though, I assure you). Below is the list of recipients, then the cover letter I sent to each.
Mayor Thomas Menino
BPS Superintendent Carol Johnson
Rep. Liz Malia
Rep. Jeffrey Sanchez
Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz
State Senate PResident Therese Murray
Speaker of the House Robert DeLeo
Sen. Maj Leader Frederick Berry
House Majority Leader Ronald Mariano
Sen. Min. Leader Bruce Tarr
House Min. Leader Bradley Jones
And my cover letter:
Dear,
As a parent and an educator, I am deeply concerned about the current atmosphere of attacks on public education. These attacks come from both the Democratic and Republican parties, and are funded not by the public, but by corporations and wealthy individuals who are bent on privatizing public education. George Bush’s No Child Left Behind and President Obama’s Race to the Top share the ultimate goal of removing education from the hands of local control and putting it in the hands of for-profit groups like Pearson and any number of private charter school companies. This will result in the loss of democratic rights – of parents and citizens in general – to have a say in the education of our youth.
On October 17th, at the request of educational historian Diane Ravitch, and blogger Anthony Cody (who has recently engaged in a public dialogue with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation about the role of poverty in student achievement), over 400 teachers from across the country sent letters to President Obama. I was one of them. In our letters, not a single teacher supported Race to the Top or the new culture of testing as both a means and an end of improving student achievement.
The letters were collected by Mr. Cody in a single .pdf document which I have attached. I urge you to sample these letters and use what you learn from America’s pedagogical experts what we really need our leaders, such as yourself, to support and enact in the name of quality education. Please help the country move away from imposing untried, unscientific, and punitive measures such as using student scores to evaluate teachers. This is a measure that adds profits to testing companies, but does nothing to actually support learning. Help the country move away from the urge to privatize public money in the guise of closing public schools in favor of charters, which often have the same, or worse, testing results than the public schools they replace, and don’t even have the same populations (charters find numerous ways to restrict ELL and SPED students). Help the country to face what is really at the root of poor student performance: poverty and inequities in the distribution of resources.
America is facing a crisis in education that will have repercussions reaching far into the future. Teachers should be supported, not vilified. Please, read these letters, and focus on defeating the real enemies of education, instead of setting up false ones that will do no one any good.
Sincerely,
John M. Radosta