Long ago there was an organization called Stand for Children that advocated for children and their public schools. Unfortunately, the organization jumped on the money train and joined the corporate reform movement. Now it is flush with cash. It still pretends to care about children but it uses its clout to strip teachers of any rights and to advocate for privatization. It is anti-teacher, anti-union, and anti-public education. Some of its former supporters now refer to the organization as Stand on Children.
In Colorado, where there is a heated contest for control of the Legislature, Stand on Children removed the mask. It has endorsed five Republicans who support privatization. Corporate money is bolstering the GOP campaigns, along with Stand on Children and Wall Street hedge fund groups devoted to privatization of Colorado’s public schools.
If you live in Colorado, please support these five Democrats:
Evie Hudak (SD 19)
Andy Kerr (SD 22)
Daniel Kagan (HD 3)
Brittany Petterson (HD 28)
Max Tyler (HD 23)
Public education advocates also urge a NO vote on Bond 3B, which allocates disproportionate funding to charter schools while neglecting the needs of students who are poor, black, and Hispanic and attending overcrowded schools.
Opponents of the bond say:
• A zip code shouldn’t determine the quality of a child’s education. This bond reinforces that race and class still largely determine which children are prioritized depending on where they live.
• Though SW Denver’s low-income children have suffered years of chronic overcrowding, there is little money allocated through the bond to address the needs of the 12 SW Denver schools which are over 100% capacity.
• Lincoln High School will remain overcrowded. Lincoln is the only high school designated by the district for English Language Learners. Many students must travel from throughout the district to attend this program.
• Charter schools will get millions of taxpayer dollars at the expense of neighborhood schools. Nearly 40% of non- technology monies will go to select charter schools. Of the $119M for new facility capacity, $80.6M will go to charter schools directly or through co-locations.
• Nearly $40 million or 32% of the new facility bond funds will go to Stapleton even though there is space in nearby schools. Manual High (4.4 miles from central Stapleton) and George Washington High (4.9 miles) have a combined 1500 open seats, and Smiley Middle School (2 miles) has 381 open seats. The planned location of the proposed Stapleton high school, at 56th and Spruce St, is 3.8 miles from central Stapleton.
• The amount to build a Stapleton high school is more than all bond monies allocated for the high schools of East, George Washington, North, South, Kennedy, Lincoln and TJ combined.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Facts do reveal agendas that are cloaked in euphemistic claptrap! Rather like a sloppy magician’s trick of distracting the audience from the slight of hand he/she is attempting to pull off. Charter schools likewise try to veneer their true objectives of corporate greed that will make education a profit driven venture-NOT an “excellence in education” true goal. At its base, these corporate types have a list of objectives that focus, just as this article depicts on; stripping of teachers’ rights, decent pay, tenure and ability to form unions to advance and protect what is obviously at peril. Having been an educator for decades, in three states, both public and private institutions, I have watched his covert attack on traditional public education and dedicated teachers. What is shocking to me is the vicious, nearly slanderous assaults on those low paid, 60+ hours work week, and often unselfish aid these people give to their charges,. Often these charter school advocates demand programs faculties know are inaffectual, then proceed to loudly condemn teachers for those programs predictable failures. Nice trick.
At least this publication was willing to withstand the blasts they are sure to have against them for their courage to reveal the truth of these pseudo lovers of public education. Bravo!
If you live in Colorado, please support these five Democrats…
Have these candidates stated their positions on implementation of the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), and the Koh memos? Do they support the reckless spending on tried-and-failed approaches? Are they satisfied with our President’s response to concerns regarding his administration’s education spending priorities?
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/hr/treaties/index.htm
I think there is some misinformation about the DPS bond. As a DPS teacher it is not a vast swath of public Ed advocates opposing the bond. The teachers union supports it and many of the claims are at least on some level biased by the neighborhood where the complaints are based.
1. It is true the bond does little to reduce over crowding in SW Denver where I work, but the presentation of Lincoln HS as the only school that serves ELLs is simply untrue. The school I work at which is 1 mile from Lincoln has an ESL program as does almost every other school in the district that is not a charter.
2. Stapleton does need a neighborhood high school as the two schools they have are a charter and an elitist art school. The open seats in those other school could only be filled, because of our choice based enrollment system, by collocation of a charter. Which is already happening in Smiley MS. Based on its location I find it hard to believe that a Stapleton HS would be mostly upper class white students. It would probably be more diverse than many of DPSs high schools. This would probably be a good thing.
3. I don’t know that it makes sense to say that monies go to charters at the expense of black and Latino students. We don’t have any very white and very wealthy charters. There are lots of reasons to complain about charters,in DPS but this one doesn’t work very well here.
4. The real issue here is that DPS is growing and we need lots of money to expand, the priorities might not be perfect but starving DPS will do nothing to fix our issues. The problem is we just can’t get enough to fix up our old buildings and build all the new ones we need.
5. There is money in one the of the measures, it might be 3A, that goes to teacher salaries.
I voted for this today and while I might not agree with all of it, I think I would be a bad thing if it didn’t pass.