A teacher left this comment on the blog:

 

I am a teacher and PARENTS have everything to do with joining the dialogue on education (http://parentsacrossamerica.org/ ). And the teachers I see day in and day out want to know what parents think, what they see and hear from their children outside the school environment… we desperately want parents to understand what “reforms” are requiring of teachers nowadays… and that we teachers have not been part of the process at all! Any teachers (as well as “corporate ed reformers” like John King demonstrated in Poughkeepsie) who do not want your observations should be suspect! As far as setting policy, current “ed reformers” have worked hard to “sell their product” to parents via a very tight and highly organized PR machine that works relentlessly through the media and they have worked equally hard at keeping public school teachers away from policy setting dialogue. Someone commented that everyone always brings up the “medicine analogy”… i.e. just because we go to a doctor does not mean we should be setting medical policy etc… Well, everyone has a role to play in setting medical policy – some roles are direct and some less so. A patient can certainly let the medical community know things that do not work so well from a patient perspective and this will help set policy as to how patients should be dealt with so they feel comfortable. But do we want the patient to determine how the MRI machine is operated? Or how much anesthesia should be given to a patient? Sure hope not! Bill Gates, David Coleman, Eli Broad and a host of others have way over-stepped their bounds by creating and implementing education policy!

As a teacher, I dream of parents, students, teachers and fed up administrators joining hands and putting a stop to the “educational” abuse of our nation’s youth through “corporate ed reform” policies. If your child used to love school but no longer is excited about it, if your child is throwing up the night before a high stakes test or getting sick and not wanting to go to school during high stakes testing season… or is afraid to express an opinion on something for fear of “being wrong” or spending way too much time on a take home “vacation packet” designed to help them do better on high stakes tests thus having a stressful “vacation week” at Christmas etc…, join teachers in fighting the nonsense of corporate “ed reform” and find ways to get fellow parents to join in. I sure wish the middle and upper class parents whose students are failing under common core would realize and join hands with low income parents whose students have been suffering a lot longer due to the high stakes tests pre “common core” that their students struggle to pass.

So LT in addition to the cite referenced above http://parentsacrossamerica.org … also take a look at this cite:http://unitedoptout.com/