Phyllis Bush, one of the founders of Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education, describes here the growing sense of hope among her fellow activists.
Bush joined a contingent of colleagues in Austin for the first conference of the Network for Public Education. Bush is a member of the board of NPE.
Everyone, she says, felt the energy in the room when hundreds of Resistance leaders gathered.
She writes:
“Arising from this message of validation, we could feel there is hope and that the tide is turning. Momentum is building, and it feels as though we are approaching a tipping point. The 500 activists at the conference represent thousands more across the country who are questioning the wisdom and the speed with which education reforms and untested policies have been implemented and which ask for virtually no accountability for charter schools and for voucher-funded parochial schools.
“Parents and teachers are protesting the vast amount of instructional time devoted to preparing kids to take tests whose only real value appears to be to label students, teachers schools, and communities as failing…..”
“Throughout the country there is a growing sense of outrage over the bill of goods corporate reformers have sold legislators. The primary way in which these reformers have operated is by writing stock legislation that governs legislation at the state level and threatens local districts with punitive action.
“Throughout the country, there is a growing sense that parents and educators have been right all along; public schools are not failing. The corporate, for-profit reformers view children as data points and test scores; their view is unacceptable. The research shows that this “brave new world” of testing, accountability, charters and vouchers that Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, the Koch brothers, the Walton Foundation and ALEC have promoted is not working.”
“Parents and teachers know that the joy of learning comes from imagining, creating, playing, thinking, experimenting, problem solving and being ready to learn. The joy of learning comes when a child has an “aha moment” when he or she finally gets it. Parents know that play contributes to learning; that children need the physical activity at recess and in gym class just as much as they need “rigor” sitting at a desk; that art and music help children learn much more than learning to practice for a test and bubble in an answer sheet.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This i optimistic news. Now, it would be wonderful if there was a group developed, a ‘Committee of Correspondence” to formally coordinate, facilitate and reap the full value resistance across the country
I agree. This is needed more than anything else — a way to unite the voices of all the parents, teachers, and public school supporters as one.
The question parents are beginning to ask, and should have been asked a long time ago, is how is this test helping my child’s learning. The standardized tests regime are not designed to answer this question. They are solely built on a model of comparing/correlating numerical schemes that achieve their “validity/reliability” by reducing/ignoring multidimensional traits (which are undefinable) to unidimensional right and wrong answers that leave the child totally out of the assessment picture. Of course the test makers present the myth that their tests is measuring some ill-defined trait inside your child —think about that for a while. Returning to the original question, what am I learning from the test score that will help my child read better or compute better—aside from the glib comment, “study harder,” or “do the homework,” the silence that follows looking in grade books (which have columns of numbers/checks that are more meaningless than the standardized tests) or telling a parent that their child scored ___ on the state test says it all. For so many years as a teacher and administrator, I taught in classrooms and sat in special education staffings, looking at some for of numerical evaluation of a student that in no way resembled the student I knew in my classroom or hallways. What the educational professionals and their minions in Washington have put children through is truly tragic. I thought when I retired I would be finished with this insanity, but I am now back on the crazy train watching my grandchildren put through this test-prep meat grinder in supposedly good schools. It is chilling to hear a nine year tell you: “School is so boring, all we do it take tests. It’s ok grandpa, the teacher lets me go to the bathroom a lot.”
“What the educational professionals and their minions in Washington . . . ”
Alan,
The edudeformers certainly are not “educational professionals” unless one considers that self reported moniker to be true. No, they are not “educational professionals”, they are professional charlatans, posers, frauds, etc. . . .
I purposefully used the term educational professionals to denote a group of individuals who are firmly established in professional organizations, such as ASCD, NASSP, NAEP, AERA, KAPPAN, NEA, AFT– I could go on, but the point is a political one–that we have lost control of our profession.It is now in the hands of individuals with credentials, theories, and vocabulary that rule over who gets published, who gets to speak at conferences, and who is invited to sit on state and national panels. I would agree, that currently the profession is governed by what I call the unschooled. Having said that, try to have a proposal accepted at any national conference that is critical of the testing/accountability regime or would even mention John Dewey in their remarks. A recent response to a proposal I submitted (will not name the organization) indicated they were looking for strategies for implementation (e.g. common core, formative assessment, etc.), not for a new model of schooling. Tragically, these organizations have hooked their economic wagon to Washington’s crazy wagon train.
One can sense that the tide is turning away from the corporate, for-profit reformers because they are getting nastier against those who seek to protect our great nation, it’s public schools and their teachers, and our precious children.
The amazing thing about the entire reform movement, from Common Core to its disgracefully inappropriate content and grotesque experimental revision of proven educational learning, to the idea of storing enormous and personal data on American children for exploitation purposes, to the biased and error-based teacher evaluation system…to the underfunding of public schools with the intention of portraying them as “failures”, to the propping up of charters and portraying them as anything but failures….whereby Cuomo blatantly stands with charters and their corporate cronies, and dances for joy when the public schools suffer.
If one thinks about it, the $800,000 “donation” Cuomo received from Moskowitz is the cost of one nice home…or with about 1.2 million students in New York City, he sold the children out for approximately 67 cents per child.
Democracy is the fairest and best form of government known to humanity…however, it is the slowest when trying to “right a wrong”. But the tide is definitely moving away from the hideous agenda of the reformers…They should be labeled for what they are…enemies of our American values.
“. . . the $800,000 “donation” Cuomo received from Moskowitz is the cost of one nice home. . . ”
Around here that would be one hell of a “nice” mansion. It’s more like five very nice homes.
Duane, $800,000 is a very large campaign contribution, but it would not be enough to buy a one-bedroom apartment in the toney neighborhoods of Manhattan.
There is a wonderful book called “The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein. It demonstrates how deformers either use natural disasters, or man-made ones to push their policies through. In order for their changes to become implemented, they must push them through with speed…away from any democratic debate. The concept is called…”shock and awe”…,and it is what is being used to wrongfully label public education a failure.
Hence, the private negotiations pushing the privatization movement away from the public eye. Their goal is to keep the American people in the dark for as long as is necessary, so that they can buy off many entrepreneurial governors, such as Cuomo, and others who have sworn to serve the public but value money over ethics, to push their personal agendas, no matter who they harm.
Actually, pseudo disasters.
Teachers in Indiana concerned about over-testing should join parents, Monday, April 21st at the Statehouse for a rally. We were promised “uncommonly” high standards, but were instead presented with a very poorly rebranded version of Common Core! We call for a re-adoption of IN’s pre-Common Core Standards, which IN teachers no well. http://in.chalkbeat.org/2014/04/18/common-core-critics-plan-to-protest-new-indiana-standards/
Excuse my typo! I’m using my cell phone and meant “know”