Our regular contributor KrazyTA offers the following advice:
“It is easy to get tired and feel beaten down by the edubullies and edufrauds as they use their bludgeons of sneer, jeer and smear on all those for a “better education for all.”
“They say it is often darkest before the dawn.
“The beginning of a speech of 1854 by William Lloyd Garrison:
[start]
“I do not know how to espouse freedom and slavery together. I do not know how to worship God and Mammon at the same time. If other men choose to go upon all fours, I choose to stand erect, as God designed every man to stand. If, practically falsifying its heaven-attested principles, this nation denounces me for refusing to imitate its example, then, adhering all the more tenaciously to those principles, I will not cease to rebuke it for its guilty inconsistency. Numerically, the contest may be an unequal one, for the time being; but the author of liberty and the source of justice, the adorable God, is more than multitudinous, and he will defend the right. My crime is that I will not go with the multitude to do evil. My singularity is that when I say that freedom is of God and slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say. My fanaticism is that I insist on the American people abolishing slavery or ceasing to prate of the rights of man ….
[end]
Link: http://www.blackpast.org/1854-william-lloyd-garrison-no-compromise-evil-slavery
Remember: not that many years before the start of the Civil War, things looked pretty bleak for the abolition of chattel slavery. And nowadays, not a day passes that some new development might make folks think that things look pretty bleak for ensuring a “better education for all.”
As the old saying going, it’s darkest before the dawn. If you feel you can’t go on, just remember:
“Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.”
Harriet Tubman. She didn’t say it would be easy. But she did say we could do it.
And the tide has been turning, albeit slowly and painfully, for a while.
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” [Mahatma Gandhi]
As I see it, we are in stage 3.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Bravo, elegant and inspiring.
…and then the Supreme Court overturns your win.
We’ve got no other choice. They’re going to destroy unions with Friedrich v CTA. They’re going to elect an anti public ed president in Hillary or Scott Walker. They’re going to steal our pensions. But we will fight. Because, quite literally, we have nothing much to lose and no other choice.
This made me weep.
I am sure there are so many others out there who needed this today, just like I did.
This fight is hard! No doubt.
Everyday we get a little stronger! Everyday we grow more determined! Everyday I see another of my friends waking up to this mess and joining the fight! Every single day.
Keep getting up in the mornings and putting on your battle gear comrades! The casualties of this war have been and continue to be great. When we win, and we will win, we shall still be here to help put the pieces back together!
Onward!
…finally, the ultimate Supreme Court praises and approves the REALISTIC human rights. This is what we certainly know and experience within one life according to the old saying:
“”Good deed returns good deed, evil follows evil””
Back2basic
Or, “Seek good and you will find it; seek evil and it will come to you.” (Proverbs)
Thanks for the encouraging words. So many teachers have become demoralized and dispirited from the continuous and constant beat down from the reformers/privatizers and their stooges in the media.
An amazing message of hope. The last line of Gandhi’s movie was think of it, the bullies never win. How else could we define the reformers who make up statistics and lie, give public monies to private greedy corporations, revile teachers and educators , ignore the impoverished and disabled students, and make learning dry, and boring and all about tests. What else are they if not well funded, arrogant, self involved, selfish bullies.
We must hope.
We must fight
in all the ways we can – responsibly.
It will be hard as mentioned.
It may be long – but who knows, it may come sooner than later.
[darkest before dawn.]
Contracts are sacred…unless they’re made to a teacher.
What is perhaps the most disheartening is that the deformers have identified every crutch that we leaned on for determining education policy and worked in earnest to commandeer them or dismantle them.
Education research – let’s hire a bunch of researchers to generate what we want to say
Standards – Let’s govern what’s taught in classrooms whether it’s reasonable or not, educationally sound or not (this leads into all the VAMish nonsense)
School boards – let’s buy the races or have control seized from them, or both (buy the board then have it turn over power).
Money – Let’s find every end run through taxes and otherwise that will take money out of the schools from the students we’re trying to save, and blame that on teachers for being so greedy that they need to accept less – let’s take their money spend it elsewhere then blame them for their bloated pensions too.
Purpose of Education – Rather than being student centered it is now job market centered with schools being responsible for generating appropriate human capital (the student matters so much as they need to be come the chattel for said market)
I went into teaching to help students and make a living to help support my family. Pretty simple. If you look at the lens of effectiveness through all of these elements and how they’ve shifted over the last 20 years, it’s pretty disheartening.
They are succeeding (right now anyway) in turning school from a place of wonder, fun, community, and learning, into a hellish individualistic market centered hell hole focused on prepping each individual student for the test they must pass to be deemed “good product” – that takes away from so much of developing students into the types of neighbors we’d want in society. The message is insanely cynical.
Did you inspire this, Krazy?
http://m.poststar.com/news/local/activist-begins-hunger-strike-to-protest-common-core/article_ebf1e214-38e9-57cf-a277-5f92b653e8a4.html?mobile_touch=true