Steven Singer asks: “How radical must we be to get the schools our children need and deserve?”
Steve describes two days of meeting with fellow activists in Philadelphia, where they discussed the road ahead.
He writes:
“All weekend at the United Opt Out Conference we’ve been talking about rebellion and revolution. There’s no weak tea here in the City of Brotherly Love. No half measures. We’ve been discussing tearing the system down piece-by-piece.
“A timid voice speaks up in the back of mind, “Do we really need to do all that? Do we really need revolution just to keep our public schools and make them into something worthy of our children?”
“I think I’ve been trying to answer that question for a while now. Maybe a lot of us have.
“In a rational country, our demands wouldn’t be so radical.
“We want public schools centered on the good of all, not the profit of some. We want educationally valid curricula for our children. We want some control over the school system – both as parents and teachers.
“Is that so much to ask? Is that such a lunatic request?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t get what’s so radical or revolutionary about trying to recover what was stolen.
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“The bus debacle as a description of how our school operates on an everyday basis.” A school board talk given to the School Board of Palm Beach County, FL. February 17, 2016.
https://youtu.be/DpKbCnFi7R8
Transcript:
Good evening. My name is Andy Goldstein. I’m a teacher at Omni Middle School and the proud parent of a seven-year-old daughter who attends second grade at one of our public elementary schools.
I read with great interest the article by Palm Beach Post reporter Andrew Marra titled “Collision course: Inside Palm Beach County’s school bus crisis.” The article detailed our school district’s bus debacle at the beginning of this year, in which a rushed implementation of a new technology program for bus routes resulted in many of our students being late for classes and many of our disabled students not being picked up at all.
As I started to read the article, I thought to myself, “Surely this is an aberration, a one time-event.” But as I read on about how the collective experience of our own bus drivers was ignored in favor of a rushed policy to implement computer-generated bus routes that made no sense, apparently to please a higher authority, I started thinking, “This is a very accurate description of how our school district functions on an every day basis.”
There is always someone or some higher policy that is pointed to as the reason we are doing things in the classroom, regardless of whether they make sense. And many times they do not make sense. The judgment of our own teachers, is not even in the equation. We teachers have been deluged with a plethora of nonsensical policies flowing through our classrooms, and we and our students have suffered.
John King, the acting Secretary of Education, recently in his first major speech, apologized to the nation’s teachers. saying “teachers and principals at times have felt attacked and unfairly blamed for the challenges our nation faces.”
But it hasn’t been “at times,” it’s been continuous, as part of an agenda to privatize our schools and make as much money off of our children as possible.
And a recent article in the New Yorker was titled, “Stop Humiliating Teachers.”
And we, and our students have been subject to much humiliation. A year-round standardized testing schedule and diagnostic schedule that has cheated our children of authentic learning opportunities. The important thing, apparently is not to have an opportunity to teach and learn but to test. It doesn’t even matter if the tests make sense. as long as they are given. And some times, they don’t make any sense.
I’ve started going around asking teachers an open ended question: “Do you find the diagnostic testing helpful.” So far no teacher I have asked has said that they find it helpful.
Our school district is obsessed with policies that don’t help our kids learn.
For example:
• The “We’re building the plane while we’re flying it Marzano teacher evaluation system.”
• Teachers stripped of their Step increments and relegated to a career at or near a beginning teacher salary.
• Teachers put on relegated to an annual contract which disempowers them, strips their educator’s voice to stand for what’s right.
• Students subject to dry test prep instead of authentic project based learning, cheating them of the joy of falling in love with the process of learning.
Our school district says, “Blame Tallahassee for these policies!”
Our principals say the nonsensical directives come from School District headquarters.
In our school district, there is always someone pointing to a higher authority as to why we are implementing nonsensical policies.
And our teachers strive to create an environment of teaching and learning despite the constant disruption of these nonsensical policies.
This evening, at your Board workshop, you discussed involving stakeholders in striving to achieve the goal of having all of our children read at grade level by third grade. I was very inspired.
Perhaps you could include our teachers among the stakeholders to achieve this goal, instead of leaving us out of the equation, as is usually the case.
Thank you.
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“We’ve been discussing tearing the system down piece-by-piece.”
That sounds like a reactionary goal, not necessarily the best one.
With all this “revolution” talk, anyways, I hope teachers can walk the walk. You’ll have to change yourselves, too.
“We want some control over the school system – both as parents and teachers.”
…and will the students have some control? Or will “school” continue to be “adults” demanding children to follow their requests?
“Revolution” must be careful, not simply an emotional response. John Dewey’s “Experience and Education” was a testament to this.
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I am reminded of Goya’s etching, Los Caprichos: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 1799.
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I have been watching the destruction our schools for two decades. Finally, people are standing up and going HUH? Next step, what can we do? The come folks like the one you describe who knows nothing,and says, “hey do we really have to do this?
Yeah.
it’s War. THEY made the war https://greatschoolwars.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/eic-oct_11.pdf
and the government helped by making it happen with the race to the Top, and the NCLB and the CC mandates.
Now, we see the REFORM for what it did to our INSTITUTION OF PUBLIC ED.
We need to stop talking about SCHOOLS, and see the assault on our ‘common welfare”.
Across the modern nations in Europe, as the Moore documenter “Where Do we Invade Next, shows. the health and education of the people is EXPECTED as the role of the elected government.
Yes, we have to fight… go to this video and if you want to see the POWER THAT WE are fighting, be sure you watch to the end and see the last chart.
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I can’t stress enough how amazing that United Opt Out conference was last weekend. The keynote from Chris Hedges was perhaps the highlight. I’m still thinking about his question – how radical must we be to get the schools our children deserve? It seems I’m willing to be pretty radical. Maybe more than some, maybe less than others. Food for thought. Thanks again for writing about my article, Diane.
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