Beth Lewis wrote this report about the great news from Arizona, where SOS Arizona is staying strong, united, dedicated, and powerful.
SOS Arizona won NPE’s first annual Phyllis Bush Award for Grassroots Leadership, presented at the NPE conference last October in Indianapolis.
Beth Lewis writes:
We have good news from Arizona! Coming off of their huge victory in defeating Proposition 305, which would have been the nation’s largest voucher expansion, Save Our Schools Arizona took their fight to the statehouse and won several critical battles.
The grassroots powerhouse stymied all five legislative attempts to either expand access to “Empowerment Scholarship Account” (ESA) vouchers or lower oversight of the existing program.
This marks three years in a row that the national voucher lobby has been defeated by volunteer parents, teachers and retirees in AZ. It’s thanks to mounting pressure to respect voters and fund Arizona schools, as well as wide reaching efforts to educate voters about the harms of privatization. Thousands of everyday citizens called, emailed, and met with lawmakers to make their opposition clear. In the end, the voice of the people prevailed over the various local and national special interest groups trying to push these bills. Arizona, the one-time school choice proving ground, is now demonstrating to the nation how to fight and prevail against privatizers. And that’s exactly why SOSAZ needs our support – to continue prevailing and protecting public schools. Please support their incredible work by donating at sosarizona.org/donate – they are nowhere near done fighting and need massive support to continue their work!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Congratulations. This is no small achievement. Eternal vigilance will be necessary, and votes, to reduce the likelihood of more take-down efforts.
This is what happens when educators lead the fight for public education!
AZ SOS is indeed led by heroes!
Hooray for AZ SOS!
Children are more important than big public education monopoly jobs. Not all kids fit into the one size fits all public school factories. The narrative is, “let’s save public schools and give a great education to everyone”. The reality is, “let’s eliminate competition and force kids to attend public school factories, even if it harms the child.” The big public education monopoly, willing to harm children I’m order to to further the union agenda.
Matt,
Are you proposing that we adopt the Betsy DeVos agenda of vouchers for everyone to attend any kind of school, no matter how backward, how biased, how racist, how unqualified it is to “educate” anyone?