Archives for category: Education Reform
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Jeff Bryant: How Community Schools Help Revive Erie, Pennsylvania

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2021 //
6

Jeff Bryant recounts the story of the revival of Erie, Pennsylvania, which was in the depths of despair, both as a city and as a school district.

Manufacturing was leaving the city, white- and blue-collar jobs were disappearing, poverty levels were rising, the public schools were losing enrollment, and the city and its schools were in deep deficit.

He writes:

As good-paying jobs left Erie, families increasingly left the local schools. By the 2016-2017 school year, the district estimated its schools were 5,000 students below capacity, reported the Erie Times-News, which meant less money was coming into the district from the state, compounding the district’s long-standing funding deprivation from the state—among the lowest in Pennsylvania, according to the Erie City School District’s assessment.

Asking local taxpayers to dig deeper was not an option in a city where almost 28 percent of residents lived below the poverty level, the median home value was significantly below the state average, and an abundance of government-related buildings made almost a third of the real estate tax-exempt.

Erie’s school district was also bleeding money to an expanding charter school sector, one of the largest in the state. In the 2015-2016 school year alone, Erie paid more than $22 million to charter schools.

Students remaining in district schools tended to be the ones who were the costliest to teach. In a 2016 report using data from the 2014-2015 school year, 80 percent of Erie K-12 students were classified as poor, and 17.6 percent qualified for special education services. The district was also in the top 3 percent among Pennsylvania school districts for the number of English language learners.

Jeff explains how a bold superintendent won emergency fiscal aid from the state and launched community schools, before he moved on.

The funding, of course, was crucial, and the community school modeled transformed relations among parents, teachers, students, and schools. As the model become established, it brought hope to a community that had been battered by years of bad news.

Read Jeff’s article to learn how the community schools work in Erie.

Categories Education Reform

Gary Rubinstein: NYC’s New Chancellor Runs a Chain of Low-Performing Schools

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2021 //
12

Gary Rubinstein, a math teacher at Stuyvesant High School, has no patience for overblown claims. For a few years, he maintained a website devoted to debunking the spurious claims of “miracle schools,” such as those that claimed 100% graduation rates of their seniors but neglected to admit the high attrition that occurred before senior year.

He inevitably had to review the chain called Eagle Academy, which was founded by David Banks, who is Mayor-elect Eric Adams’ choice to be Chancellor of the New York City public schools. The Eagle Academy has six schools, one in each of the city’s five boroughs, and one in Newark.

Gary reviewed public records for the data, and he wondered why none of the city’s media had done what he did.

He writes:

Before Eric Adams was the next mayor of New York City, he was the borough president of Brooklyn. In that capacity, he worked with David Banks to create ‘The Brooklyn Nine’ where Banks would share some of the best practices from Eagle Academy to improve nine schools in Brooklyn. There is a short documentary about Eagle Academy on HBO currently called ‘The Infamous Future’ , similar to Waiting For Superman, made a few years ago in which Eric Adams says that the practices of Eagle Academy should be used in more schools so that they become ‘The Brooklyn 90’ and then ‘The Brooklyn 900′ and eventually the entire school system can replicate the success of Banks’ Eagle Academies. So this gives us some idea of what to expect in the next 4 or 8 years with Adams as Mayor and Banks as Chancellor.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Media, New York City

New York Will Drop edTPA

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2021 //
51

The New York Board of Regents, which is the state’s Board of Education, has begun the process of eliminating the controversial edTPA as a requirement for certification.

The New York State United Teachers applauded the decision, which is almost certain. Theres no evidence that the test is weeding out people who would not be good teachers. It has had a disparate racial impact. At a time of teacher shortages, there’s a need to hire more teachers, not fewer.

Categories Education Reform

Do Not Forget the True Purpose of School

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2021 //
13
Mother’s first class, around 1950, at Skabersjöskolan, where I myself also went to school.

A friend in Sweden sent this article via Twitter. It was written by Jenny Maria Nilsson. I went to Google and asked for a translation from Swedish to English. Sweden is even farther down the road to privatization than we are. A conservative government in the early 1990s opened the way to public funding of independent schools, many of which operate for profit.

She writes:

The goal for primary school is not millions of different things but first and foremost education. If that goal is achieved, it certainly also provides other things: life opportunities, education and freedom, social interaction, a place for children to be and so on, but the school’s goal is teaching a basic curriculum.

In the book about the digitalisation of the Swedish school, which I have contributed to, I write: “What is the school’s task? To be a marketplace for all kinds of commerce, an arena for the edtech industry, a pseudo-market for welfare entrepreneurs and consultants, an advertising opportunity for municipalities, schools and individual teachers, a leisure center where children can thrive while parents are at work, an institution that organizes social support, a place where educators are responsible for identifying and developing great talent, an organization that will kick-start your child’s career, rank your child and let it make contacts with others in its social group, a place for admiration and curling of young people or vice versa a place where you put children in place and so on. ”

Tax-financed primary school is none of this but a “room” organized by us where previous generations through teachers and other school staff strive to convey the basic practical and theoretical knowledge that has been accumulated in various fields. The goal often seems to me to be distorted, the school system has increasingly been characterized by what I call the era of panic, where more people are looking for things that have nothing to do at school. The school has become a means for various special interests rather than a goal in itself.

To leave the era of panic, we need to navigate an era where school and school institutions and administration can maintain integrity. An era where the school is a cohesive unit that honors its knowledge and education mission – what I call the era of the monolith.

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, International, Real Education

Audrey Watters “Takes on Ed Tech from Its Beginnings”

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2021 //
30

Steven J. Koutsavlis, a research associate at the National Center on Privatization in Education reviews Audrey Watters’ new book on the history of education technology in schools. Its title is Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning.

Koutsavlis writes:

On account of the pandemic, there has been a seismic shift to remote or hybrid instruction. However, long before COVID-19, forces to harness instruction to technology were at play within the American school system. In Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning (MIT Press, 2021), Audrey Watters masterfully explores this story and explains the consequences technology has had on the nature and architecture of American schooling.

As many policy analysts know, Watters has been writing incisively about this important topic since 2010 on her blog, Hack Education: The History of the Future of Education Technology. With Teaching Machines, she cements a decade of lucid, riveting commentary.

In this NCSPE excerpt, in particular, Watters establishes the foundation for her analysis with a depiction of the first efforts of the Harvard psychology professor B.F. Skinner to mechanize learning. Skinner would go on to develop several teaching machines during the Sputnik era and beyond. Watters explains how he incorporated his work as a behaviorist into the design of these learning devices.

Skinner, along with other progenitors of teaching machines such as education psychologist Sidney Pressey, aimed to pioneer the automation of pedagogy, “freeing the teacher from the drudgeries of her work so that she may do more real teaching, giving to the pupil more adequate guidance in his learning,” Watters writes. In doing so, they prioritized the interests of private entities looking to engineer systems of learning at the expense of teachers and school leaders who aimed to engender more democratic modes of education.

The posture of automated learning presumes that the work of evaluating student responses and guiding them to new levels of understanding can simply be outsourced to a programmed device and does not require the nuanced touch of a seasoned practitioner with deep content knowledge. Yet the word “assessment” itself derives from the Latin assidēre, meaning “to sit down to.” The role of the teacher to sit beside children and listen deeply and intently, not only to learn how students are approaching a particular task, question, or problem, but also to hear from them about what piques their curiosity about the work at hand and motivates them to persevere. Watters deftly details how even the most well-designed or well-intentioned teaching machines fail to achieve this. She moreover describes how critics of Skinner such as Paul Goodman raised these concerns as they saw these devices dehumanizing the educational process.

“Who, then, will watch the puzzlement on a child’s face and suddenly guess what it is that he really doesn’t understand, that has apparently nothing to do with the present problem, nor even the present subject matter?” Watters quotes approvingly from Goodman’s 1960 book, Growing Up Absurd. “And who will notice the light in his eyes and seize the opportunity to spread the glorious clarity over the whole range of knowledge; for instance, the nature of succession and series, or what grammar really is: the insightful moments that are worth years of ordinary teaching.”

Even with advanced programming and interactive computer displays, personalized teaching machines or programs may not be able to elucidate nuanced understandings of difficult concepts with struggling learners. Independent work with these programs is often unsupervised, and students may receive unauthorized assistance to particular questions instead of actually supplying their own authentic response. A recurring issue with struggling learners is also the motivation to complete the tasks themselves. Extended independent assignments often, in fact, result in fatigue and non-completion for students who are still building task stamina.

Watters also writes about the very challenges of implementing such programs, where private demands for technocratic control over the levers of schooling have clashed with the needs of actual practitioners and students. As we see in contemporary education settings, Watters documents that programs were often rolled out in a hasty and haphazard fashion, unsupported by research evidence demonstrating their effectiveness or appropriateness for students and without adequate levels of teaching training or adoption.

Programmed instruction in the form of teaching machines as well as the modern incarnation of computerized learning engines, Watters likewise makes clear, represent a highly systematized and standardized form of education that collides with more progressive, constructivist, and student-led pedagogical methods. They also reify practices and norms within school systems that promote a highly functionalist model of education, where students are fed bits of information as they are trained to complete discrete tasks serving little more than the informational needs of private companies.

While programmed learning systems and algorithms aim to provide individualization and personalized learning, Watters demonstrates how they can conversely serve to stifle creativity and individual expression, on the student, teacher, school, and system level. “These technologies foreclose rather than foster possibilities,” Watters writes.

For longtime followers of Watters’s blog, which is now on hiatus, Learning Machines will fulfill all expectations. For those who haven’t read Watters’s blog, this excerpt should pave the way to reading the book. Agree or not with Watters, readers will be glued and challenged.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, History, Technology

Kathy Irwin: The Public High School in Mayfield, Kentucky, is Serving Its Battered Community

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2021 //
6

Blog reader Kathy Irwin sent the following comment, which shows how important publicschools are as the heart of their communities. This shows why we fight against privatization of public assets, of which public schools are the most important.

She wrote:

A “pioneer” in the Community School Movement was 1929 Elsie Ripley Clapp when she took John Dewey’s thinking on democracy into The Ballard Memorial School in Jefferson County Kentucky. Not all that far from Mayfield, Kentucky where today the public high school is still standing after last night’s devastating series of tornadoes.

Mayfield High School has been turned into a shelter. People are taking refuge there. They are being fed, treated for injuries, fed nourishing, cafeteria meals. Clothing is provided, WiFi, relocation services, even transportation to another safe destination.

It does not take much to imagine this as an example of a community school IN ACTION. No one chose this weather catastrophe but it serves to remind us of what resources community schools can coordinate when administering to The Moment.

Elsie Clapp later ran a community school in FDR’s industrially ravaged Arthurdale, West Virginia. Starving families were literally selling body & soul just to stay alive when this Great Depression era school sprang up from a buckwheat farm and began demonstrating how public schools can enter a crisis and become the HUB and the ❤️ HEART of people-directed restoration and recovery.

Charter schools are in no position to do any of this work. It is not in their “DNA”. But it is the genetic makeup of community schools and there is plenty of crisis at hand. The Pandemic is the monster opportunity but so is the climate crisis headed our way.

Elsie Ripley Clapp learned how to enter, enjoy and energize the very humane energy stream of people-powered problem-solving. Community schools walk right into the middle of the fray, facing it head-on because they are the practical embodiment of We The People.

Thank you, Kathy!

Categories Education Reform

Leonie Haimson: To Reduce Inequality, Cut Class Sizes

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2021 //
23

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, is one of the nation’s most persistent advocates of class size reduction. She is the voice of many parents in New York City, who regularly tell pollsters that their number 1 wish for their children is smaller classes. Now that the city’s public schools anticipate a new infusion of funds, Haimson and many parents are pressing to get a commitment from the city to reduce class sizes.

She writes in The Nation:

New York City public schools are often as crushed as the subway during rush hour, with literally thousands of students forced to learn in overstuffed classrooms—sitting side by side, elbows knocking into each other, or sometimes leaning against the wall or resting on a radiator. Even in the age of Covid-19, hallways are so jam-packed it can be hard for students to get to their next class.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way—and, if the city’s mayor and the City Council speaker would pass a crucial piece of legislation limiting class sizes in New York’s public schools, it wouldn’t have to continue. But as the end of the council’s term ticks closer, the two are standing in the way of a popular bill, adding a new and frustrating chapter to a drama that’s been playing out for decades.

New York City parents and educators have been calling for smaller class sizes since at least the 1960s. In 2003, the state’s highest court agreed with them. It concluded that class sizes were too large to provide students with their right, guaranteed by the state Constitution, to a sound basic education. It found that the plaintiffs, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, “presented measurable proof” that New York City schools have “excessive class sizes, and that class size affects learning.” It concluded:“The number of children in these straits is large enough to represent a systemic failure.”

To remedy this and other inequities, the court ordered that the state provide more funding to high-needs districts, and in 2007, the state passed a law requiring New York City to use these funds to lower class size. But then the Great Recession hit, and the full state funding never materialized. Class sizes actually increased.

Today, classes in the city’s public schools are larger than they were in 2003—especially in the early grades. Before the pandemic hit in 2020, more than 330,000 students—roughly a third of the school population—were crammed into classes of 30 or more. On average, classes in the city’s public schools are 15 percent to 30 percent larger than they are in the rest of the state. While both Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio, the city’s most recent mayors, promised to address this critical inequity during their campaigns, both failed to follow through once elected.

Now, the pandemic has brought the perennial problem of class size into sharper focus, as the need for social distancing has made smaller classes more critical than ever. At the same time, Covid-19 has helped bring unprecedented resources that could be used to address the issue: Over the next three years, the city is due to receive an additional $8 billion in federal and state funds for our schools.

The federal funds are meant to help the city improve both the health and safety of the classroom environment—goals that smaller classes could help achieve. The state funds—which amount to $1.3 billion in additional annual aid, due to be phased in over three years—represent the long-overdue fulfillment of the mandate of the CFE case.

Together, these funds represent a remarkable opportunity, one the City Council recognized when it proposed that a substantial portion of them be allocated toward reducing class size. But the mayor balked. So the council’s education chair, Mark Treyger, introduced Int. 2374 in July, a bill that would effectively phase in smaller classes over three years. It would do this by increasing the per student square footage required in classrooms, ranging from about 18 to 26, depending on the grade level and room size.

The legislation currently has 41 cosponsors out of 50 members—a supermajority that could overturn the mayor’s likely veto. Yet the vote on this bill has been delayed by Speaker Corey Johnson, despite the fact that there are fewer than two weeks before the council adjourns for the year and a new one takes over in January.

Read on to review the research supporting the value of class size reduction as the most important and effective reform that schools should enact.

Why is City Council Chair Corey Johnson blocking this crucial measure?

Categories Class size, Class Size Matters Org, Education Reform, New York City, Parent Groups, Parents

Steve Ruis: Are Democrats Tricking the GOP into Resisting Vaccines?

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2021 //
99

Steve Ruis posed an interesting suggestion in a comment yesterday. What if Democrats tricked Republicans into fighting vaccines and masks?

He wrote:

Maybe we should approach this using the mechanisms of the GOP. Spread the rumor that the anti-vax/anti-mask campaigns were created by liberals to deliberately expose GOP voters to the deadly disease. GOP voters are known to be older and more likely to die if they get the disease, so they have been targeted with these fake news campaigns.

Of course! Qui bono when diehard conservatives drop like flies from the COVID?

What if Steve is right?

What if it was undercover Democrats who persuaded Trump voters that masking and vaccines are for sissies and that real Americans, real men and women, don’t wear masks and never get vaccinated?

What sane Republican would want conservative families to fight against public health measures?

The entire Trump family is vaccinated, but that means nothing to the anti-vaxxers.

What kind of mind control has convinced them that it is fine for Trump and Melania to get the shot, but they don’t need it?

Even Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar are ridiculing the vaccine. They were tricked too.

The Republican base is supplying the great majority of COVID deaths.

When will they figure out that they were hoaxed?

Categories Democrats, Education Reform, Fraud, Health, Republicans

PBS: Anti-CRT Laws Make Teachers Fearful of Teaching about Race and Racism

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2021 //
262

PBS NewsHour posted an AP story that described the chilling effect of anti-“Critical Race Theory” laws. Laws that ban the teaching of certain subjects and that ban books never end well. They are the path to censorship and ignorance.

New measures that restrict how race is addressed in classrooms have spread confusion and anxiety among many educators, who in some cases have begun pulling books and canceling lessons for fear of being penalized.

Education officials have nixed a contemporary issues class in a Tennessee district, removed Frederick Douglass’ autobiography from reading lists in an Oklahoma school system and, in one Texas case, advised teachers to present “opposing” views of the Holocaust.

At least a dozen states have passed measures this year restricting how schools teach about racism, sexism and other topics. While educators are still waiting to see how they will be enforced, the vagueness of some of the measures, coupled with stiff penalties including potential loss of teaching licenses, already are chilling conversations on race in schools and, in some cases, having consequences that likely go well beyond the intent of those approving the measures.

Matt Hawn, a high school social studies teacher in Tennessee, said he has heard from teachers concerned about how they will teach controversial topics since he was fired himself this spring as state lawmakers were finalizing new teaching restrictions.

“It’s certainly giving them caution, like, ‘What’s going to happen if I teach this?’ — because the penalty is so steep,’” Hawn said.

Hawn was dismissed after school officials said he used materials with offensive language and failed to provide a conservative viewpoint during discussions of white privilege in his contemporary issues class, which has since been eliminated.

Teaching around race and diversity has been on the rise alongside a broader acknowledgment that racial injustice didn’t end in America with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Those efforts have spurred a backlash, particularly among Republican voters.…

Some sections of the new laws would seem unobjectionable. Tennessee’s law bars the teaching that one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex. But other sections are more murky, barring teaching that promotes division or causes children to feel psychological distress because of their race or sex...

In Tennessee, a conservative group of mothers in the Nashville suburb of Williamson County, Moms for Liberty, has challenged how schools teach the civil rights movement to second graders.

In a letter to the Department of Education, Robin Steenman complained that the texts and accompanying teachers manual imply that “people of color continue to be oppressed by an oppressive ‘angry, vicious, scary, mean, loud, violent, (rude), and (hateful)’ white population.” The books Steenman cited include “Ruby Bridges Goes to School” and “Martin Luther King Jr. and the March on Washington.”

In Oklahoma, teachers in the Edmond Public Schools said books by authors of color were struck from a list of anchor texts, around which English teachers build their curriculum. A lawsuit filed by teachers, students and parents said the district also removed commonly taught texts by Black authors from the curriculum, including the autobiography of Frederick Douglass.

How is a teacher to know what is permissible?

Clearly, to comply with the law and to avoid arousing parent anger, teach children that racism happened long, long ago, but it doesn’t exist anymore.

Never mention anything happening today that suggests the persistence of racism (which doesn’t exist anymore), like the murder of George Floyd, Briona Taylor, Tamar Rice, or other persons of color.

Do not mention the 2020 election, so as to avoid discussing who won or lost.

Do not ever discuss gun control or gun rights (too divisive).

Do not discuss abortion (too divisive).

Do not discuss the assassination of John F. Kennedy Jr. or Martin Luther King Jr. (divisive).

Do not discuss immigration (divisive).

Perhaps what the legislatures should do is revise the laws so that they describe in detail what teachers are allowed to teach.

Best of all would be if legislatures agreed that they should not write curriculum.

Categories Education Reform

Civil Rights Groups, Unions Form Coalition to Urge Federal Funding for Community Schools

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2021 //
11

If you don’t know the work of Jitu Brown, this is a good time to inform yourself. Jitu Brown has worked for many years as a grassroots organizer in Chicago. He wants families and communities to be able to advocate for themselves, and he trains them to do it. He ardently opposes school closings and privatization, methods of ”reform” that are imposed on communities of color by the powerful. He led the successful hunger strike that blocked the closing of the Walter S. Dyett High School, forcing Mayor Rahm Emanuel to rescind the closing and to reopen the refurbished high school. Out of his work in Chicago, Brown led the creation of the Journey for Justice Alliance, which has chapters in 36 cities. J4J strongly supports the establishment of community schools that meet the needs of communities and build networks of families and communities.

MEDIA ADVISORY TUESDAY, DECEMBER 7TH 10:00 AM ET


AFT’S RANDI WEINGARTEN, NEA’S BECKY PRINGLE, U.S. SEN. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, CONGRESSMAN BOWMAN (NY-16), JOURNEY FOR JUSTICE’S JITU BROWN TO JOIN EDUCATION EQUITY COALITION AT PRESS CONFERENCE TO ANNOUNCE NEW COALITION


National Leaders Back ‘Equity or Else’ Campaign and
Push for Biden Budget Initiative: $440 Million for Community Schools


(WASHINGTON, D.C) – On Tuesday, December 7, 10 a.m. ET, the American Federation of Teachers president, Randi Weingarten; National Education Association president, Becky Pringle; U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-MD; Congressman Jamaal Bowman, NY-16; Journey for Justice Alliance national director, Jitu Brown; and Schott Foundation for Public Education president, Dr. John Jackson will join national justice and education union leaders to hold a press conference in support of the “Equity or Else” campaign to announce a brand new commission, and amplify its strong support for President Biden’s education budget which will announce a groundbreaking increase of 41 percent for school funding in his proposed FY2022 budget. This Equity Commission will engage municipalities and the federal government to inform government officials at every level on how to create investments and policies that transform quality of life for all Americans, with a focus on equity.


Journey for Justice sits at the helm of the coalition that has been pivotal in shaping President Biden’s agenda on education, especially around community schools. The Equity or Else campaign is a coalition of leaders and organizers from different quality-of-life areas, including education, housing, health care, environment/climate justice, youth investment and food production and delivery, to promote education on how inequity impacts these areas and the grassroots solutions they have organized.

The coalition includes: The Alliance for Educational Justice, The Center for Popular Democracy, National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression, Dignity in Schools Campaign, American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association, Appetite for Change, Clean Water Action, White Coats for Black Lives, National Nurses United and Black Lives Matter at School.


WHAT: News Conference with National Education and Justice Leaders on President Biden’s Budget Proposal and Brand New Equity or Else Commission


WHO:
● U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-MD
● Congressman Jamaal Bowman, NY-16
● Becky Pringle, president, National Education Association
● Randi Weingarten, president, American Federation of Teachers
● Dr. John Jackson, president, Schott Foundation for Public Education
● Jitu Brown, national director, Journey for Justice Alliance
● Zakiyah Ansari, Alliance for Quality Education, state advocacy director ***

PLEASE EMAIL MAYA.HIXSON@GMAIL.COM TO RSVP*** WHEN: 10:00 AM ET, Tuesday, December 7, 2021

WHERE: The National Press Club, 529 14th St., NW, 13th Floor, Washington, DC (Vax card or Negative COVID Test Required)


Facebook Live: https://www.facebook.com/J4JAlliance

FURTHER BACKGROUND: The Schott Foundation’s national Opportunity to Learn Network, in partnership with the Journey for Justice Alliance’s Equity or Else project, is launching a nationwide campaign to reverse the trend of privatizing public schools and in its place implement its proven plan for reimagining an education system that has long neglected Black and brown children and starved their schools of resources.

Bolstered by a newly created Grassroots Equity Commission, Equity or Else has come to Washington to back the Biden administration’s budget, which would double the Title I funding that targets low-income schools and, for the first time, allocate $440 million for sustainable community schools. The commission, formed by Schott with J4J, will engage local and federal government in exploring how institutions engage Black, brown and working-class families.


Intent upon getting true equity in education for children of color and reversing the runaway school-privatization trend abetted by Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary, grassroots members of campaign organizations will also meet with key senators and with current Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.


The time is ripe for reimagining public education. The Biden administration is committed to allocating critically needed new resources for the task. Congress has shown itself willing and able to provide those resources. The conviction of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers has amplified the discussion of what equity actually means. The pandemic has highlighted the stark inequity that afflicts children of color. And those who have been left behind are raising their voices to demand the rooting out of systemic racism in every institution, including: schools, hospitals, healthcare, food production and delivery systems and public safety.


The Schott Foundation’s Loving Cities index assesses how these institutions function in Black, brown and working-class communities. Equity or Else is founded on the proposition that this reimagining of policy must be guided by the voices of those who have been most deeply affected by inequity. We have come together and are finding solutions that meet our needs.

Equity or Else is doing listening projects with people in underserved communities across the country. The Equity Commission will engage officials from municipalities and the federal government to explore how those foundational institutions in those communitIes can be reimagined, with a focus on equity. By using data from all these sources, the commission will be able to inform government officials at every level on how to create equitable investments and policies to transform quality of life for all Americans.


The following national organizations are participating in the overall Equity or Else campaign: The Alliance for Educational Justice, The Center for Popular Democracy, National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression, Dignity in Schools Campaign, American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association, Appetite for Change, Alliance for Education Justice, Clean Water Action, White Coats for Black Lives, National Nurses United and Black Lives Matter at School. For more information go to http://www.standing4equity.org

Founded in 2012, the Journey for Justice Alliance (J4J) is a national network of intergenerational, grassroots community organizations led primarily by Black and Brown people in 36 U.S. cities. For more information go to www.j4jalliance.com.


FOR MORE INFORMATION: MAYA HIXSON
321.266.2000 MAYA.HIXSON@GMAIL.COM
LAURIE GLENN
773.704.7246 LRGLENN@THINKINCSTRATEGY.COM

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Categories Civil Rights, Creativity, Democracy, Education Reform, Equity, Health, Hope, Innovation, Privatization, Safety, Students, Supporting public schools
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