Register for the Great Annual Conference of the Network for Public Education in Oakland on October 14 & 15.
Join the Resistance!
Meet your favorite bloggers!
Take a selfie with me and Carol Burris and Anthony Cody and your other friends and compatriots.
Learn, share, be inspired.
Join us.
Thanks to your efforts, the inaugural video about the fight to save public schools from privatization has reached over half a million viewers. In addition, it has been logged in by over a million Facebook feeds.
This is the video you shared. Please share it some more. We are aiming for one million views!
Our voices together have generated a mighty roar!
The public is waking up to the threat to their public schools.
They know that Betsy DeVos hates public schools and wants their children to go to charter schools, religious schools, cyber-charters—anything but a public school. She truly doesn’t understand the role of public schools in a democracy, nor does she have any ideas about how to improve them other than to eliminate them.
Together, we are sending her a message. The public schools belong to the public. They were paid for with tax dollars, and we are not giving them away, leasing them, or selling them off to entrepreneurs.
We will not tolerate this theft of public assets.
The public schools are a public responsibility, not a consumer good.
The Network for Public Education commissioned a series of short video clips to explain the issues in education today. The filmmaker is professional filmmaker Michael Elliot, who is a parent of children in the New York City public schools.
NPE is fighting for the future and the very existence of public education. We oppose the relentless attacks on public schools, teachers, and the teaching profession by unaccountable billionaires, entrepreneurs, and public officials like Betsy DeVos. We oppose the status quo, in which privatization is offered as the remedy for inequitably funded public schools.
We believe in the importance of democratically controlled, adequately resourced public schools staffed by professional educators. Good public schools are essential to democracy. We want to improve them, strengthen then, make them better for every child.
This short clip, in which I am the speaker, is the first of a series of eight, each addressing different reasons to fight for our schools.
The audience consists of parents, educators, and other citizens. It was filmed in a warehouse in Brooklyn.
We want our message to reach the largest possible public. Please put it on Facebook, tweet it, share it with your friends and family.
Viola Davis is one of the most gifted actors of our time. She has won the Tony Award, the Academy Award, and many other awards. She has never forgotten her humble origins and those who helped her rise to the top.
When she received the Tony award in 2010, she gave a powerful speech. She thanked God, her parents, and her teachers at Central Falls High School in Central Falls, Rhode Island. In that order.
I recall leaping to my feet when I heard her speak in 2010, because that was the very time when the city of Central Falls and the state of Rhode Island threatened to fire the entire staff of the High School that Viola Davis attended. To fire them en masse, from the principal to the lunch room staff. Arne Duncan congratulated the state officials for having the “courage” to fire everyone, and President Obama echoed Arne’s insult.
It was also the year of “Waiting for Superman,” and the corporate assault on the public schools went into high gear.
But then there was Viola Davis, thanking her teachers. I learned later that her own sister was a teacher at Central Falls HS.
But…but…but…then, Viola Davis took a leading role in the film “Won’t Back Down,” funded and produced by arch-evangelical billionaire Philip Anschutz (one of the “Superman” funders). “Won’t Back Down” celebrates the parent trigger, telling the fictional story of a parent and a teacher who were so disgusted with their public school that they gathered signatures and flipped the school over to a charter operator. I didn’t get to see the movie because it opened in 2,500 theatres (Anschutz owns the Regal theatre chain) and its receipts were so bad that it closed within a month and disappeared.
Last night, Viol Davis moderated Laurene Powell Jobs’ XQ extravaganza, which asserted that high schools are obsolete and need to be reinvented.
Viola Davis, please watch the speech you gave at the Oscars at 2010.
We need a real champion for public schools.
Trump and DeVos want to eliminate the schools that made you who you are today. Our public schools need your help. They are far from perfect. They need real reform, not a wrecking ball and disruption.
Viola Davis, help us. Join the millions of parents and educators who want better public schools.
The billionaires don’t need your help. We do. They are using you.
Join the Network for Public Education. Help the children and teachers whom the billionaires despise.
The annual conference of the Network for Public Education will take place October 14-15 in Oakland, California. There is space for only 500 people. It is nearly sold out.
Don’t miss your chance to meet your friends and allies from across the country, standing together to support public schools.
Please join us.
Please join me at the Annual Conference of the Network for Public Education in Oakland, California, from October 13-15.
It is a chance to meet some of your favorite education warriors.
Make friends, make common cause.
Join us!
It is no secret that everything in the public sector is under assault by the forces of privatization and greed. Public schools, public infrastructure, public libraries, public airport, everything that is funded and controlled by public authorities is up for grabs. Given that all three branches are controlled by the same party and that the Supreme Court will increasingly lean to the right, it is important that citizens take action.
Here is a manual for direct and nonviolent action written by a veteran of the struggles of the 1960s.
One thing is easier now: to create virtually instant mass protests, as was done by the admirable Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration. If one-off protests could produce major changes in society we would simply focus on that, but I know of no country that has undergone major change (including ours) through one-off protests. Contesting with opponents to win major demands requires more staying power than protests provide. One-off protests do not comprise a strategy, they are simply a repetitive tactic.
Fortunately, we can learn something about strategy from the U.S. civil rights movement. What did work for them in facing an almost overwhelming array of forces was a particular technique known as the escalating nonviolent direct action campaign. Some might call the technique an art form instead, because effective campaigning is more than mechanical.
Since that 1955-65 decade we’ve learned much more about how powerful campaigns build powerful movements leading to major change. Some of those lessons are here.
The manual is short. It offers valuable lessons about how to organize a resistance movement.
There are many fronts on which this current struggle will be and is being waged. For readers of this blog, the central issue is the survival of public schools, democratically controlled and governed.
The privatization movement is well organized and well funded. The entering wedge for privatization is the misuse of testing to defame teachers and schools. The entry point for privatization is charter schools. Then cyber charters, then vouchers. It is a continuum. The goal is to take tax money away from public schools and direct it to privately managed schools, private schools, religious schools, and tax dodges for the wealthy whose money is then used to support vouchers.
The Network for Public Education is dedicated to preserving and improving public schools. We are not satisfied with them as they are today. For one thing, they are burdened by the detritus of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Every Student Succeeds Act. We must fight for them or lose them. The time is now.
Join NPE at its annual conference in Oakland, California, in mid-October. Meet your allies. We will join together to support our schools and our democracy.
The charter school committee of the State University of New York will soon decide whether charter schools will be allowed to hire uncertified teachers. This is a bad idea because teachers must be prepared for a wide variety of children, including children with disabilities and English language learners. Of course, if charter schools are private schools, then it doesn’t matter whether their teachers are well prepared because they are unlikely to encounter the same students as in public schools.
If you think that every child deserves a well-qualified teacher, please send an email to the members of the SUNY charter committee, all of whom were appointed by Governor Andrew Cuomo. The linked message from the Network for Public Education makes it easy to send an email.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, has been selected by the board of the Horace Mann League as its 2018 Outstanding Friend of Public Education.
The presentation will be made at the HML Annual Meeting in February in Nashville (AASA Convention).
The HML made an excellent choice. Carol has been a peerless leader in the fight against privatization and high-stakes testing and in the ongoing struggle to transform public education so that it meets the needs of every child.
In recent years, she has published frequently on Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog at the Washington Post.
She is former principal of South Side High School in Rockville Centre on Long Island in New York. She has received numerous awards. In 2010, she was named Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, she was named SAANYS New York State High School Principal of the Year. She received her doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University.
I am proud to be her friend, colleague, and ally. I humbly name her to the honor roll of the blog for her energy, leadership, thoughtfulness, kindness, compassion, scholarship, respect for the teaching profession, love of children, and intellect.
She is an educator, and a great one.
My dear friend and ally, Phyllis Bush, started a blog to write about her experience with cancer, which she insists on calling cancer schmanzer.
She is feeling better. She is cleaning closets. She is ready for the fight for her life.
Phyllis keeps me informed about the corporate and billionaire funded effort to destroy public education in Indiana. She is a fighter. She is a founding board member of the Network for Public Education. We are all rooting for her.
