Education Spring 25,000 strong and counting
Sign The Education Declaration to Rebuild America
For too long, our policymakers have engaged the nation’s schoolchildren in a grand experiment, with frequent testing, incentive programs and top-down mandates that promised much but delivered little.
Today, after an education spring of protest and dissent, leading advocates, academics, and educators have come together to demand An Education Declaration to Rebuild America.
Those who’ve signed the Declaration include prominent progressives, such as Robert Reich; public officials, such as Florida State Senator Nan Rich; education experts Diane Ravitch and Linda Darling-Hammond; union leaders Randi Weingarten and Dennis Van Roekel; parent activists, such as Rita Solnet; authors Jonathan Kozol and Dave Eggers – and more than 40 other prominent leaders. See them here.
We invite you to add your name and forward this to friends so that we can grow this movement for real education reform based on what America needs and our children deserve.
For too long we’ve only focused on a standards-based reform agenda, without systemically providing children the supports they need to learn and succeed. This Declaration unites leaders from many diverse sectors in calling for a pivot in America’s educational trajectory.
— John H. Jackson,
Schott Foundation President & CEO
Declaration Co-Author
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Reblogged this on PHIGURITOWT.
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Education Spring and modern communication technologies:
The name, “Education Spring” taken I assume from the concept of the “Arab Spring” will hopefully bring about a social movement and resistance that many of us would like to see. Part of that resistance is to the “Educational Industrial Complex” and the further enrichment of Oligarch’s and the 1% whose growing monopolistic control of education seems evident.
Maybe “Educational Industrial Complex” borrowed from Ike’s “Military Industrial Complex” is, however, the wrong image! Maybe it’s wrong even if the concept comes from one of America’s greatest Republicans; an irony, I thought. Ike led before the individual through the “post-modern” internet, text, cell phone, twitter, and other liberating communications existed. Those liberating communications made the “Arab Spring” possible.
Another irony with Ike was he appointed Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Warren’s viewpoints led him to look at the “individual” and he went on to lead the Court to a 9-0 decision with the Brown v. Board of Education case. Think about it, a 9-0 decision to end school segregation by both “liberals” and “conservatives” by Northerners and Southerners. Would that be possible today?
Fundamental justice and liberty starts with the individual, and perhaps “industrial complex” is the wrong image because it violates too many parent’s conception of liberty in the “post-modern” information age. After all, the conceptions of justice and liberty that came from the Brown decision and Civil rights are now a half century old. When it comes to the education of “their” individual children, parents today are unwilling, I think, to sacrifice the perceived safety or opportunity of their own children. To do so at the expense of fighting something like the ” industrial complex” even if it does violate conceptions of social justice with the formation of monopolistic practices on the part of Oligarch’s and the 1%.
Most parents, in my experience, simply go about the business of finding the best educational opportunities they can for their individual children. They do so, for the most part, without consideration for the implications of their actions on the larger social order. It is through the use of modern communication technologies that parents can now form “internet communities” that reach outside traditional neighborhoods (as isolated as some of them may be) and find other school alternatives. They can do so through charter schools and through the privatization movement in education. It’s difficult for public, civic, democratically invested school systems through school boards to compete.
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Julian–the “see them here” link does not work. Thank you for the post. I have signed.
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Fixed! Thanks for the heads-up JS Noble. 🙂
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It’s the least I can do–thank YOU for your dedication and work.
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Joined the Petition, thank you!
Yes, American school children don’t need to be subjected to the “Educational Industrial Complex” that is really designed to put $billions of dollars in the pockets of America’s oligarchs under the guise of doing philanthropic work. While the internet and computer industry has contributed to education, it has also undermined (LEAs) local school boards, administrators, teachers, and parents. LEAs in their civic effort to provide educational opportunities for ALL children, has been thwarted under the ideological guise that “private” is good and “public” bad. The national agenda by neo-liberals and neo-conservatives is to “privatize” education using Federal incentives. While school systems are inappropriately represented as being “monopolies” –really public and civic endeavors that are voted on- real monopolistic practices in the private economic sector as it relates to education does exist. For example, just two publishing corporations will share in the development of the Common Core Standards evaluation process across 46 states.
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