Being pro-public school doesn’t seem like a controversial notion. But at a time when Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction lends his voice to a robocall pushing vouchers (“You may be able to send your child to private school for free!”) and charters, a public-private hybrid, are all the rage, advocating for preserving and improving our public school system rather than dismantling it can sound downright radical.
That’s why attending the Network for Public Education conference in Austin, Texas, the first weekend in March felt like entering an alternative education universe. It was a full-throated celebration of public schools, which a keynote speaker called “our trust fund; our nest egg.”
Eight Tucson-area residents joined the 400-plus attendees at the conference, including Robin Hiller, who is Executive Director of NPE (she also heads Tucson’s Voices for Education), and TUSD Superintendent H.T. Sanchez. In the course of keynote speeches as well as in 30 panels and workshops spread over six sessions, participants condemned vouchers unreservedly. Charters, at best, were viewed warily, and high-stakes testing was denounced for turning our schools into “testing factories.” One student wore a T-shirt pleading, “Don’t test me, bro!”
The term “education reform” was disparaged at the conference—not because the attendees are anti-reform, but because the term has been co-opted by the conservative-led school privatization movement.
“We’re not against reform,” said Julian Vasquez Heilig, an associate professor of educational policy and planning at the University of Texas, during his talk that opened the conference. “We want to reform the ‘reformers.'”
Hiller sat on a panel looking into the “opt out” movement, where parents refuse to let their children take high-stakes tests and teachers defy their districts by refusing to administer the tests. TUSD’s Sanchez participated in a panel with other superintendents discussing the challenges of “leading schools and districts in an era of high-stakes accountability.” (I was on of a panel that looked into charter schools, virtual schools and vouchers.)
Though a major thrust of the conference was the fight against the “education reform/school choice” agenda, the atmosphere was more upbeat than negative. It felt like a gathering of the progressive education tribes. K-12 teachers and administrators, university scholars and parents from around the country who had heard of one another’s efforts and had read each other’s news articles and blog posts met face to face for the first time. The overriding feeling at the conference was, “We’re not alone.”
Hiller found the experience energizing. “People here have seen the bylines and read the articles and blog posts,” she said as she looked around the auditorium on Sunday morning. “Now we can put faces and voices together with those bylines.”
Sanchez was impressed by the positive energy. “This isn’t a gathering of angry people,” he told me. “These are people who want public schools to be the best they can be. But at the same time, the conference allowed me to understand how wide and deep the frustration is with people who want to bring down public education.”
The Network for Public Education is only a year old, but in that short time it has developed a large national following. One of its goals, according to co-founder Anthony Cody, is “to endorse candidates who support public education. We don’t have a litmus test. Being in favor of educating our children in the community isn’t a left wing idea.”
For most of the participants at the conference, though, NPE is the center of a grass-roots movement, a virtual gathering place and educational clearinghouse for a growing number of people who are speaking out against what many refer to as the “corporate reform” agenda. The organization sends out daily email blasts and Facebook posts alerting its members to the most important education news and ideas around the country.
Diane Ravitch, who gave Sunday’s keynote address to thunderous applause and standing ovations, is NPE’s superstar. She’s an education researcher and historian whose trajectory parallels changes in the education landscape over the past 40 years. In the 1970s, Ravitch wrote about education from a mildly progressive/liberal perspective, but she grew impatient with the slow pace of educational progress. When the first President Bush took office in 1989, Ravitch was asked to serve as assistant secretary of education research, where she advocated for the “education reform” she now rails against. She helped the second President Bush implement No Child Left Behind.
But as she took a long, careful look at the agenda she was promoting, she realized the data showed it was failing. Worse, it was hurting our children and damaging our system of education. In 2010, Ravitch published The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. Last year, she followed with Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. Both books are considered required reading for people wanting an analysis of the failures of the conservative “education reform” movement. Ravitch also details the strategies, inside and outside of schools, that she believes will strengthen education for all our children.
NPE is a mostly volunteer organization. Marshaling the talents of educators and parents, it has created a dynamic website and a professional appearance, but it runs on a shoestring. The organization recently held a fundraising drive and brought in a little more than $20,000, which helped pay for the conference. To put that figure in context, the Walton Foundation, funded by the Walmart fortune, spent $164 million on “Systemic K-12 Education Reform” in 2013 alone (the Arizona Charter Schools Association received $600,000), and the Walton Foundation is only one of many deep-pocketed groups funding the charter/voucher/privatization push.
Despite the huge funding disparity, Ravitch is optimistic that the movement NPE represents will prevail. “We are not outgunned,” she said in her keynote speech. “We are outspent, but we are many and they are few. We will win.”
This article appears in Mar 13-19, 2014.
In many (not all) cases, public schools have become nest eggs and trust funds for the teachers, and not the students.
In case you forget, a school’s function, among other things, is to take a child and twelve years later, graduate a young adult who is functionally literate, something schools are increasingly failing to do.
It is NOT a place to brainwash the young with the latest flavor of the month.
After 27 years, I can tell you that I am working longer, harder, with fewer resources FOR THE CHILDREN, spending more of my own paycheck ( which hasn’t seen a raise in 8 years). Anyone who believes that TEACHERS are “benefitting” from having educational resources absolutely gutted, is just uninformed. (That’s the nicest word I can think of!) The trust fund being spoken of is OUR COMMUNAL PRECIOUS CHILDREN. It is being plundered in the misleading name of “choice”. Choice is something that has always been available-you just have to pay for it. Thinking that making it “free” will provide equity is just folly. I just returned from a trip to the Midwest where I toured many schools in several districts. There, they GET equity; every child in every school in every district has state of the art technology, reasonable class size, art, music. PE, counseling services….while at the same time teachers are paid fairly. A miracle? No. Simply prioritizing our children, our future, our trust fund-every one of them! If we continue gutting PUBLIC education….well, get used to wearing the scratchy Depends when you are old and relying on Medicaid-since THESE children will be in the workforce…and paying taxes!
I’m so gratified for the existence of NPE, for the work that went into organizing this conference, for this–and every–pushback against the privatizers and profiteers.
When the superintendent of a public school actively pushes for vouchers, he needs to get out of public education and join the Gates/Broad/Walton crowd. Vouchers do not help poor kids, good teachers do and there are many good and caring teachers in the public schools. When given the resources they need, they do an outstanding job educating our kids. Neighborhood schools and caring teachers, along with funding so that inner city schools are as resource rich as suburban schools (even more so, because kids who are hungry, have poor health care, and insufficient healthy food need more funding than needed to educate rich kids), is sorely needed – not vouchers.
Public educators fighting to save public education. Perhaps Superintendent Huppenthal should take notice and do likewise.
These voices need to be heard over and over by more and more people to rid public schools of the current terribly damaging testing and prescribed curriculum. Good schools and good teachers, of which the US has actually had many in the past, have always continued to find ways to improve. Current curriculum mandates, extensive testing, and draconian policies are not improvements, are in fact destroying our public school system and severely harming our young people (our future adult generations) and their teachers.
As a classroom teacher, then teacher educator, now retired, I have watched the increasingly aggressive take-over by corporate interests—textbook sellers and testing agents (Pearson most notably)—to the detriment of student learning and welfare. I see really good, caring, teachers stymied by the increasingly onerous teach-to-the-test constraints that prevent them from teaching-the-child. Good teaching is done by good teachers. Good teachers come from top-notch teacher-training institutions that include extensive, supervised practicum and internship components. Set high standards for those institutions, as we do for medical schools, then trust the teachers who emerge from them to make the curricular decisions that will meet the needs of the particular students who walk through their classroom doors.
I didn’t know about NPE but am sure glad they exist. http://www.networkforpubliceducation.org
I’d like to see more information about the Network for Public Education and its members.
I am grieved to see uninformed people casually discussing the merits of tossing aside a system of public school education that has been the envy of the world. I work closely with hundreds of public school teachers and assure you they are working at unsustainable levels to comply with senseless, draconian mandates issued by people who know nothing about the developmental needs of children, nothing about teaching in challenging settings, and nothing about creating the conditions necessary for learning. But since everyone has been to school, they feel entitled to weigh in on the matter, even if they have not stepped foot inside a school for many years.
How exactly are public schools “Nest eggs and trust funds for teachers”?
That statement makes absolutely no sense. You should become a more informed person, before you start spouting foolishness on a public forum. Sadly there are many who feel similarly and who are similarly misinformed. I am in my eighth year of teaching and I work another part time job as well as tutor to make ends meet for my family. I spend my own money to provide supplies for many of my students who come to school without them, and I spend my own money to purchase books for my classroom library to encourage my students to read by providing them with choices of what they would like to read. I have paid for lunches for students who cannot afford them and work evenings, some weekends, and a portion of every break that I get to provide quality lessons that will engage my students and motivate them to learn. How is it possible that teachers are the problem? The teachers who I know and who I have encountered work above and beyond their contract, use their own money, and never quit on their students. That should be appreciated and not looked down on.
One commenter asked for more information about the Network for Public Education. For those interested, here are the links.
Network for Public Education: http://www.networkforpubliceducation.org
NPE News Briefs: http://www.networkforpubliceducation.org/n… (You can get the news briefs in daily emails by Subscribing in the right hand column.)
NPE Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/networkforpublice… (“Like” the page, and individual news briefs will arrive on your FB page throughout the day.)
I think this says that folks who financially benefit from the current form of public education are all for it. Unfortunately , the data seems to rain on their parade. The US ranks in the low 20’s/high 30’s in global standardized tests and in our largest cities just 40% of students read at grade level while +99% of teachers get satisfactory or better reviews. And yet spending per student is highest in the US with the highest levels in the largest cities. In California, virtually all of the recent ” millionaire” tax increase for education went to retired teachers.
It would seem that the current system isn’t as perfect as these folks portray and maybe it is worth exploring alternatives.