AFT President Randi Weingarten Launches Effort to ‘Reclaim the Promise of Public Education’!

Dear Commons Community,

Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), has launched a new initiative, Reclaiming the Promise of Public Education.  Its basic themes are:

“…about fighting for neighborhood public schools that are safe, welcoming places for teaching and learning. Reclaiming the promise is about ensuring that teachers are well-prepared, are supported and have time to collaborate. Reclaiming the promise is about enabling them to teach an engaging curriculum that includes art, music and the sciences. Reclaiming the promise is about ensuring that kids have access to wraparound services to meet their emotional, social and health needs.”

This “promise” is in response to:

“…the pressure not only from out-of-touch legislators, but from economic and societal factors outside school that make it much more difficult to achieve success within the classroom. Nearly 1 out of every 2 students in public schools lives in poverty, and educators have become the first responders to their stress, hunger and hardships. But these factors don’t keep us from teaching, they keep us up at night.

Public education is also under assault by people whose brand of “reform” consists of austerity, polarization, privatization and deprofessionalization–and who then argue that public education is failing. Maybe they never learned the difference between cause and effect…

But people are beginning to see that the emperors of reform have no clothes. Years of top-down edicts, mass school closures and test fixation with sanctions instead of support haven’t moved the needle — not in the right direction, at least.”

In launching this initiative, Ms. Weingarten is presenting the teachers’ perspective but there are kernels of truth in what she says. The current school “reform” movement is centered on developing a corporate culture based on standardized testing and privatization and is not meant to improve public education but to undermine it.

Tony