Save Our Schools weekend

In case you missed it, the same weekend Congress tortured us with an eleventh-hour default standoff, thousands of parents, teachers, and education leaders gathered for a call to action on educational policy. Organizers of the Save Our Schools weekend met over four days for events that included workshops, a congress, and a march of about 5000 people. We came to address not just an education crisis, but current government policy that shows a profound lack of judgment about and respect for the field of education.

No one argues that public schools are fine the way they are. What's being protested is how policies like "No Child Left Behind" and "Race to the Top" are attracting privatization monies that systematically demonize teacher unions and shut out parent and teacher voices in tackling what should be our shared goal of improving schools. (Read about the co-location sagas playing out in New York City schools under mayoral control. Watch the newly released film "The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman" that is a response to the "Waiting for ‘Superman'" film that recently swept the country.) As David Cohen, a teacher from California, writes: "Would you force reforms on the military and ignore the opinions of career officers? Would you try to change practices in hospitals but ignore the input of nurses and doctors?" Taxpayers beware: educational policy must be smarter than this.

"Race Over the Cliff" threatens our public schools by using high-stakes testing to aim shrinking resources toward corporate charters, whose testing results are just as variable as those of public schools. Current reforms invite educational profiteering and such simplistic actions as replacing staff with cheaper, barely trained Teach for America young people. If what we want are highly qualified teachers, we won't get this by dismissing experienced teachers for new ones whose training consists of five-week crash courses before being placed in their first jobs. Would you want your children - especially if they had learning challenges - to serve as guinea pigs for well-meaning but highly inexperienced and unqualified teachers?

These reform examples are hypocritical "solutions" to problems that deserve deeper, more sustained kinds of work than that.

On that sweltering weekend in Washington, parents, teachers, and educational leaders came together to remind policy makers that quick-fix reforms are no substitute for quality change. If Americans want to get serious about improving schools, then we must recognize that there are no shortcuts. It takes time to build a quality teaching force and time to cultivate deep student learning. Let's work together to make all schools great and available to all.

To get a taste of the weekend, sample this link: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2011/07/save_our_schools_rocks_the_cap.html?cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS2

A version of this op-ed appeared in Rochester City Newspaper, August 23, 2011