This student-made video protests New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plans
for the "turnaround" of one school.
Michelle Rhee calls her organization StudentsFirst, a common affectation among corporate-style education reformers, who often like to claim that the tens of millions of dollars they pour into remaking education policy are spent on behalf of students and parents. But in fact, the policies they push—promoting testing, making it easier to fire teachers, opening charter schools, and bringing profit motives into education in a dozen more ways—are not only empirically flawed and anti-teacher, but are often opposed by actual students and parents, who are increasingly pushing back.
In Florida, a so-called "parent trigger" bill failed last month. Though it was sold as parent empowerment, "Not a single major Florida parent organization supported the bill, including the PTA," with many opposing it, believing that it "would lead to the takeover of public schools by for-profit charter management companies and other corporate interests."
In Seattle, a growing group of parents have opted their kids out of standardized tests:
"We're not against testing," Purcell said. "But in the context of all the budget-cutting, we're saying: Can we at least spend the money on a more useful test?"
And in New York, students at
several schools slated for
"turnaround" have
protested in a variety of ways.
Kids and parents don't have the money to put into their protests that the corporate reformers have to put into the agenda being protested. But at least they're speaking in their own voices, not trying to claim to speak for someone else to cover up a profit motive.
