Venture capitalists and deep-pocketed corporate foundations, such as Bain Capital and the Walton Family Foundation, are moving aggressively to remake MA public schools based on their right-wing ideology. They are funding “Stand for Children” to sell a ballot initiative that would undermine our children’s learning environment and sharply restrict teacher job protections. Don’t let them do in Massachusetts what they did to Illinois!
Stop Corporate Control of Education: Sign the Pledge
May 14, 2012 by
News Alert: 64 Former Stand Activists Oppose Ballot Measure
May 11, 2012 by
A group of former activists with Stand for Children have endorsed an open letter calling on Stand for Children to withdraw their ballot initiative.
The group, which includes parents and school committee members from across Massachusetts, wrote:
The proposed ballot measure attempts to blow up the collaborative work that created the new regulations last spring. It does nothing to improve teaching in our schools. What it does is put the careers of our teachers at the mercy of an untested rating system, violating the recommendations of the people who designed that system.
We fear the result would be to drive some of our best teachers away from the schools that need them most.
Stand for Children’s Ballot Question: Bad for Teachers, Kids and Schools
April 9, 2012 by
The ballot initiative by the numbers:
Words: 2826
Pages: 5
Sections: 11
Provisions supported by data-driven scientific research: 0
Just the FAQs
The “Stand for Children” campaign is called “Great Teachers, Great Schools.” What does the ballot initiative do to help teachers improve their teaching and become “great teachers”?
Nothing. It’s not about that.
What does the Stand proposal do to make schools great—Cut class size? Improve leadership? Lengthen learning time? Help parents get more involved with their children’s learning?
No. It’s not about any of those things.
So what is the “Stand for Children” proposal about?
Many things. One of them is that new, untested teacher ratings would drive critical staffing decisions including layoffs and transfers. (However, principals could ignore the ratings—see below.) To read more, click here. → Read More
Stand for Children’s Ballot Question – What’s the Deal?
February 4, 2012 by
Join the CPS effort against this ballot question by letting us know you want to help. Email office@citizensforpublicschools.org → Read More
Why is Stand Selling Voters a Pig in a Poke?
January 23, 2012 by
What is a pig in a poke?
- A term dating from the Middle Ages meaning buying something claimed to be a suckling pig in a bag (“poke”) without looking to see what was inside.
- The Stand For Children ballot question called “promoting excellence in public schools.”
Will it actually:
- Turn good teaching into mindless test prep?
- Cause further narrowing of the curriculum?
- Punish teachers of the neediest students and deter teachers from working with these children?
- Drown principals in pointless paperwork?
Nobody knows!
Stand wants to force school districts to take a new teacher evaluation system that does not yet exist and has not been tried in the real world, and use it to decide on layoffs, transfers, and other critical matters. The system is just beginning to be developed, so nobody knows yet how it’s going to work.
But the New York Times reports a similar system in Tennessee has been a disaster, keeping principals tied up with endless paperwork, sending teacher morale into a tailspin and prompting such insanity as measuring music teachers by a school’s writing scores. → Read More
