Monday, August 1

Join us in Brookline to hear about SOS Rally and Support CPS!

Public Schools and Teachers are Under Appreciated, Underfunded, AND UNDER ATTACK

Learn about and support two inter-related efforts to combat this:

•       Save our Schools March and National Call to Action, Washington D.C., July 28-31, and local events across the state, sponsored by Citizens for Public Schools.

•       Wisconsin Senatorial Recall Elections, August 9, and attacks on Public Unions.

7:00 pm, 123 Buckminster Rd., Home of Don Weitzman and Harriet Goldberg

Organized by Julie Johnson, Rep. Frank Smizik, Ed Loechler, David Klafter and Marcia Hnatowich, and supported by:  Citizens for Public Schools, Brookline PAX, and Brookline Chapter of Progressive Democrats of Massachusetts.

For more information about this event, click here. Read the Washington Post coverage of the rally here.

   → Read More

Diane offers more than enough great reasons to head to DC on July 30 and join her, Deborah Meier, Monty Neill, and many of your CPS friends. Here are just a few:

I am marching to protest the status quo of high-stakes testing, attacks on the education profession, and creeping privatization.

I want to protest the federal government’s punitive ideas about school reform, specifically, No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top. Neither of these programs has any validation in research or practice or evidence. The nation’s teachers and parents know that NCLB has been a policy disaster. Race to the Top incorporates the same failed ideas. Why doesn’t Congress know?

I want to protest the wave of school closings caused by these cruel federal policies. Public schools are a public trust, not shoe stores. If they are struggling, they should be improved, not killed.

Read the rest of her Blog post here.   → Read More

Join us in Washington, D.C., Saturday, July 30 for the

SAVE OUR SCHOOLS MARCH AND NATIONAL CALL TO ACTION

After decades of “school reform” it is finally…

Our Day! Our March! Our Voice!

BE THERE!

It’s time to change the national dialogue on public education.

For over a decade, education laws and policies have been enacted without input from those who REALLY know how
to improve our schools and society. And now, as we stand at a critical crossroads in the future of public schools and
the teaching profession…

• The President has a voice
• The Secretary of Education has a voice
• Politicians have a voice
• Corporate billionaires have a voice
• The media have a voice
Finally, the nation will hear OUR VOICE!

On July 30, 2011

The Save Our Schools March & National Call to Action in Washington, D.C.

To register and for more information, click here.   → Read More

Ann O’Halloran testified Tuesday, June 7, 2011, before the Joint Education Committee of the Massachusetts legislature in favor of House Bill 153. Among other things, she said this:

It is distressing that so many schools lack libraries and librarians, have relentless cutbacks in the arts, music, drama, after school programs, lack appropriate resources in books, technology and science labs, have constant cutbacks in special education, in medical, psychological, and social work supports that are essential to so many students. While the Commonwealth has built a mammoth testing system for students with huge concomitant costs  – with an intent to expand even further – it has been complicit in the ongoing cutbacks of the very basics of a modern school system.

To read her full testimony, click here.   → Read More