Teacher Whitney Elliot spoke at the rally. Photo by Mark Thomson.

A Massachusetts public school activists coalition–including Citizens for Public Schools, Fairtest, Mass. SaveOurSchools, and Boston-area education faculty–rallied in Harvard Square Thursday, May 26, to tell Arne Duncan what we think about Race to the Top and his other education policies. (Arne Duncan was inside Harvard Yard performing as Chief Marshal of his 25thHarvard Class Reunion.) It was a broad-based coalition–teachers, parents, school committee/board members, city councillor, professors of education, fairtest–it was such a wonderfully broad spectrum.

Speakers included Deb Meier, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Alfie Kohn, Eleanor Duckworth, Larry Ward. Also Ruth Rodriquez-Fay of Citizens for Public Schools; Lisa Guisbond of FairTest and CPS, National Center for Fair and Open Testing; Marc McGovern, Cambridge School Committee member; Whitney Elliot, Boston public school teacher and author of blog, The “Greedy” Teacher; Diane Levin, Professor of Education, Wheelock College; Larry Aronson, retired Cambridge public school teacher; and founder of Social Justice Works!;   → Read More

Thursday, May 26, 2011, 10 – 11:30 a.m.

Speak Out for Public Education: Rally and Press Conference, Harvard Square (in “The Pit,” behind Out of Town News).

While Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is inside Harvard Yard performing as Chief Marshal of his 25^th Harvard Class Reunion, a group of prominent educators and public school teachers will be outside the ivied walls offering a public critique of his policies.

Speakers include Centro Presente, Prof. Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Whitney Elliot, Alfie Kohn, Deborah Meier, Merrie Najimy, Monty Neill, Ruth Rodriguez Fay, Larry Aaronson. For more information, contact Jenny Kastner 617-945-2869.

Save Our Schools! Rally in Washington, D.C., Saturday, July 30

Citizens for Public Schools is proud to join FairTest and other organizations that have endorsed the Save Our Schools Rally. Educators and families from around the country say they are fed up with so-called “reform” policies that falsely label more than 80% of U.S.   → Read More

Richard Rothstein accepts Activist for Public Schools Award from CPS's Lisa Guisbond. (Photo by Larry Aaronson)

No sooner did Richard Rothstein graciously accept his Activist for Public Schools Award from CPS than he challenged CPS members and other progressive reformers to rethink issues of educational equity and the “achievement gap.” Demonstrating his adherence to evidence, he passed out a chart showing huge gains in math scores for Massachusetts black 4^th and 8^th graders between 1992 and 2009. The evidence, he said, does not support the idea that our schools have utterly failed black students. On the contrary, they have made such great gains in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, that they essentially closed the gap that existed between them and white and students in 1992. The gap persists because whites have also made gains during that time.

Rothstein’s point was not that school quality doesn’t matter, nor that we cannot improve schools for black students, but that if reform activists buy into the idea that schools alone can make up for larger social inequities and close the “achievement gap,” we are buying what amounts to a losing battle for teachers and schools.   → Read More