The rally in Albany was massive today; with estimates of 25,000. You can get a sense of the size from the video below. I was honored and
excited to be a part of it. Let's hope it is just the beginning of a real movement to rescue public education, led by teachers, parents, administrators and students, to take back our schools. Here is my speech:
excited to be a part of it. Let's hope it is just the beginning of a real movement to rescue public education, led by teachers, parents, administrators and students, to take back our schools. Here is my speech:
We
are here today to call upon the Governor and the Legislature to do what is
right for the children of New York.
Children
need good schools. Children need small class sizes. Children need experienced and caring
teachers…But instead of giving New York's children what they need, the
Governor, the Legislature and the Regents are intent on giving our kids more
tests.
Parents are outraged as to how our public schools are being
undermined by policymakers who do not seem to realize how their decisions are
hurting New York State’s children.
From the testing obsession, to budget cuts, class size
increases, and rampant sharing of private data, the needs of our students and
the priorities of parents are ignored, and our trust in government is eroding
every day.
Rather than give our children the smaller classes they need,
the corporate reformers claim that personalized instruction will be provided
through software and data analysis.
So the state is providing all our children’s most sensitive
personal information to a corporation called inBloom Inc. funded by Bill Gates
– which in turn plans to give this information to for-profit vendors w/o
parental consent.
Because of protests from parents, four states have announced
they are pulling out of inBloom –– but the arrogant and reckless bureaucrats in
the NYS Ed Department are still intent on going ahead no matter what.
NYS is now the only inBloom client willing to risk the privacy
and the future of more than 3 million public schoolchildren of the entire state
by putting their names, test scores, disability status, health records &
disciplinary records on a vulnerable cloud -- managed by Amazon.com with an
operating system by Wireless, run by Joel Klein and owned by Rupert Murdoch.
And not only parents should be worried – inBloom is also
collecting personal teacher information, including your social security number
and the longitude & latitude of your home address, as though they wanted to
send a drone missile to your home. They
are putting this data together with your students’ test scores, and the reason
you were let go from your last job – so that there can be a national black list
of teachers based upon unreliable value-added formulas.
Collecting data and providing it to for-profit companies run
by people like Rupert Murdoch can never substitute for the personal interaction
a child has with his or her teacher. You
cannot be replaced by a machine.
Today we come together to say, enough of this arrogant
dismissal of the voices of parents, children and teachers; enough of the damage
being wreaked on our schools. We will not stand for it any longer.
It must end today.
3 comments:
Leonie- awesome speech! Are you sharing it on FB? Can it be shared on FB?
Thank you,
Margaret
Fantastic speech! Isn't it sad how elected officials in NY just ignore the voice of the parents and educators of our city in order to follow their own agenda. The only one gaining from their policies are the charter school advocates who couldn't care less about the education of the majority of our children in public schools.
Feel free to share it wherever! Thanks,
Post a Comment