Video of massive rally in Albany today and my speech

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:

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.

Nikhil Goyal on fire at One Voice rally in Albany today

Here was one of the best speeches in Albany today, by teenage rock star/pundit Nikhil Goyal, announcing he will lead a statewide boycott of testing next year.

Good afternoon. My name is Nikhil Goyal. In January 2013, I graduated from Syosset High School on Long Island. I am a member of the No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top generation. My generation has been tested to an extent that is unprecedented in the history of this country, many experts have said. My entire school career has dominated by endless testing and a culture of "drill, kill, bubble fill."

My friend and educator Marion Brady once said, "Even if standardized tests didn’t cost billions, even if they hadn’t narrowed the curriculum down to joke level, even if they weren’t driving the best teachers out of the profession, they should be abandoned because they measure the wrong thing."

My fellow peers, from Portland to Seattle to Providence to Chicago to Newark to Philadelphia, have been walking out of school, protesting, and rallying against high-stakes testing, budget cuts, and the assault on public education. Whether it is gay rights, voting rights, civil rights, women's rights, in every successful social movement, it is always young people taking charge, leading the way, lighting the fire out of outrage within us all.

Wael Ghonim, one of the organizers of the Egyptian revolution, once said, "The power of the people is much stronger than the people in power." We may not be in the White House. We may not be in the halls of Congress. We may not be in our state legislatures. We may not be in the boardrooms of corporations. But we are in our classrooms and in our schools every day. And we have in power in numbers.

Next year, we are launching a student-led campaign in New York to boycott the ridiculous state teacher evaluation tests. Last year, I opted out of the tests. I left the Scantron blank and left the room.

Thousands of students will do the same.

It's time for our stakeholders to rise up and revolt. We will walk-out. We will opt-out of testing. We will boycott. We will protest. And we won't stop until our demands are met.

Nine-year-old Asean Johnson said at a rally to stop school closings in Chicago, "We are not toys. We are not going down, not without a fight."

To Governor Cuomo, Commissioner King, Mayor Bloomberg, Chancellor Tisch: We're coming for you. We're taking back our children. We're taking back our schools. We're taking back public education from your hands, from the hands of corporations, billionaires, Wall Street, and testing companies.

Wake the hell up. I'm not a stupid little kid. Do you hear me?