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In this Discussion
- bvaliant May 2012
- cgaw May 2012
- garyv May 2012
- Horace_Mann May 2012
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After the Letter is Sent
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It is time to start talking about what happens at Dump Duncan after the letter and signatures are delivered to the White House. R Gary and I have been talking about organizing local initiatives using the email addresses and zip codes provided by those who chose to "opt in" when the y signed the letter. What are your ideas. We obviously can do more than one thing.
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After the printed batch is sent of to the White House, I'm going to leave the petition running until Duncan is gone, but it will simply send emails to the Pres each time there's a signature.I'm then going to focus my attention on advocating for local control for public education.The drive ended up being much more successful than I had initially imagined it would be. I am particularly impressed that the initiative was completely free of financial sponsorship. What we -- all of us -- accomplished required no money, no celebrity educators, and no strings.
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Dr. Valiant,I believe I would not be mistaken to say the bottom line of what we all want is local autonomy. This would inevitably end high stakes testing, common core, the national database, corporate takeover, etc.Do we want some type of confederacy then, where we are all working locally, but communicate nationally?
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I'm with you 100%, Horace. This will not be an easy task. There are a wide variety of ideas about how public education should operate so unifying rhetoric will have to exist outside of the context of learning theory and pedagogy. We are talking about creating a political structure that allows smaller groups of people to make decisions about how education best operates for their children and communities.It is also going to be sobering to point out that when the national corporate/bureucratic edifice falls, the real work of reconstructing local education systems begins.I also think we've got problems with the existing American Dream of materialism, but that's a long conversation.At this point, I think these are the most natural allies:
- parents
- disenfranchised communities
- individuals on either end of the traditional left/right ideology spectrum
Anyone materially benefiting right now from existing structures is going to be a hard sell. -
Give 5 year olds the choice between a sour apple jolly rancher, apple flavored fruit roll up, 3 oz individual plastic container of applesauce, or......... an apple. When you have given something to each one, my bet is you will still have all your apples.And so it goes with this dilemma, R Gary Valiant.
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Valiants...I have a real hard time getting logged in to this forum. Google ID always says BONK, something is wrong, and FB id keeps saying I need a unique name. Maybe it's just me, but maybe it's also keeping lots of people from joining. Might need some maintenance on log in?
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R Gary, I think we have a re-circulation problem. Most of what I write gets about the same number of hits. A few of my things reach out there and pull in some new, but for the most part, I think we may be going around congratulating each other on what we know.I talked with my sister the other day for the first time about my blog. She works in the business world, raised two kids, and in general sees merit based pay, charters, etc. as gov. reform that is working to make pub. ed better. She read my blog and asked a few questions and cited bad teachers, 'lifers' as real problems. I think most of the public can remember one bad teacher who affected them negatively, and thus see reform as needed without needing a hard sell. They buy it.These are the people we need to reach en masse, and convert. It will take conversion. How?
