[RSCT] sign on letter to presidential candidates re: desirable and undesirable education reform

[Monty Neill]

I've been asked to forward this letter to listservs, which I am happy to do. Live links for this story are online at 
http://pureparents.org/index.php?blog/show/Open_letter_to_Obama_and_McCain_from_national_network. Monty


Dear Friends,

Two years ago, PURE teamed up with New York City-based Class Size Matters, to write an open letter to the parents of Los Angeles, warning them about the pitfalls of mayoral control of their schools.

An AP story about the letter was carried in more than 10,000 papers and their websites around the world, and the LA mayor never did get control of the schools.

We're joining forces again to get a message to the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates about the key reforms parents and others at the grass roots level believe are needed in the federal education laws.

We're asking you to sign on to the letter below. Please let us know if you will join us by contacting PURE at pure at pureparents.org by the end of the day on Friday, 9/5. We welcome any signers, but if you have a 
title or group affiliation please include that information. 

OPEN LETTER TO THE 2008 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES

Dear Senators Obama and McCain:

We would like to congratulate you on your nominations for President. As public school parents and other stakeholders, we want to bring to your attention the critical need to improve the opportunities of millions of children throughout the country who attend markedly inferior schools that deny them an adequate chance to succeed.

We have read your education positions and believe that the concerns we raise and the proposals we suggest would help focus and strengthen your plans for improving our nation's schools.

In recent weeks, two different statements have been released by advocates, academics and elected officials, with very different perspectives about how to improve our nation's public schools, particularly for poor and minority students.

The first statement by the Educational Equity Project called for even more high stakes testing, merit pay for teachers, competition, and charter schools, and pointed to the teachers unions as the major obstacles in achieving success.

We would call this approach NCLB on steroids. Rather than improving our schools, more high stakes testing and merit pay based on standardized test scores will likely further punish our neediest students, diminishing their educational experience and leading to even more teacher turnover, test prep, narrowing of the curriculum, and less time and effort given to authentic learning in their schools. It will also contribute to more test score inflation, meaning that their scores will no longer provide reliable evidence of their actual level of achievement.

The other new coalition of academics and advocates argued for "a bolder, broader approach" to education. They say that although some educational programs should be supported, without major investments in health care and reducing poverty, it is wrong to ask schools alone to significantly narrow the achievement gap between ethnic and racial groups or improve 
outcomes for our neediest students.

Although we believe that as a society we should be doing more to expand healthcare and reduce income inequality, we also believe that this perspective significantly understates the potential for dramatic improvements, particularly in those schools that most minority and high-poverty students attend, and the need for critical reforms to enhance their chance of success.

The following are the improvements that we believe are necessary and would change the lives of literally millions of children throughout our country.

1- Safe and uncrowded schools with more counselors: Many of our students, particularly in urban areas, attend overcrowded schools in near third world conditions, contributing to a variety of disciplinary problems that make it difficult for them to learn, leading to more violence and higher dropout rates. In addition to less crowding, these schools often require many more guidance counselors; in many, there is only one counselor for six hundred or more students.

2- Smaller classes: Despite the abundant research that conclusively demonstrates that smaller classes can significantly narrow the achievement gap, poor and minority students continue to attend schools with much larger classes on average than those in wealthier districts, and thus are deprived of the individual attention they need to succeed. Small classes in all grades K-12 have been linked to more classroom engagement, more time on task, higher levels of achievement, and lower dropout rates. Moreover, in national surveys, educators throughout the country overwhelming say that reducing class size would be the most effective way to improve the quality of teaching in our public schools.

3- Adequate resources and teacher support to assure that all students receive a rich, well-rounded curriculum including the arts, physical education and project-based learning in a curriculum connected to their own lives and culture, with progress evaluated by high-quality, appropriate assessment tools that are primarily classroom-based.

4- More parental involvement: Studies show that the more involved parents are at the school level, the better the outcomes for students. And yet the top- down, corporate approach to school governance currently used in cities throughout the country such as Chicago and New York has consistently and systematically worked to eliminate the ability of parents to have a real voice in decision-making and thus to be true partners at the school and district level.

Competition, including charter schools and vouchers, has not and will not lead to a significantly better or more equitable public school system, just as it has not brought us better access to health care. In fact, the continued proliferation of charter and other schools requiring interviews and/or application processes risks creating wider disparities between the haves and have-nots; and what is often advertised as increased parental choice actually means the ability of such schools to 
exclude our neediest students. The last thing our nation needs is a "trickle down" educational system.

As a nation we have an overarching moral imperative to provide all our children with the same educational opportunities that our more advantaged public and private school students take for granted, including the right to attend a safe and uncrowded school with smaller class sizes, a rich, high-quality curriculum, and more parental involvement.

Until these goals have been achieved, we cannot and should not give up on the potential of schools to transform lives.
We urge you to recognize this imperative, and if elected president, do everything in your power to ensure that every child who grows up in this country has the opportunity to attend the sort of school he or she needs for a better chance to learn and succeed.

Yours,

Leonie Haimson, Executive Director, Class Size Matters, New York, NY

Julie Woestehoff, Executive Director, Parents United for Responsible Education, Chicago, IL  
----------------------------------

Monty Neill, Ed.D.
Deputy Director
FairTest
342 Broadway
Cambridge, MA 02139
617-864-4810 x 101;  fax 617-497-2224
monty at fairtest.org
http://www.fairtest.org
Donate: https://secure.entango.com/servlet/donate/MnrXjT8MQqk
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.criticalteach.org/pipermail/rs_criticalteach.org/attachments/20080826/ec42c4ee/attachment.html