Most Americans are affected by K-12 Ed policies either as parents, students, teachers, administrators, or teacher educators. We now have evidence that testing companies (Pearson and PARCC) have been rigging tests to fail our children. The children, teachers, and parents of America desperately need and demand transparency for the big testing companies that are controlling K-12 education and failing our schools! It is one thing to hold teachers and schools accountable, but the measuring tool matters as much as the measurement. There are no excuses for tests that are not aligned to the standards they claim to be assessing.

The Governor of Georgia is proposing to change the constitution of Georgia to allow the state to control and takeover schools in high minority and improvished areas. If this law passes it will allow resegregation of these schools by putting them into one district and labeling them all as failing

The assertion that people from different races do not possess equal music ability is inaccurate, extremely offensive and counter to the values we as music teachers and music teacher educators hold most dear. We would like to see the government create a task force to address diversity in music education that will construct a list of timely, actionable, constructive goals for addressing issues of inclusion in the music education profession.

We have applied to charter our proposed school for 5 years. The State keeps turning us down. Why?!

A group of volunteers with no political affiliations organized as Williamson Strong to monitor and be advocates for good schools. They are being persecuted and fined in a tragically unfair, politically motivated action by the Tennessee Registry Office to classify them incorrectly as a PAC. Please investigate the matter to protect these good people, our schools and the very integrity of the TN Registry Office. If this interpretation is allowed, no group that speaks against an issue or politician will be permitted without creating a PAC.

At 4:30 a.m. on Thursday, May 5, the Michigan House of Representatives passed a package of right-wing bills to punish teachers and students in Detroit. Gov. Rick Snyder must veto it. Make no mistake: These bills discriminate against Detroit’s children—who are overwhelmingly economically disadvantaged children and children of color—and are designed explicitly to punish teachers who speak up on behalf of their students and themselves. Many of the so-called teacher-related provisions have failed and been rejected when used in other jurisdictions. Under state-controlled emergency management, indifferent politicians abandoned Detroit’s students to learn in under-resourced schools with deplorable conditions. The state created half a billion dollars in debt for the school district, and the House bills, which only affect Detroit and not the rest of Michigan, don’t solve the state-created debt crisis. Instead, this legislation creates a new district with a litany of bad education policies, strips teachers of their rights and voice, and leaves Detroit’s students in an even more vulnerable situation. Under the House proposal, school employees—including teachers, clerical staff and support staff—are stripped of their existing contracts and benefits, and the district will no longer recognize their unions. The bill will punish teachers for going on strike or participating in walkouts over school conditions—even if the school is unsafe for students and staff to be in. The bills would also allow the district to hire noncertified teachers and tie teacher pay to student test scores, even though research clearly shows those types of merit pay systems do not work. This package of bills only applies to Detroit. Why are Michigan House Republicans punishing Detroit for the debt their emergency manager created? Why are they stripping rights and imposing bad education policies in Detroit, but not expecting their home districts to do the same? The answer is simple: They don’t think they’ll have to answer for what they’re doing. Gov. Snyder must veto any version of the House bills that comes to his desk. The children and people of Detroit are counting on him to stop these reckless legislators from hurting them.

I think the rise of Donald Trump is evidence enough that the educational standards of this country have sunk well below acceptable. They need to be supreme.

As an objective observer, it's plain to see that Detroit school children and their education are continually place in jeopardy because the state of Michigan regards them as little more than expendable pawns in a political chess game. No child's education--and by extension, their lives--should ever be so easy to play with.

On July 12, 1995, the state of New Jersey seized control of Newark's "failing" traditional public schools. The state takeover was sought after the Examination Department of the NPS school system found it to be in "deplorable condition." The Comprehensive Compliance Investigation (CCI) reported low test scores, high dropout rates, questionable expenditures of public funds, crumbling buildings with health & safety hazards, including a lack of such bare essentials as doors on bathroom stalls. Twenty-one years later and the issues still remain the same. Newark Public School system has not improved even under state control; rather it grew worse, including contaminated water found in the pipes of NPS, closure of some traditional public schools to expand charter schools and co-located traditional public schools with charter schools, in which is the cause of segregation and flat funding of Newark Public School District Budget. Sign the petition in support of our legislator's sponsored Bill A3637 to return local control back to the Newark Public School District! It's our right! They are our schools and our children! By signing the petition, you are saying enough is enough! Let's go get the schools all our children deserve!! Full Local Control Now, Parents Educating Parents

Funding Chicago's Future is the Chicago chapter of Funding Illinois' Future, a coalition of over 230 superintendents, community leaders, faith leaders, educators, community organizations, and education reform and civil rights group from across the state united around bringing equity to every school district in Illinois by reforming the state’s education funding system. The coalition has been present in every media market throughout Illinois and engages in grassroots, earned media, social media, paid media, and legislative activities. All activities are non-partisan.

This petition is to let local elected officials know that there is strong community support for Plato Academy Charter School to give parents an innovative and viable educational opportunity for their children.

My son, who turned 3 this April, is enrolled in preschool. I asked his teacher: how much time does he spend outside? 45 minutes was the answer. Shocking? No wonder American kids have vitamin D deficiency. So I asked if he could play outside more. The teacher said that he could, but then he would be missing out on other activities, including tracing letters and numbers, and by the time he turns 4, when he goes to the next class, he needs to know letters and numbers. I was shocked even more. I insisted that I want him to play more outside, and she agreed, saying if the parent asks, then it is ok. Why, despite all the scientific proof, that early academics hurt, the government keeps pushing first grade curriculum to kindergarten and to the preschools? Isn't it time to actually incorporate research into school policies, instead of making policies that hurt our children? Researcher and educator Mercedes Schneider, author of A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Education, has documented the lightning- quick writing of the CCSS (Common Core State Standards) and has found no evidence that they are based on research. She writes: If they [the writers of the CCSS] were interested in research they would have started with kindergarten and piloted the standards for a few years and then made adjustments based on their research — and built slowly from there. There is absolutely no evidence that developmental stages were considered. That is a major problem across the standards and especially for the youngest grades. Anyone who has a cursory knowledge of development knows that it is not linear and that children do not all develop at the same rate — there is a span. Now, as the Common Core standards take hold across the country, literacy has taken over even more space in kindergarten classrooms, crowding out many high- quality learning experiences young children need. In a survey by Defending the Early Years (DEY) of about 200 early childhood teachers (preschool to grade three) across 38 states, 85% of the public school teachers reported that they are required to teach activities that are not developmentally appropriate for their students.9 A New York public school kindergarten teacher with more than 15 years of experience reported: Kindergarten students are being forced to write words, sentences, and paragraphs before having a grasp of oral language...We are assessing them WEEKLY on how many sight words, letter sounds, and letter names they can identify. And we’re assessing the “neediest students’” reading every other day. While the timetable for children’s cognitive development has not changed significantly, society’s expectations of what children should achieve in kindergarten have. A recent two-year study by the Gesell Institute in New Haven found that “children are still reaching important developmental milestones in much the same timeframe as they did when Dr. Arnold Gesell first published his data in 1925. Gesell used 19 measures to ascertain a child’s development. Among them were asking children to look at and draw a circle, cross, square, triangle, divided rectangle, and more complex forms. A clear pattern emerged. He found an age span for each task, but also a clear pattern of when most children could accomplish the task. By age three most children could replicate the circle, but most could not copy the cross or square until age 4.5. They could draw the triangle by 5.5 but could not copy the diamond until after age 6. The Institute’s recent study, given between 2008 and 2010 to about 1300 children across the country, found almost identical results. The Harvard Education Letter described the findings under the heading: “Kids Haven’t Changed; Kindergarten Has.” A number of long-term studies point to greater gains for students in play-based programs as compared to their peers in academically-oriented preschools and kindergartens in which early reading instruction is generally a key component. A number of long-term studies point to greater gains for students in play-based programs as compared to their peers in academically-oriented preschools and kindergartens in which early reading instruction is generally a key component. Findings from HighScope’s Preschool Curriculum Comparison Study, for example, suggest long-term harm, especially in the social-emotional realm, from overly directive preschool instruction. In this study, begun in the late 1960s, 68 children from low-income homes were randomly assigned to one of three preschool classes. Two were play-based and experiential. The third was a scripted, direct-instruction approach. Interestingly, there were very similar short-term gains among the children in all three programs at the end of year one. But the children were followed until age 23. By that time, there were significant differences in social behavior. School records indicate that 47 percent of the children assigned to the direct instruction classroom needed special education for social difficulties versus only 6 percent from the play-oriented preschool classrooms. And by age 23, police records showed a higher rate of arrests for felony offenses among those who were previously in the instructional program (34 percent) compared to those in the play-based programs (9 percent). Rebecca Marcon found negative effects of overly- directed preschool instruction on later school performance in a study of three different curricula, described as either “academically oriented” or “child- initiated.”18 By third grade, her group of 343 students — 96% African American with 75% of the children qualifying for subsidized school lunch — displayed few differences in academic achievement programs. After six years of school, however, students who had been in the groups that were “more academically directed earned significantly lower grades compared to children who had attended child-initiated preschool classes. Children’s later school success appears to have been enhanced by more active...