To: Wall Street Bankers, driving a for-profit agenda for public education built on high-stakes testing and Wisconsin-style attacks on public teachers
Reclaim public education from Wall Street bankers
We endorse the "Principles That Unite Us" in the fight to "Reclaim the Promise of Public Education." These include providing all children with the opportunity to attend a high-quality neighborhood public school; giving those closest to the education process a voice in policy and practice; and ensuring that school environments are safe, welcoming places.
Why is this important?
Wall Street wants our schools. We say no.
Public education is under attack from the same set of people who thought it was okay for Wall Street criminals to entrap school districts around the country in “interest rate swaps” that were sold as ways to guarantee steady income for the critical job of educating our kids. Instead they turned out to be massive drains on school budgets, for example, costing Philadelphia $331 million [1] and Chicago $150 million (and another $36 million every year). [2]
In addition, so-called “reformers” are pushing kids to become test-taking automatons, while creating ways for for-profit charter schools, many of them online-only, to siphon off critical public school investments , short changing our children’s future to line the pockets of private, usually out-of-state, corporations dedicated primarily to the bottom line.
No longer. We are joining with tens of thousands of parents, educators, community residents, faith leaders, and front-line union members to Reclaim the Promise of Public Education and sign on to the Principles That Unite Us. (You can see the full Principles here: http://www.reclaimpublicednow.org/home)
These principles form the vision the drives our opposition to the corporate-funded education “reform” agenda that wants a market-based system of schooling based on high-stakes testing and Wisconsin-style attacks on front-line teachers.
At their core, these principles envision a public education system seeks to ensure that all kids excel in school and everyone who wants to go is prepared to succeed in college. This, we believe, would be fulfilling the promise of public education.
Please to take a moment to stand up and join in with the thousands of others demanding public schools that work for all of our children regardless of where they live, what color their skin is, and how wealthy (or not) their parents are. Endorse the principles by signing above.
[1] “Too Big to Trust? Banks, Schools, and the Ongoing Problem of Interest Rate Swaps”, Sharon Ward, PA Budget and Policy Center, January 2012, page 1.
[2] http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/19251143-452/amisha-patel-banks-soak-cps-as-schools-close.html