The film shown here - Waiting for Superman - drew media attention to public education across the country (click on the image to the left to see the official trailor for the film). Unfortunately, most of it was negative.
The message of the film is that public schools are failing because of bad teachers and their unions. The film’s “solution,” to the minimal extent that it suggests one, is to replace them with “great” charter schools and teachers who have less power over their schools and classrooms.
Check out an article or two that criticize the film.
NYC Teachers Counter “Waiting for Superman” with a Film of Their Own
The Harvard Educational Review
Challening Corporate Ed Reform
Watch the trailor for the film.
School reform is always going to be a part of your professional life now. And, unfortunately, a lot of school reform comes from billionaires like Bill Gates. Gates, by the way, was completely behind the push for Common Core Standards. Um, yeah. Okay…
How Bill Gates Lied and Introduced the Defunct Common Core to Falsify an IT Skills Shortage.
There are lots of things to confront in the field of education and one, for sure, is that those who are most far from an actual classroom - like business folks and politicians - often make the decisons for what is happening in classrooms. That is a travesty! And you and I will work harder to make our professional voices heard.
Alongside school reformers are other things that impact us greatly, like standardized testing. I think you’ll spend a lot of your career struggling with things like there.
I thought I’d share something we did with our daughter Helena this year when it came to standardized testing. Of course, this is the year she was on lockdown because of COVID-19. And, as I’ve mentioned before, she has several learning disAbilities which, by the way, she is becoming an activist around them as she self-advocates and collectively advocates for accommodations for herself. Also, standardized testing comes in the Spring, of course, in March to be exact. And Helena lost both of her beloved Grandfathers on February 1st and 14th - days apart.
Pandemic trauma. DisAbilities. Death. Loss. Depression. Grief.
And you think you’re going to cognitively test her?!
We opted out of all standardized testing. And will continue to do so.
For the first time, we decided that we would begin writing “position papers” on critical issues and saw this as a great opportunity to do our first one. We wanted Helena to be able to articulate her stance in regards to her own agency to not be assessed in these meangingless and often violent ways. We think it is a great first draft of this idea of family posiiton papers. Don’t you?
