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News Alert: 64 Former Stand Activists Oppose Ballot Measure

May 11, 2012 by

A group of former activists with Stand for Children have endorsed an open letter calling on Stand for Children to withdraw their ballot initiative.

The group, which includes parents and school committee members from across Massachusetts, wrote:

The proposed ballot measure attempts to blow up the collaborative work that created the new regulations last spring. It does nothing to improve teaching in our schools. What it does is put the careers of our teachers at the mercy of an untested rating system, violating the recommendations of the people who designed that system.

We fear the result would be to drive some of our best teachers away from the schools that need them most.

To read the full letter, click here.   → Read More

Filed Under: Education

Stand for Children’s Ballot Question: Bad for Teachers, Kids and Schools

April 9, 2012 by

The ballot initiative by the numbers:

Words: 2826
Pages: 5
Sections: 11
Provisions supported by data-driven scientific research: 0

Just the FAQs

The “Stand for Children” campaign is called “Great Teachers, Great Schools.” What does the ballot initiative do to help teachers improve their teaching and become “great teachers”?
Nothing. It’s not about that.

What does the Stand proposal do to make schools great—Cut class size? Improve leadership? Lengthen learning time? Help parents get more involved with their children’s learning?
No. It’s not about any of those things.

So what is the “Stand for Children” proposal about?
Many things. One of them is that new, untested teacher ratings would drive critical staffing decisions including layoffs and transfers. (However, principals could ignore the ratings—see below.) To read more, click here.   → Read More

Filed Under: Education

Stand for Children’s Ballot Question – What’s the Deal?

February 4, 2012 by

Join the CPS effort against this ballot question by letting us know you want to help. Email office@citizensforpublicschools.org   → Read More

Filed Under: Education

Why is Stand Selling Voters a Pig in a Poke?

January 23, 2012 by

What is a pig in a poke?

  1. A term dating from the Middle Ages meaning buying something claimed to be a suckling pig in a bag (“poke”) without looking to see what was inside.
  2. The Stand For Children ballot question called “promoting excellence in public schools.”

Will it actually:

  • Turn good teaching into mindless test prep?
  • Cause further narrowing of the curriculum?
  • Punish teachers of the neediest students and deter teachers from working with these children?
  • Drown principals in pointless paperwork?

Nobody knows!

Stand wants to force school districts to take a new teacher evaluation system that does not yet exist and has not been tried in the real world, and use it to decide on layoffs, transfers, and other critical matters. The system is just beginning to be developed, so nobody knows yet how it’s going to work.

But the New York Times reports a similar system in Tennessee has been a disaster, keeping principals tied up with endless paperwork, sending teacher morale into a tailspin and prompting such insanity as measuring music teachers by a school’s writing scores.   → Read More

Filed Under: Education

Thank You, Diane Ravitch for Being Part of the Struggle!

January 11, 2012 by

Diane Ravitch (photo by Larry Aaronson)

Our friend, the education historian and author Diane Ravitch, has yet another great piece in the current Education Week and The Washington Post Answer Sheet.

It’s called “No Child Left Behind and the Damage Done,” and it’s about NCLB on its tenth anniversary and why it needs to be dramatically reformed so we can stop its “destruction of local community institutions.” Ravitch makes the piece made even greater by giving a  shout-out to Citizens for Public Schools:

When I spoke to Citizens for Public Schools in Boston, a young man who works as a chef at a local hotel got up to ask what he could do to stop “them” from closing his children’s school. It was the neighborhood school, he said. It was the school he wanted his children to attend. And they were closing it.

In city after city, across the nation, I have heard similar stories from teachers and parents.

   → Read More
Filed Under: Education
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