Nancy’s article for the Huffington Post is trending:

Read “The Gorilla Speaks” here.

If They Might Be Giants sing it you know it’s true! They wouldn’t lie to children, and neither should we. But the clock is running so fast in many states that it may be too late to call for repairs.

The truth is that we like our educational system. We support teachers and the work they do. We think our kids are getting a good education. We like our public schools. Really. 

So, what’s the problem? I think it’s that we’re not even having the same conversation. You heard me: we’re having parallel conversations. Yes, we’re using the same language. But as The Little Prince said, “Words are the source of misunderstandings.”

Here’s another truth: We all have the same goals for our kids. We all want them to be hard workers, to set realistic goals, and to be able to communicate effectively. Since we don’t agree on the means to the end, it has become imperative for conservative legislatures to end public education once and for all. But since they can’t end it, because you like it, the only solution is to strangle public schools. To starve the beast. It’s not kosher to say this, of course. So they’ve moved to Plan B. Vouchers! For-profit charters! No oversight! Let ‘em eat cake! 

Tick toc…..are you listening? Are you finally ready to act? Call your state legislature. Write to Arne Duncan (do not think I am a one-party person when it comes to the keeping public education healthy). Opt Out of State Tests. Join us at Occupy the DOE April 4-7 in Washington, DC. Join Parents Across America 

Tick toc…..

Nancy recently wrote an OP-ED for Good Magazine outlining the history of education “reform.”

Education Reform: Who’s Winning and Why We’re All Losing.

Read Nancy’s OP-ED here.

We’re raising $25,000 to complete our documentary on the privatization of public education. It’s the untold story of why it’s happening now…who’s winning and why we’re all losing.

Think of it as the “Inside Job” of education.

We’ve scraped together 10 hours of footage with the help of supporters who have graciously donated their time and energy, but we need to start moving faster. This is a time-sensitive issue and the stakes are high.

Contribute Now

Read our Thesis

Michelangelo famously said that he took a piece of marble, chipped away, and out came David. Apocryphal? I’m not sure, but it certainly makes the point all artists know: keep chipping away until the piece presents itself. One more bead on a dress can ruin it; one more line on a painting makes it crass; too many words in the story-ugh!

About a year ago we began the work on Going Public, our documentary whose goal is to remind the world that public education is the heart of our democracy. Our public schools are the last place where people from different classes and different walks of life come together to learn, to share ideas, and to be afforded a fair opportunity to reach for the American dream.

But today, an unholy alliance of wealthy conservatives and agressive hedge fund managers have declared war on public education. Their goal is to dismantle public schools, and ultimately destroy the middle class and the opportunity of upward mobility that defines the can-do American spirit. We asked several questions: Why are teachers, their unions, and public education in general under attack now? Who stands to profit from this? And is there a real basis for these attacks? Finally, we want to know where our schools are working well and why.

We filmed lots of interviews and met amazing people. We listened and chiseled. We filmed and chiseled some more until we found 2 minutes that begin to tell the story. We hope you will watch it and say, “I want to know more,” because we’re now ready to get to the next step.

We need to raise money to complete the documentary. We hope you’ll consider contributing via pay pal. We’re in the process of securing our 501 (c)(3) status so that each of your contributions will be tax-deductible.

For anyone who’s ever hoped for a movement to bring back the dignity of public schools and restore their place in our democracy, for anyone who is looking for answers to the the role outside money is playing in helping to destroy public schools, we hope we’ve got your back.

I’ve always loved to write. I wrote my first novel when I was 8. It was about the adventures of Sandy Satinsky and Nancy Levin and how they solved mysteries in Yeadon, Pa, their hometown. Nancy Drew was my model and I tried to be a writer like Carolyn Keene (wink wink: not her real name). I wrote the chapters in a little spiral-bound notebook, taking immense pride in the work. I wrote my first-and only-book for Scholastic Professional Books. It took over a year and required a dedicated editor who found the gold in my tsunami of words.

Between those two experiences I joined a writing group while I was a classroom teacher. The idea was that we would meet each month, share our work, and eventually publish our writing. We’d get credit for the course. We worked hard, learned to be kind but critical and saw our skills improve. The secretary who put the booklet together told me she cried when she read the essay about my daughter. We were pumped. So we asked the head of our Teacher Center to continue.

“You had one semester of writing. That’s enough.”

That’s enough? People, do you understand the hidden message? What she could have said was, “You had one semester of violin. That’s enough. You should be able to teach now.”

How long does it take to be a teacher?

You know what I’m getting at, right? Malcolm Gladwell said:

Suppose you don’t have 10,000 hours? Could you be a successful teacher in 5 weeks? Teach for America thinks so. One week introduction, 5 weeks of summer training and, Bingo, you’re on your own.

When I worked with a group of teachers who were about to become mentors to new hires in their district I took an informal survey The questions was: When did you believe you were a ‘real’ teacher? When did you wake up the day before school began without butterflies in your stomach? The consensus in that room was about six to eight years.

I tell you all of this because our profession is undergoing a massive overhaul. We’re being told to revamp our thinking in order to conform to a set of new standards and the standardized testing that go along with them. And to make it snappy. And we’d better be up and running on Day One. With little or no professional development. With an increase in the number of students in our classroom. With students who have a multiple learning difficulties. With students who are hungry, who are tired, who are weary. Or with students who are overworked and fearful that the competitive nature and the cost of higher education will leave them behind.

The unintended consequences of this will surely permanently dent public education. To the well-meaning who have forgotten Testing and Measurement 101: There is little research to show us the relationship between standardized testing and success in life. To the ill-informed: The difference between the test scores of students in charter schools and those in public schools show public schools outperform charters. To the privateers, the voucher advocates, the venture philanthropists: Yours will be ill-gotten gains. The roar is getting louder from those of us who are tired of being disgraced without justification. The Movement for democratic schooling is getting louder. We are Going Public with our resistance. We are writing, and marching, and picketing and letting you hear our collective voices growing louder. We will no longer turn the other cheek.

We thought our job was to teach children. We now know it is to teach the public as well.

The marvels of Facebook surprised me again last week. A former student–this time from 1968–’found’ me through my daughter’s work. Thanks, Liz (mom-101.com.) Wendy reminded me of “Alice in Bookland,” the film we made when she was in the 4^th grade. Her gracious message brought on a wonderland of memories.

I followed my reverie to the basement where I store students’ love notes, workshop handouts, binders, class photos. Memories.

While I was downstairs I decided to go through the material I offered as I facilitated professional development workshops. That’s when the whiplash began. Those standards from the 1970s? Toss ‘em. The ones from 1988? Trash. How about those Twentieth Century Skills? Not relevant. Local Standards from 1992? Nope. State Standards from 2010? Gone forever. Common Core Learning Standards circa 2012? Keepers. Trust us this time parents, teachers, community members.

Pinky promise.

When the deli down the street changes ownership, they close the store for a week or three as they put in shiny tiles on the walls, new linoleum on the floor, and bring in a new baloney slicer. Then they hang a red, white and blue banner from the window announcing, “Under New Management.” Educators? Not so lucky. We have to be in the classroom teaching kids even as we’re ‘Under New Management.’ Every time new standards come to us we’re expected to learn them, master them, and show student’s success.

People, can we all assume that the baloney is real this time? We’re told that there is money behind this effort. It’s NOT for professional development. It’s NOT for music or art teachers. The money is NOT for creating smaller classes. The money is for new tests to measure teachers. The money is for grading the tests. And for assessing teachers.

According to Class Size Matters,  smaller class size is a research-based variable we can count on to provide more effective teaching and instruction. But we’re not in an age of research. Teaching is a business; therefore, successful business leaders are best able to ‘reform’ education. No research is necessary, because business just knows how to do it. Pinky promise.

Once a meme enters the public consciousness it doesn’t stop to examine itself. It bounces back and forth from originator to talk show host to Facebook , to Twitter, to the New York Times, The Washington Times…your PTA meeting, your soccer field, your carpool. You know.

Leonie Haimson, the Executive Director of Class Size Matters: You are in good company. No one listened to Louis Pasteur, either, when the public believed that illness was caused by spontaneous generation

Remember when salt was bad for us? Not anymore. But it took forever to get the word out, because the ‘truth’ was too far gone.

Where is the research that equates business models with successful education? Why does the public believe those who say, “Don’t confuse us with the facts?” Why are these standards better than any others we’ve had? Educators want to hear from members of our own profession whose ideas are supported by research.

Members of our profession? Right. Name three. Um, Diane Ravitch…

Our new standards tell us what counts as knowledge, what information gets taught, whose stories matter and where reality lies. And now we will be tested to validate these truths. Scientific method, indeed!

In 1988 Rick Simonson and Scott Walker, edited The Graywolf Annual Five:Multi-Cultural Literacy. They offer their own list of what constitutes knowledge. Try these on for size. How many do you know? And I’m only up to the D’s.

Whose stories will be told? Whose voice will count in the 21st century? What sort of education are you willing to fight for? Whiplash alert 2012 version.

Are you listening, Malcom Gladwell? I think we’re at a tipping point in education “reform.” This weekend Gail Collins wrote about the obscene amount of money the 1% are making from education. Gail Collins does not suffer fools gladly, people. Recall the number of times she called our attention to the fateful trip Mitt Romney’s family took to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of his car? It’s now entered our collective conscious with its very own website. If Gail Collins can do that about a dog, imagine what she can do for education.

Lisa Graves, Executive Director of Media and Democracy, keeps adding notches to her virtual belt as she ticks off the corporations who have resigned from ALEC. Fourteen and counting. She named names until the rest of the media could no longer snooze.

Leonie Hamison, Director of Class Size Matters, and a charter member of Parents Across America, fuels us with the underhanded moves of the elite in cities and states around the country. I swear she never sleeps. Her tweets and blogs and emails come to me just about every hour of the day. Leonie never lets us forget that power corrupts and absolute power tends to….am I right?

You’ve got to scrunch up your forehead and move your lips into the disbelieving position (I know you know how to do it) whether you read about “reform” in print, see it online, or hear about it over the fence. But the skies are beginning to lighten. Whether you live in New Orleans or Baltimore or Buffalo you must have noticed that the backlash has begun. It will take a continued commitment on your part and mine to keep connecting the dots. The monied class wants to take as much money from education as quickly as it can. They want to do to education’s 600 billion dollar pot what they’ve done to health care: privatize it for their own purposes. At the other end, the well-intended want to make education over into their own image: upwardly mobile businessmen and women. They base their educational fads on little research and less input from educators and parents. Few of them graduated from public schools.  How many of them had to sit through endless hours of test prep? Where do their kids go to school? Time we find out.

The lot of them refuse to acknowledge the real problem is poverty.

When you compare our middle class, well-fed, students with the same cohort from any other country in the whole wide world, we do as well or better on any standardized tests you can throw at them. Lump the impoverished kids into the mix and the conservative’s meme that our schools are failing screams out from behind the curtains. Painfully, we have more kids at or below poverty than any other industrialized country.

But I say to hold on, folks. We’re on our way to some truth. That is, if we can halt this train wreck before we wipe out an entire generation of students with us. Where is our collective political will? Where is yours?

Diane Paragas and Amy Lawday of Civilian Studios have signed on to co-direct the Going Public feature length documentary! Diane just directed Brooklyn Boheme with Nelson George which was purchased by Showtime! Stay tuned…

“First they came for the……and then they came for me, but there was nobody left.” Most of us can quote Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous lines, at least some of them. At least the gist of it. Most of us give tacit voice to it’s message. We get it, so of course we’d like to think we would stand up for the oppressed, the least among us.

Well, people, the time is now.

CHOICE. STANDARDIZED TESTS. PUBLIC HUMILIATION OF TEACHERS AND SCHOOLS. FOR PROFIT CHARTERS. We’re seeing the newest fads in public education take over our lives. Yet where is the movement to counteract it? We’re watching an entire generation of teachers who have learned nothing but to “teach to the test.” And students, if they care at all, are learning to spew factoids in record time.

“Grandma,” my six year old granddaughter told me, “If I don’t get to Step Six in math I can’t go to second grade.” What! Believe me, people, she did not think that up all by herself.

Kids are being judged on tests that may not even be valid or reliable (remember those words from Statistics 101?) and we’re being told that the only skills worth testing are reading and math.

Reading and math are important, sure, but what about the legacies that civilizations leave? See, for example, Ancient Greece, Mozart, cubism, Michael Jordan. Need more examples? Where do we teach about racism, imperialism, gender bias? Where do we allow Mexican students to see themselves reflected back in the curriculum? Arizona, are you listening?

The tests drive the curriculum. “If we’re all taking the same tests then we’d all better be teaching the same content.” Teachers, you know better. You know the danger that lurks behind those dictates. You know that children learn at different rates, that they have different interests, come with different skills. You know that tests are culturally biased. And if you don’t come from a place where the word ‘spectacle’ is used, you’re out of luck on the test, kid.

So, just for today, let’s agree to agree. Let’s all say that we know that fads come and go, but this one has a chance of wiping out a whole generation of students and the teachers who teach them. Now, let’s see what we can do before it’s too late. Here are some ideas:

1. Encourage every teacher you know to get onto Facebook, Twitter, or any social media site that connects them to others who are striving for the same ends. Ask them to friend others, to tweet, to support the efforts of those on the front line of real educational reform.

2. Read blogs. Comment on the site. Let the authors know you’re out there. Some of the really wonderful ones include: Valerie Strauss at The Washington Post, Diane Ravitch and Deborah Maier who blog at Edweek.org; Susan Ohanian, amazingly passionate at EdNotesOnline; Peggy Robinson at PegWithPen.

3. Be the change you want to see. I know it’s a cliché, but if was good enough for Gandhi it should be good enough for you. Don’t wait to be loved. Don’t wait for others to join. It only takes one other person to form a group. Watch this clip to see how it’s done.

4. Show up. I know you have children at home, food to cook, car pooling to do, tests to grade. I know you’re tired after work, I know you hardly sleep now, I know.

…BUT WHEN THEY COME FOR YOU, WHO WILL BE THERE?