Reclaiming the Promise for America’s Public Schools
AFT’s just-launched “ Reclaiming the Promise of Public Education ” initiative aims to ensure that all children have access to services that meet their emotional, social and health needs.
AFT President Randi Weingarten told the nearly 3,000 educators in Washington, D.C., for AFT’s TEACH Conference that teachers are not here to protect the status quo in public education, but to build up and support public education for generations to come.
Reclaiming the promise of public education is about fighting for neighborhood public schools that are safe, welcoming places for teaching and learning. Reclaiming the promise is about ensuring that teachers are well-prepared, are supported and have time to collaborate. Reclaiming the promise is about enabling them to teach an engaging curriculum that includes art and music and the sciences. And reclaiming the promise is about ensuring that kids have access to wraparound services to meet their emotional, social and health needs.
Public education is under assault, says Weingarten, “by those who want, for ideological reasons, to call one of America’s great accomplishments—public education for all—a failure.”
These are the people who demand and pursue austerity, polarization, privatization and de-professionalization. They say you can cut, cut, cut—not invest in—public education, and then they argue that public education is failing….They believe in a market system. But a market system says, ‘There will be winners and losers.’
Public education, she says, is the pathway that ensures all children are winners.
The Washington Post recently released a poll that surveyed 1,000 parents earlier this month with four key findings:
- Parents would rather see their neighborhood schools strengthened and given more resources than have options to enroll their children elsewhere.
- When it comes to traditional public schools, more than three out of every four parents surveyed say they were opposed to reducing compensation for teachers or cutting resources for the classroom while increasing spending on charter schools.
- Majority of parents surveyed say too much learning in the classroom has been sacrificed in order to accommodate state tests during the school year.
- Nearly two-thirds of parents were satisfied with their children’s public schools, while 31% were not. Seven in 10 parents say they were satisfied with the quality of their children’s teachers.
The results, says Weingarten, show that parents and students do believe in and support public education.
We believe in high-quality public education because it is an economic necessity, an anchor of democracy, a moral imperative and a fundamental civil right. And this poll makes clear that not only do parents overwhelmingly believe in the promise of public education to help all children reach their dreams, their prescription for how to reclaim that promise matches what America's teachers want for their students and schools.
Click here to take action and get involved with the “Reclaming the Promise” initiative .
