Hi all,

Thanks to all the parents that made community day a great event. Here is the video we made where TNS parents share their views about progressive ed in the current political climate

Please mark your calendars for Community Day on May 1st.  We will be joined by a dynamic speaker discussing the challenges facing democratic education in today’s world, working on improving the classrooms and common spaces, and eating and spending time together as a community as well.  The theme this year is therefore: Eat, Work, Chat! 

Schedule:
10:00 Pancake Fundraiser (Wellness Committee)
11:00 Work in the classrooms
2:00 Lunch
2:30 Speaker:  (Jon Moscow will discuss Democratic Education in Today’s World)

This was forwarded to me from a colleague who lives in Brooklyn, I don’t personally know Marc Ribot the author of this post but he writes so eloquently on the way that the “reform” movement is really a privatization movement and how focusing parents and children on the competition for desirable schools distracts us from organizing for goods schools for all. I just had to share:

my own daughter got into Frank Sinatra, and is happy with her choice. But what will she find when she’s there? How many to a class in the face of budget cuts and teacher lay-offs? This isn’t only the result of ‘the economy’, but of bad political choices:
of gradual privatization through a shift to ‘charter schools’[1], de-unionization [2], a program of breaking up larger schools into smaller ones which has multiplied administrative costs without producing any measurable benefits in achievement [3], and a parent choice process which forces high schools to channel scarce resources into self marketing.  

There’s nothing wrong with choice or diversity: in and of themselves, these are fine things. The problem with the system now in place is that the rhetoric of improving the system through added ‘choice’ is being employed as a smokescreen to mask a defunding which is a prelude to privatization.  The relative richness of a very few of the choices is masking the impoverishment of the system as a whole-  - the selection process we have just been through is  the means by which we, a public who once regarded education as a right for all, are being socialized to take scarcity for granted: of good schools, of manageable class sizes,  of music and art programs, of books, of toilet paper...what’s next????... 

The current system is rationalized by its proponents as introducing the benefits of market dynamism into education. But the system lacks the one element that makes markets work: money. all the applicants in the world don’t increase the resources available to an individual school, and all the frantic struggling of thousands of 8th graders and their parents don’t increase the funding to the school system as a whole by one penny.  

        one can only admire the political brilliance of the privatizers’ strategy: at precisely the moment every year when tens of thousands of parents are forced to confront the result of underfunding in the lack of excellent schools in our immediate neighborhoods,  we’re all so exhausted by the effort to get our kids into the few existing good schools that  we don’t have time to think, let alone to question why ALL schools aren’t good,  let alone organize a political response.  Instead, what might have been public political anger at the government’s failure  is siphoned off into individual personal shame: if our kids wind up in a lousy school, with underpaid teachers demoralized by grading 170  papers a day,  then its somehow their own fault for not having been ‘gifted’ or ‘special’, or ours for not having researched enough, filled out enough applications, been willing to have them commute to the Bronx, or paid for enough SHSAT tutorials. 

it all boils down to an illusion of choice which masks the denial of the one choice that would make a real difference: allocating more resources for education- more teachers, well equiped schools where EVERY kid is able to learn up to their abilities, the gifted are challenged, those falling behind are given help, and social services are available for kids and families whose outside problems prevent them from succeeding in school.  

 I’ve had it with fake  ‘reforms’ which recycle the same inadequate resources between large schools and smaller schools in the same facility, between public and charter, and call it ‘progess’;  tired of seeing my kid subjected to the drudgery of ‘teach to the test’ and rigged, dumbed down test standards so the system’s advocate’s can declare their failure a ‘success’,  tired of voluntering at PTA benefits which allow our school to recoup a fraction of the budgets cut by the state (and tired of pretending its morally acceptable that schools with middle class or wealthy PTA parents get things like music and art programs while kids in poor neighborhoods don’t). 

And I’m tired of hearing there are no resources: my father attended Lincoln High in Brighton Beach- and received an education good enough to inspire the son of a poor immigrants to go on to college, which he could do because Brooklyn College was 100% free at the time, and then to medical school (thanks to the navy). And this was in the 1930’s height of the Great Depression. There were resources for education then because progressives- real progressives-   believed an excellent education was every student’s RIGHT, not a privilege of the rich, the lucky, or the insanely ambitious.  

sincerely, m ribot

A Creative Expression Workshop for Boys in 3rd , 4th and 5th  grades

Presented by the Children’s Arts Guild

April 18th through April 21st, 2011

(Public School spring Break)

1:00 pm to 5 pm

93 St. Mark’s Place

Total price for the week:  $250.00

Boys Art Express is an immersive workshop that uses facilitated  whole body arts exploration to help boys connect to their emotions, acquire new tools for expressing them constructively,  and begin to manage them responsibly.

To learn more visit   www.childrensartsguild.org

Childen’s Arts Guild

550J Grand Street, 11F,    NY,  NY 10002

Tel.  347 644 0452

For additional information contact Mark LaRiviere,  (Juliet’s Dad) 212 228-6885