En Español aquí
Some have asked us, "You're against so many things HISD is doing. What are are you for?" Well, we wrote down some of it here during last year's trustee elections, but also, you have to agree on the problem before you can agree on a solution.
We believe that "School Failure" is a myth concocted to bring about the privatization of our public schools--both in the form of privately-controlled charter schools as well as through the funneling of massive amounts of public school funds to for-profit companies (i.e billions of dollars in Texas alone spent on standardized testing in just a few years).
Privatization is a way to justify less government funding in public education. Privatization is a way to justify the new-era segregation of our schools with a legal separate-but-equal system. And privatization is a way to distract from the social justice questions of our day like the root causes of poverty, the need for universal healthcare and systemic discrimination in our criminal justice system, to name just a few.
If you're trying to understand what we're for, you have to first understand that we're not looking for answers to the same problems--the problems that the education industrial complex would have us all believe exist.
Schools aren't failing children because poor kids can't pass a test--a test that was designed for them to fail. Society is failing schools by not giving poor kids what they need to thrive in our world, and our schools are being scapegoated into oblivion because of it.
The problems we see are the multitude of social injustices facing society today, and we believe that public education is the incubator of a better future. To that end, we believe in principles like independent, democratic control of our schools, the protection of minority rights within that democratic control, and the promise and gift of professional teaching with teachers who know and embrace that our children are more than the sum of their test scores.
These values are under attack.
Public education is under attack.
When you see us fighting on every front, it's because the other side has been winning for over twenty years, the house is on fire, and we are nearing a point of no return. We cannot lose any more battles. We need everyone who believes in public education, everyone who shares these values, to step up and fight.
We need our elected officials--progressives, people of color--to step up and fight. We need parents to see past their own children's education today and think about the world they'll be leaving them to manage tomorrow.
It's now or never. Which side are you on?