We Did It!
Forum Director Sam Chaltain hands the petition of over 10,000 names to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
On January 6, 2009, just days before Barack Obama took the presidential oath of office, The Forum for Education and Democracy launched a national web-based campaign and challenged all Americans to transform the optimism of the election season into the promise of collective action to improve public education.
Grounding the campaign with a powerful short film featuring the voices of educators and young people, we asked all signatories to join us in urging the administration to honor four promises that must be fulfilled if we are serious about supporting young people and public schools:
- Every child deserves a 21st Century education
- Every community deserves an equal chance
- Every child deserves a well-supported teacher
- Every child deserves high-quality health care
On April 29, 2009 - President Obama's 100th day in office - we proudly announced that 14,284 petitioners have united to challenge the administration to prioritize four core principles that can guide its ambitious education reform efforts. Since then, our numbers have continued to grow.
Now, our task is to infuse the debate with the messages we heard loud and clear from the grassroots - and to hold the administration accountable for real change that can benefit all students.
To that end, The Forum and its signatories will press four issues going forward:
- Prioritizing student learning - Instead of continuing to urge schools to become cultures of testing, in which student success is determined by isolated measures of student scores, we want future policies to empower schools to become cultures of learning, in which student success is determined by multiple measures of student growth, and schools can refocus on the larger intellectual and social challenges that a good education must address.
- Equalizing resources - Instead of demanding equal outcomes from schools without equalizing the resources they provide, we believe a central role of federal, state and local governments must be to ensure that all schools are funded centrally and equally, so that all children can receive the same opportunity to a high-quality public education.
- Investing in teachers - Instead of settling for a teaching force that rotates into (and out of) schools every 3-5 years, we demand the investments necessary for creating a teaching profession of high quality educators who serve all children, and accrue both skill and wisdom over the years.
- Aligning community supports - Instead of continuing to believe it is sufficient for education policies to work in isolation, we believe it is essential to adopt education policies that work in tandem with other policies, so the myriad forces impacting student achievement can be addressed in relation to one another.
"The success of this campaign further reinforces our belief that someone in Washington must work to provide a clear, provocative, insistent and persuasive voice for a system of American public education that is of, by, and for the people," said Deborah Meier, a former teacher and principal, a 1987 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation's prestigious "Genius" Award, and one of The Forum's fourteen Conveners , all national leaders in school reform and educational policy.
You can get involved and stay connected here. Together, we can turn the hopeful energy of the present moment into the actualized promise of a better society for our children, and a more hopeful future for our democracy.
Yes We Will.