Save Our Schools March

On Friday, March 18, Rethinking Schools editors Bob Peterson and Stan Karp will be featured in a 90-minute web "teach-in" designed to build this summer's Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action. The webinar begins at 8pm Eastern/7pm Central/5pm Pacific time and is open to the first 100 people who sign up here:http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RethinkingSchoolsWebinar
This event is part of a series of web discussions with supporters of the National Call to Action leading to coordinated events around the country and a march in Washington, D.C. on July 30. The July events are built around four demands:

• Equitable funding for all public school communities
• End to high stakes testing for student, teacher, and school evaluation
• Curriculum developed for and by local school communities
• Teacher and community leadership in forming public education policies

For more info, visit the SOS March web site, www.saveourschoolsmarch.org

The first webinar on 3/11 featured Diane Ravitch. Future sessions are planned with scholar-researchers Yong Zhao and Stephen Krashen. The March 18 session will be hosted by members of the SOS organizing committee, including teacher/blogger Nancy Flanagan and will feature two longtime Rethinking Schools editors and activists:
Bob Peterson is a founding editor of Rethinking Schools and a veteran 5^th grade teacher at La Escuela Fratney, a two-way bilingual public school in Milwaukee. He has been active in the historic Wisconsin protests this past month and is also running for the presidency of the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association.
Stan Karp taught English and Journalism to high school students for 30 years in Paterson, NJ. He currently works for NJ's Education Law Center and has written widely on federal and state education policy and the politics of school reform. He coordinates the "NOT Waiting for Superman" project for Rethinking Schools.

Save our schools

The message we want to get out to as many people on Valentine’s Day is that everyone who cares about young people should also care about our public schools. Our best schools nurture our children and make them feel safe and able to take the risks they need to in order to learn. But our schools are in danger of becoming even more narrowly focused on test preparation while class sizes rise and teachers are blamed for the ravages poverty inflicts on their students.

We are responding. We love our schools. We declare the week of Valentine’s Day, 2011, to be

I  Love Public Education Blog Day. On this day we will write our hearts out, about why public education is so important to us, to our children, and to our democratic society. If you or your readers will join us and tell why you love public education too, send your comments and posts tosaveourschoolsmarch@gmail.com.

Writing will be displayed at the www.SaveOurSchoolsmarch.org website, and will be tweeted with the hashtag #LovePublicEd. We offer the march and events of July 28 to 31^st in Washington, DC, as a focal point for this movement, and we ask participants to link to this event, so that we can build momentum for our efforts. If your readers wish to repeat this post on their own blog, we would welcome it. We would love if you could use our attached graphic to indicate that this is part of our campaign.

If you are not familiar with our new grassroots movement, please go to our webpage and look at our endorsers and also at “About Us.”You will see that many of our endorsers are well-known people, such as Diane Ravitch, Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, and David Berliner. You will also find a list of our demands on the webpage. A new website will go live in the next few days.

Thank you for any help you can give us in getting the word out.

Katherine Cox

www.saveourschoolsmarch.org