Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Welcome to this Blog

For those of you who could not attend Saturday's meeting, I wanted to give you an update. We had a group of approximately 20 teachers and parents who came to the meeting, which was quite impressive considering that it was planned with such short notice. Even more impressive is that we had teachers and parents on the same page and articulating a shared vision of education reform in DC.

We decided that we should focus first on pressuring George Parker in hopes of putting the brakes on the current contract negotiations. I am attaching a copy of a petition addressed to George Parker and Randi Weingarten, AFT President, that we can use to educate teachers and parents on the issue, as well as pressure the WTU. Please get as many signatures as possible and fax completed forms to the number at the bottom of the petition (202-319-1010).

We also discussed setting up meetings with City Councilmembers and other efforts to increase our support. We will discuss these strategies in more detail at our next meeting, which will be held this Thursday, October 2nd at 5:30 (place TBD). It is very important that we have as many people as possible at this meeting who can join us in creating a movement to redefine the terms of the debate. Then, we can actually begin to address the real issues surrounding real reform in teaching and learning.

Also, for those of you who missed it, I am pasting here the link to our Commentary published in the September 28 Outlook Section of the Washington Post. This makes it clear what we believe in. Please use this, along with the petition, as a way to reach out to other teachers and parents.

Thanks again. I hope to see you on Thursday.

Kerry Sylvia

3 comments:

Unknown said...

It seems that The Washington Post is only interested in seeing teachers get fired. The assumption is that many teachers in DCPS are bad. I have been in many classrooms and have seen many of our city's teachers in action, and I can't recall seeing very much, if any, poor teaching.

The best thing Ms. Rhee could do would be to get a more conventional contract on the table, get the contract out of the way, and then start doing more benificial things such as asbestos removal, window replacement, having smaller classes, implementing individual student tutoring and sending traveling instrumental music teachers to our elementary schools. Doing these positive things would help us be more on par with school systems such as Arlington County, VA and Montgomery County, MD.

Will Ms. Rhee ever see the light and get away from her firing fetish and actually start sincerely helping students?

-L. Mullin (Ward 5 Resident)

Unknown said...

Is anybody else going to leave a blog?

Real Ed Reform DC said...

We're having some technical difficulties when the teachers and parents who have been coming to the meetings of the group and have lots to say then try to sign up to be authors on the blog. Hopefully we'll get it resolved soon.