Friday, October 21, 2005
We, as educators, support the call “THE WORLD CAN’T WAIT, DRIVE OUT THE BUSH REGIME!” We say, “OUR KIDS CAN’T WAIT, DRIVE OUT THE BUSH REGIME!” We are calling on all teachers, parents, and students to take this up!
Education is under direct attack by this administration. Legislation like “No Child Left Behind”, only serves to further segregate the public school system, failing our children and leaving most of them behind. School funding must be made available to all schools, not just the ones with higher test scores. Jonathan Kozol, author, has said that we are in the process of restoring apartheid education in America! Can we really sit back and accept this? As stated in our call “That which we do not resist and fight to change, we will learn or be forced to accept.”
This government is sending military into our schools and giving them the right to request the records of any student. Why is the government after student records? To seek out the kids with the low test scores (due to unfair testing) to prove to them and their families that the USA army is the best chance they’ve got?
This government is turning our students into quick and easy military recruits.
Can we really sit back and accept this?
This government has mandated that our children “be held accountable” and are demanding that our children take high stakes tests every year in their schools in order to prove themselves for further funding. A report from Policy Analysis for California Education shows clearly that the more diverse a school is and the more economically disadvantaged students it enrolls, the less likely it is to make Adequate Yearly Progress, which leads to direct punitive action from the government. In other words, the message to struggling schools is, “Fix your problems, get your test scores up, or we shut you down!”
Can we really sit back and accept this?
This government has imposed a separate and unequal education, reduced to test preparation, for the nation’s most vulnerable children.
Can we really sit back and accept this?
Could it be that the state testing mandates with NCLB are inextricably linked to the need for a draft? How incredibly convenient for the military to have a plethora of data on our black youth which show them unfit for college due to the unjust tests given to kids who don’t have resources in their schools to GET an education, thusly turning these same kids into prime military candidates!
This government spends more of its efforts on criminalizing its youth than educating its youth! According to Jonathan Kozol, it costs us $64,000 a year to incarcerate an adult on Rikers Island, and $93,000 a year for a child on Rikers Island, which is 11 times what it spends on the average NYC public school student, and 18 times what is spent on an average 1st grader in the South Bronx. This government uses lower test scores to promote racism, bigotry, and hatred.
Can we really sit back and accept this? No, no, no! The future of our children depends on our actions now.
Nov. 2nd, no school, no work, join the movement to DRIVE OUT THE BUSH REGIME!
OUR KIDS CAN”T WAIT!