Taking Back OUR Schools March and Rally

Calling all NYC Metro community activists (“voices of resistance”), families, students, civil rights advocates, voters, immigrant families, policymakers and legislators, union members, teachers, and faith leaders…

This rally and march is part of the national Testing Resistance & Reform Spring campaign. We aim to support the efforts of parents, teachers and community members to have public schools that work for the community.

Join us on May 17, 2014 in NYC!
City Hall Park (permit pending)
2:00 p.m.
Click here to RSVP Today!

Some of those speaking will be Brian Jones, Carol Burris, Raging Grannies, Joe Rella and Ken Mitchel (local superintendents), representatives of parents groups and BATS. Others invited to speak include Diane Ravitch, Jonathon Kozol, Leticia James, Leonie Haimson, Zakiah Ansari (parent) and Stephanie Rivera (SUPE).

The Vision: Create & sustain a public school system that provides a fully funded, equitable, community-based education for every child. This means that decisions about our children’s schooling are made democratically by families and professional educators, free of corporate and political intervention.

The Mission: Educate teachers, parents, students and communities on the dangers of corporate-driven reform that lead to privatization, high stakes testing, mandated curriculum, unfair teacher evaluation practices, school closures, and a two tier school system where special needs students, English as a 2nd language learners, and children of color and poverty are hit hardest.

The Goals:

• Motivate people to act on behalf of children to receive a quality equitable education.

• Bring various communities to work together in resisting national corporate reform policies.

• Restore the joy of learning

• Get media coverage of our point of view.

• Have our voices heard on the main-steam media.

• Involve mainstream and alternative media coverage of vision, mission, and goals

• Let corporations know that we will resist their efforts to privatize and control public education

• Assure authentic classroom-based assessment – end high stakes testing

• Assure locally-developed curricula that honor languages, cultures, and communities – No mandating of common core standards and standards based testing

• Ensure privacy of student data – end In-Bloom

• Universal public (non charter) neighborhood preschools based in our neighborhood public schools

• Wrap around services for every neighborhood public school: counselors, social workers, psychologists, health care

• Strengthen neighborhood schools, assure high quality schools in every neighborhood – resist charter schools and vouchers

• Value out of school multiple literacies and cultural pedagogy

• Protect programs (art, music, phys. ed.) that are important to the overall development of our children and to their love of learning

Audience: Community activists (“voices of resistance”), families, students, civil rights advocates, voters, immigrant families, policymakers and legislators, union members, teachers, and faith leaders

Celebration. We celebrate the potential of all students and schools