From May Day to Testing Day: Puerto Rico’s Teachers Battle for the Schools Their Students Deserve

On May Day, thousands of Puerto Rican teachers, parents, and students launched strikes and boycotts to push back against austerity measures that would close nearly 300 schools, lay off 7,000 teachers, convert public schools into privatized charters, and cut public sector pensions. I spoke with Mercedes Martinez, President of Teachers Federation of Puerto Rico, about …

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PBS News Hour: “At a school with a history of social protest, this teacher is leading an opposition to ‘excessive testing’”

A couple of weeks ago, Gwen Ifill and the PBS News Hour crew flew to Seattle.  They spent one day following me and one day following the richest person who ever lived, Bill Gates, to ask us about our ideas on education reform.  I was simply shocked to hear that they would be running an …

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Garfield High School Teacher Heather Robison’s Conscientious Test Objector Declaration

Today marks the first day scheduled for Common Core testing, such as it is, at Seattle's Garfield High School. As I reported last week, Garfield educators were debating about how best to oppose the new deeply flawed Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) Common Core tests, when the parents spoke and opted out hundreds of students …

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