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Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Diane Ravitch is calling on all parents to get involved | Seattle Education

Diane Ravitch is calling on all parents to get involved | Seattle Education:


Diane Ravitch is calling on all parents to get involved

The following is a call to action that was posted on Diane Ravitch’s Blog.
I like being called “fearless”.
In an earlier post, I described how a parent organization called out Scantron, the testing company, for inserting a blatantly propagandistic item into its standardized tests. The reading passage was about the alleged superiority of charters as education reform and named a fictitious “multi-millionaire” who sends his own children to a charter. Public school students in Chicago were shown this advertising for charters, with no critical views included.
The parent group is called PURE, or Parents United for Responsible Education. They are watchdogs for public education in Chicago, and they are fearless. Every city should have a group like PURE. This parent group is an affiliate of Parents Across America, and Julie Woesterhoff–its leader–was a co-founder of PAA.
One important lesson to be learned from this episode is that parents can be powerful. Parents have the freedom