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Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has been traveling around the US lately making speeches and attracting protesters. She's getting ready to roll out charter, voucher and other privatization schemes. What to do? Read more below... 
PAA ACTION OF THE WEEK

 

On the road with Betsy

US Education Secretary Betsy Devos has been on the road lately trying to sell her vision for a privatized public education system. So far the visits have not gone too well.  

In Washington DC she was briefly blocked from entering a public school by protesters, which prompted grumbling tweets from White House aide Kellyanne Conway, former USDE head Arne Duncan, and AFT president Randi Weingarten that DeVos should be encouraged to visit public schools.

But that's assuming that Secretary DeVos would actually learn something from the experience, which seems unlikely given her failure to listen so far. And that's one major reason why people protest...

Several dozen people protested outside of a DeVos appearance in Salt Lake City where access to the event cost $3000. In that speech, DeVos compared public schools to cell phone networks, easily switched when "failing" the consumer.

A few days later, graduates booed and turned their backs on DeVos as she gave a commencement speech at historically black Bethune-Cookman University.

With these appearances across the country, DeVos is trying to lay the groundwork for an expected roll-out of new federal voucher and charter expansion programs. We need to get in her way.

Watch out for her in your town and be prepared to make some noise. Be ready with a letter to the editor to send to your local paper (you can borrow as much as you like from this example, sent to the Salt Lake Tribune by PAA interim executive director Julie Woestehoff).     
TWEET OF THE WEEK

@BetsyDeVosEd wrong to compare public schls with cell phone service you switch when service lags #noschoolvouchers #PublicEdkeytodemocracy 

COMING UP

Important student data privacy webinar!


Save the date! On Thursday, May 23, at 8 pm ET, PAA will co-sponsor a webinar with the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood on student data privacy.

This event is the roll-out for a toolkit created by the Parent Coalition with input from PAA leader Laura Bowman of PAA-RoanokeValley and others.

We are looking forward to sharing this toolkit, and to this webinar. Details will follow.   
PAA NEWS

PAA co-founder letter in NYT

Leonie Haimson's letter on charter schools was recently published in the New York Times. She was responding to an essay suggesting that charter schools don't skim students. Here's how Leonie countered that false claim:  

(V)ery few charters enroll and retain equal numbers of at-risk students as traditional public schools in the communities in which they are situated - children with serious disabilities, those who receive free lunch, and/or recent immigrants and English-language learners.

The result is that our traditional public schools are increasingly concentrated with the highest need students with fewer resources to educate them. In New York City alone, charter schools are diverting more than $1.7 billion from the public schools, as well as taking up more space in a system where more than 550,000 students attend overcrowded schools and more than 300,000 students are crammed into classes of 30 or more.

PAA Kentucky affiliate hard at work!

Here's an encouraging report from our affiliate Save Our Schools KY:

We brought a group of parents, teachers and students to the capitol during the most recent legislative session in Kentucky, and a reporter from KET followed us around and filed this fun story covering our event.

 

Unfortunately, we were not successful in stopping the state's first charter school bill, but we do think our group raised a number of concerns that slowed the bill and has set the stage for some challenges in the near future.


How cool is this??? Scenes from PAA founding member        Helen Gym's recent Emily's List award event   

   
  

Helen, left, Gabrielle Giffords, second from right

We are so proud!

JOIN US!


If you share our overall goals of progressive, positive education reform and more parent input in education policy making, we invite you to affiliate with us if you are an existing group, or to form a new PAA chapter. The more of us there are, the stronger our voice will be at every level.  Here's how! 
If you have questions, comments, suggestions or stories to share, please e-mail us at info@parentsacrossamerica.org or visit www.parentsacrossamerica.org.

Looking for regular updates on key education stories? Join the PAA News List by e-mailing PAAnews-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

 
 


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