By Jerry Mintz
On March 9th I was in the audience at a huge anti-testing, opt-out rally at LIU/Post's Tilles Center. You can read about the details of the event here. There was a second, even bigger rally the next day. We are against high stakes testing and have provided AERO member schools as a refuge from them for the past two years. We will do that again this year. You can see last year's schools here. Let us know if you want your school added to the list.
Many people in the public are understandably confused about all the fuss over the Common Core Testing. I agreed with almost all the criticisms made in Diane Ravich's rousing speech. But it important to note that AERO is not aligned with any "side" in this debate.
There are basically two "sides" in this fight. On the one side there are President Obama, his education Secretary, Arnie Duncan, Bill Gates, hedge fund managers, governors such as Andrew Cuomo, etc. They are sometimes under the banner of the Democrats for Education Reform. The say that the public school system is "broken" and they know how to fix it. Their plan involves forcing testing on all students so they can weed out bad teachers and close bad schools. They plan to replace them mostly with independently managed charter schools. To accomplish this they have supported high stakes testing, the Common Core Curriculum, and the No Child Left Behind act. It is interesting that, according to the criteria created in that act, virtually all schools everywhere are failing at this point!
On the other side are teachers and teacher unions. They believe that first group has created a great conspiracy to take over the public school system and privatize it, for their own financial gain. They are against high stakes testing and the common core curriculum, and an increasing number of parents are being drawn into this.
We believe that each side has some good points, but we are on neither side. We are on the side of the students! That means that AERO believes that children are natural learners and therefore that education should be learner centered. It should be built on the interest of the learner. We outlined our stand on this in a previous issue of this e newsletter.
So we believe that fundamental changes need to be made in the education system to make it more learner-centered and empowering to students. We don't believe that high stakes testing or closing down existing schools and replacing them with schools operating on the same top-down system is the answer, but we are not against the concept of charters. We do believe that many schools that are AERO members do have the answers and are models for what is possible. These include public alternatives such as Jefferson County Open School in CO, the Lehman Alternative in NY (Dave Lehman will be a presenter at the AERO conference), and non-elitist independent alternatives with a sliding-scale tuition such as Brooklyn Free School, the Agile Learning Center, and Mosaic School. You can see hundreds more on our lists of member schools and democratic schools.
