Listen to the great song composed by Greg Gower and sung by Linda Gower for the Save our Schools March in DC.  Greg and Linda are two of the founding members of Parents Across America -Spokane. Come join Parents Across America, Diane Ravitch, Matt Damon and many others in the Save Our Schools rally and march to the White House on Saturday, July 30 2011. More information here.   President Obama, listen to us!

As an educator and strategic planning facilitator over the past four decades, Tom Olson has advised 13 different states on their education reform efforts, and has consulted with more than 500 local district and state strategic reform projects. He also served as a volunteer member on several Stand for Children (SFC) State Task Forces, and was a  board member of the SFC Political Action Committee.  He wrote the following letter to Jonah Edelman, the founder of Stand for Children, joining … →

What could be more admirable than an attempt to improve school meals? And making a profit by doing that can only be beneficial to everyone, right? That’s what San Francisco Bay Area-based Revolution Foods has convinced a lot of people, anyway. The private-sector enterprise has won acclaim for supposedly bringing better, healthier, fresher school meals to school cafeterias. Only trouble is, Revolution Foods claims that it can do that for the amount public schools receive from the government for school … →

Rahm Emanuel, the new Mayor of Chicago, walks out of an NBC  interview when asked when asked what school he intends to enroll  his children in. He intones: “My children are not an instrument of me being mayor.” But everyone else’s children are. Check out the video here and below. If the report in the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet is correct, he has chosen the Lab School, where Obama sent his own kids, where Duncan went to school himself, and … →

This perceptive piece is reprinted with permission from the American Enterprise blog.  Members of Parents Across America agree that Duncan’s policies are arbitrary, overreach his authority, and conflict with public opinion about how our schools should be improved. By Whitney Downs In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, education writer Stephanie Banchero highlighted the increasing impatience among state leaders over Congress’s inability to “fix” No Child Left Behind. Reauthorization of the law, which was enacted during the George W. Bush administration and … →

By Pamela Grundy The first clue came when the phone rang at the house of my friend Carol Sawyer. At the other end was a pleasant woman who said she was conducting a survey on education in our school district, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Carol doesn’t much care for phone surveys, but she’s interested in anything that has to do with CMS. She said yes. A few minutes in, she realized that this was no ordinary survey. Question after question sought her … →

by Julia Sass Rubin of Save our Schools NJ, an affiliate of Parents Across America; cross-posted at the Big Think. In a recent big think profile, New Jersey’s Acting Commissioner of Education Christopher Cerf observed that consensus “is not the highest value in this world” and that “putting too high a premium on consensus and collaboration” could lead to bad solutions. This may be true when it comes to corporations.  But Mr. Cerf wasn’t discussing corporate restructuring; he was talking … →

By Susan Barrett I appreciate that Oregon’s Stand for Children (SFC) chapter has responded to my post, but unfortunately this only further confirms for me that they have no interest in changing their agenda. In the past few days, I have been contacted by other parents who agree with me that Stand is not representing their concerns. For example, not once have I heard a parent say, “Gee, if only we had more Teach for America teachers, things would be … →