Sue Peters, founding member of Parents Across America and co-editor of the blog, Seattle Education 2010, speaks about the overwhelming influence of venture philanthropy on education policy, which is doing an “end run around democracy.” She points out how the strings attached to this funding “are binding our children and binding our teachers to policies that have failed and are damaging our schools.”

Florida Education Forward! Summit – January 26, 2011 The challenges which Florida’s public education faces approach us with hurricane force this year.  After the recent election, those in the education profession might call it a Cat 5 storm, at that. January, I thought to myself,  is a time for new beginnings, new ideas, new cooperation.  Central in my mind was the thought that we simply cannot begin a new year re-hashing old reform ideas which sent us into a tailspin … →

By Julie Woestehoff of PURE and co-founder of Parents Across America Well, it’s not just to get to the other side. Since Monday, a handful of Advanced Placement students from Chicago’s South Shore Schools of the Arts and of Technology have been marching across the street for a mere 50 minutes of class in the brand-new, otherwise empty South Shore International College Prep High School building. Meanwhile, the rest of the students at these two small high schools are being … →

By Sue Peters, co-editor of the Seattle Education 2010 blog & founding member of Parents Across America Huffington Post, February 4, 2011 The current crowd of education reformers like to dismiss any of us who disagree with their agenda as “defenders of the status quo.” Nothing could be further from the truth. I am not a defender of the status quo in public education because the status quo is currently No Child Left Behind and its insidious spin-off Race to … →

Parents mobilize nationwide Pam Grundy, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools parent activist (and frequent poster to this blog), will be part of next week’s launch of Parents Across America, a coalition of parents who support equity, diversity and parent involvement in public education. She says the idea for a national parents’ network emerged as local activists realized that issues they were dealing with often originate on a national level. Big-money donors such as The Broad Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation … →

There has been much publicity in recent years about how for more than a decade, Finnish students have excelled in the international comparisons called the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), exams given each three years in reading, math, and science to samples of 15-year-olds globally. In the current issue of the New Republic, Samuel E. Abrams, a visiting scholar at Teachers College, explains what Finland did to turn around its education system, starting in the 1970’s: Finland’s schools weren’t … →