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These Educators Deserve a Movie Deal

Feb 1st, 2012
by Lily.
1 comment

There are two stories to tell in Chester Upland School District in Pennsylvania. One is a heroic story worthy of a book or movie deal. There are plenty of movies about the lone teacher crusader who against all odds and against the establishment brings students out of the darkness of ignorance and into the light of the power of their own futures.

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I’m a sucker for those movies. But I have a love-hate relationship with them because inevitably, in order to lionize the hero, they have to make all the other teachers in the school less than heroes. They have to make the principal a bully. Movies need a good guy to cheer for and bad guys to boo over. Así es la vida. That’s the way it goes.

Chester Upland, a poor and predominantly minority district, is a long way from Hollywood, but it does have a star in Sara Ferguson.

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Lily On Assignment With CNN’s Sanjay Gupta

Jan 9th, 2012
by Lily.
4 comments

Thousands of schools across the country are in tremendous need of repair, remodeling, or replacement. CNN’s Sanjay Gupta tours a Pennsylvania public school with Lily Eskelsen and learns firsthand how indoor air quality issues affect student success.

Schools like this one fall woefully short in providing a minimum environment for effective teaching and learning. It represents the types of problems America’s public school students face nationwide.

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An International Diane Ravitch Moment?

Dec 15th, 2011
by Lily.
15 comments

There is hope on the horizon, my dears.

For more than ten long, empty, intellectually dry and dishonest years, we’ve lived under the insanity of No Child Left Untested. (Someone told me not to be so negative. Trust me. I’m holding back.) Children, especially poor children, have been subjected to a corporate “reform” mentality of pass/fail by making their quota of test score points on some standardized garbage never designed to gauge anything more delicately complex than a child’s understanding of where the comma goes.

(Ironically, the only ones lately who have been afforded “social promotion” have been the morally corrupt CEOs who were awarded their gold star parachutes whilst bankrupting the global economy, but I digress.) (more…)

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We Are All Ohio

Nov 9th, 2011
by Lily.
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I am Ohio today. Ok, I’m in Ohio, but I didn’t forget the preposition. I am Ohio today. All across the country good people who work for American public schools, colleges and universities are celebrating. Firefighters are celebrating. Police officers are celebrating. This is an historic victory.

It’s historic in many ways – in voter turnout; in the number of volunteers who walked neighborhoods and manned phone banks; in the nastiness of the rhetoric against educators and other public servants as some sort of “privileged” class.

But historic in that this is the first time in the history of our great country that voters have been asked to take a position on the rights of public employees, teachers and support staff, police officers and firefighters, public health nurses and other public employees, to be engaged in good-faith negotiations that allow them to have a voice in issues dealing with their compensation and in the tools and conditions they need to do their jobs properly and safely.
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