January 11, 2018

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Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools:
A Rose in L.A.

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National Day of Racial Healing
Schott Foundation Live Chat with
Edgar Villanueva & Marianna Islam
on Decolonizing Wealth
January 22, 2019
 

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Schott Foundation News


10 Education Policy Wins That
Give Us Hope in 2019

At the Schott Foundation we’ve been working for more than twenty-five years to support and empower the grassroots, community-centered organizations that are building movements strong enough to enact serious policy change. Here are ten policy victories our grantee partners and allies have celebrated in 2018, all of which provide the momentum for the important work ahead this year.

  1. Keeping Students FirstAny list should start with the most iconic education story in 2018: the unprecedented wave of #RedForEd teacher strikes and walkouts that started in West Virginia and spread to Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado, and North Carolina. In each case such efforts led to either significant wins for educators and their schools — like increased classroom funding, public employee salaries, and halts to charter expansion — or a still-significant change in the political landscape and public will in support of public education. And in each case successful mobilizations were made possible by strong community ties and coordination (see our recent report on how you can build community-labor partnerships in your hometown!).
     
  2. CEJ
    The organizing efforts of the Coalition for Educational Justice to ensure culturally responsive schools led to $23 million in anti-bias training for educators in New York City public schools.

See all ten victories! >


Los Angeles Teachers Set to Strike on Monday: What You Need to Know

More than 30,000 teachers at the Los Angeles Unified School District — the second-largest school district in the country after New York City — are about to go on strike. Support for L.A. teachers has been pouring in from across the country and, crucially, from within their own community too. Here is what you need to know about the upcoming strike and the politics & organizing around it:

Washington Post: Why 30,000 Los Angeles teachers are ready to strike over huge class sizes
"There is a waiver in the current contract that allows the district to ignore any and all class size caps, as long as they claim financial necessity — and the administration has take advantage of this waiver every single year since the great recession in 2009. That year, the district issued massive teacher layoffs, which increased class sizes in nearly every school." Read more >

AROS: We Are All L.A.!
Schott grantee partner the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools has produced a microsite explaining the issues that community members in Los Angeles are fighting for, including more school funding, less over-testing, smaller class sizes, and an end to discriminatory "random" searches of students. Read more & donate to the solidarity fund >

The Progressive: Will Parents Stand with L.A. Teachers?
"The union has made parent and community outreach a big priority. Teachers have passed out leaflets to parents at every school, held meetings with parents, and developed contact lists of supportive parents who they’ll invite to the picket lines. In the fall, the union held eight regional parent forums, each of which drew hundreds of parents eager to find out how they could help win more school funding." Read more >

Capital & Main: L.A. Teachers’ Potential ‘Meta-Strike’ Reveals Battle Lines in U.S. Public Education War
"If Los Angeles teachers walk off the job January 14, as widely expected, it will be a meta-strike with extremely high stakes not only for teachers, students and parents in L.A., but for public education across the U.S. The stalemated negotiations over wages, class size, staffing and other issues matter – but they are proxies for an epic fight that has been playing out in American school districts for more than a decade." Read more >

Betsy DeVos Should 'Recommit' to Enforcing Civil Rights Laws, Coalition Says

In a Thursday letter to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, more than 100 education advocacy groups including the American Federation of Teachers, Children's Defense Fund, and the NAACP registered their strong opposition to DeVos' decision last month to rescind the Obama administration's school discipline guidance that was intended to protect students of color from the disparate impacts of discipline policies.
Read more >

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