Adding to The List

From the invaluable stopthefreezenj, here are the people who care about the future of our schools:

• Was Gerald Bracey wrong when he helped us understand how statistics in public education are manipulated for political purposes?
• How many lectures and invited talks does Diane Ravitch have to do before someone actually hears what she's saying?
• When will Deb Meier be taken seriously when she talks about the power of small democratic schools?
• Does Alfie Kohn really need to continue to point out the lack of research supporting the current high standards movement?
• How much more research does Linda Darling-Hammond have to produce that demonstrates that teacher education works?
• Why is it so hard for people to believe Steven Krashen's reporting about the failure of so-called high school exit exams?
• How many blogs does Anthony Cody have to write about a system that devalues public schools and teachers?
• When are people going to give Bill Ayers the credit he deserves for struggling for decades to elevate teachers and teaching to its well-deserved place of prominence?
• When will Valerie Strauss's education pieces get a chance to move the American public?
• How hard is it recognize the ability of Rick Ayers to use an analogy in describing how single metrics and MBAs damage public schooling?
• Why is Shaun Johnson's description of the "ruinous culture" of high-stakes testing only talked about on a local AM radio station in central Pennsylvania?
• When will more people read Anne Geiger's blog?
• Why is Fair-Test not regularly cited in mainstream media when discussions of education reform focus exclusively on achievement tests?
• And maybe most importantly, when are parents going to be listened to?

To which I'll add:

• When will the mainstream media take the research of Bruce Baker more seriously than the propaganda put out by "reformers"?
• How many kids will be bullied, assaulted, or even killed before we start to heed the warnings of Catherine Lugg?
• When will the voices of parents, expressed by Leonie Haimson, be heard?

Slekar nails it here:

ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Oprah, etc. please do your job! Stop elevating and glorying Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates. Arnie Duncan, Teach for America, vouchers, charters and school choice. Do your homework and look at the above list of experts. Read their research and commentary and try to "hear" what they are saying. As Diane Ravitch recently commented, "there are children's lives and futures at stake."

The biggest problem this nation has with education right now is a media that is either unwilling or incapable (or both) of informing the public of the real issues facing our schools and our students. Nothing will change until we deal with the problem of the media first.