CPF Insider

So happy to be back

Oh hi, friends.

Thanks for subscribing to this newsletter!

It’s so nice to see you again. We have a lot to talk about!

As I said on that last blog post over on Chicago Public Fools, I’ve been doing little bits of this and that, working on some bills and visiting with legislators now and again; I still have my hand a little in the education advocacy pie. But what I miss is the sense of doing this work with all of you. Because when many people are hollering about an issue, our elected officials and legislators hear it more clearly. When many people pop into their offices, it’s much harder for them to ignore our concerns.

And though I don’t feel that there are bulldozers poised just outside our schools, ready to demolish them at an arbitrary moment for an arbitrary reason, in quite the same way as when Rahm was at the helm of CPS, still our schools need our support—they are still underfunded, inequitable, disinvested, and subject to the whims of non-educator “disrupters” trying to make a profit off our kids.

And how about that State of the Union last night? In an altogether eye-popping evening, what caught my attention most was the repeated, menacing phrase: “failed government schools.” Of course the president is ginning up hysteria to push for voucher expansion, which will defund our schools yet further. You can almost see Snidely Whiplash twirling his mustache, rubbing his hands together, and cackling with demented glee. (You can’t? Is it just me?)

Folks who push these policies forget: public schools are our schools. We pay for them. They are in our communities, they are our communities. And we will stand by them, with them, and for them.

That’s what this newsletter is about. Our purpose here is to find out what school-helping bills are out there right now, and how to support this work. What YOU can do. Easy stuff like calling elected officials. Or stuff that takes a little more time like visiting Springfield. I’ll be telling you chiefly about what’s going on in Illinois, but I’m open to hearing about what folks are working on in other locales so we can lend our collective heft to those efforts too. Tell me what’s happening in your community and we’ll see what we can do together.

Let me introduce you to two issues gearing up in Springfield right now. First, there’s a bill that seeks to safeguard K-8 PLAY. We’re not just asking for a small token recess, either. For many years there have been bills trying to guarantee 10 minutes of recess, 15 minutes of recess each day in school. All of those have failed. So why not let’s do something completely different and push for an hour! Crazy, right? There are already sponsors for the legislation in both chambers. These bills should be assigned numbers in the coming weeks, and when that happens, I’ll link the specifics and share some folks to call.

Second, the work to safeguard our children’s DIGITAL PRIVACY is not done! There are several simultaneous efforts I’ll talk about about next time, and I’ll fill you in on a class action lawsuit that seeks to hold Google accountable for selling our high schoolers’ data despite the fact that this is currently illegal in Illinois. (Yikes, right?!)

Thanks ever so much for joining me here today. If you haven’t subscribed but would like to, sign up below. And don’t forget to share. The more the merrier.