Full disclosure: I am a teacher, a union member, and I feel strongly about the rights of workers to organize and have a voice. I will be at this event, but I will not wear a button, a shirt, or wave a banner with the NYSUT logo. I will be there for my three children, my students, the dedicated educators I work with, my administrators, my school, and my
community. I thank NYSUT for the opportunity.

For too long now a political campaign aimed at turning education into an investment game has been called “reform,” but it is anything but that. Schools are caught on the losing end of coercive funding, forced to submit to trial by standardized tests, and held to a system that reduces a very human endeavor to data-analyzed and marketed to the very companies that will then sell more tests to create more data. While the “free market” is often praised for what it could do, it gets a pass on what it has done to our economy and our society already, and hardly a word is spoken about the bankers and investors whose wealth continues to rise while the rest of the public “shares the sacrifice”.