Matt Damon, others speak out to ‘Save Our Schools’


Educators at the rally had strong messages addressed to Arne Duncan.

Teachers and their supporters turned out by the thousands July 30 for the Save Our Schools March in Washington, D.C. They came to protest budget cuts, the outdated No Child Left Behind Act, and most of all, the importance placed on standardized test scores.

Featuring celebrity headliner Matt Damon and a wide array of educational leaders, speakers emphasized the need for drastic reform.

“We are here because we’re committed to a strong public education system for all of our children,” said Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond. “We are here because we want to prepare children for the 21st century they’re entering, not for an endless series of multiple choice tests that deflect us from our mission to teach them well. We are here to protest the policies that produce the segregated and underfunded schools so many of our children attend.”

Speakers voiced dissatisfaction with penalties placed on schools that take in English as a Second Language students or students from poverty-stricken areas. Those schools are effectively punished when their test scores are lower than schools from higher-income areas.

“Schools today are more segregated racially and economically than at any time since 1968, the year, ironically, in which Dr. Martin Luther King was taken from us,” said Jonathan Kozol, an educator, author, and activist best known for his books on the U.S. education system.

“[Education] Secretary Arne Duncan has turned his back entirely on the precious legacy of Brown vs. Board of Education. Instead he’s very, very busy with Plessy vs. Ferguson,” Kozol said. “Mr. Duncan, listen to me. Mr. Duncan, separate but equal has never been successful. It didn’t work in the century just past, and it will not work in the century ahead, and anybody who tells us otherwise is lying to himself and to the people of America.”

Darling-Hammond criticized programs such as Teach for America.

“It is not acceptable to have schools in our cities and poorer districts staffed by a revolving door of beginning and often untrained teachers, many of whom see it as charity work on their way to a real job,” Darling-Hammond said.

Education activist Rita Solnet critiqued the standardized testing model that has been put in place in her home state of Florida.

“I had a front-row seat when Florida launched its whiz-bang one-size-fits-all Race to the Top curriculum. I watched as it robbed teachers of the flexibility to do what’s best for every child. I also watched how it robbed our children of finding out what their talents were, and nurturing those,” Solnet said.

Actor Matt Damon, whose mother was a teacher, said that if his education had been based around standardized testing, he was unsure he would ever have discovered his passion for acting.

“None of these qualities that I prize so deeply, that have brought me so much joy, that have brought me so much professional success—none of these qualities that make me who I am can be tested,” Damon said.

The emphasis on data-driven test scores has ruined the nation’s current education system, according to protesters.

“We’re abandoning an entire segment of the population here for the sake of collecting useless data. Stop wasting my tax dollars for failed reform,” Solnet said.

“We’re not here to [tell] Congress and the White House to make a couple of incremental minor changes in No Child Left Behind, or in the mania of the pestilence of testing that has spread across the land. We’re here to say you cannot fix this awful law; it needs to be abolished altogether,” Kozol said.

Speakers emphasized that teacher job security should not be based on test scores.

“Punishing those teachers if they will not drill and kill their kids for the entire year so they can artificially inflate their scores—what we have today, my friends, is not intelligent accountability, but primitive and crude accountability devised by people who know nothing about children, who disregard every aspect of a child’s learning that cannot be reducible to a number,” Kozol said.

“My teachers were empowered to teach me. Their time wasn’t taken up with a bunch of test prep—this silly drill and kill nonsense that any serious person knows doesn’t promote real learning. No, my teachers were free to approach me and every other kid in that classroom like an individual puzzle. They took so much care in figuring out who we were and how to best make the lessons resonate with each of us. They were empowered to unlock our potential. They were allowed to be teachers,” said Damon.

Kozol spoke of his experience visiting a school in Los Angeles with class sizes of 42 and seats for only 30. The remaining students stood against the walls of the classroom. He sharply criticized those policy makers who say class size doesn’t matter.

“I always ask them where their own kids go to school. Typically in Washington, they don’t even go to public schools. They go to very costly private schools where the class size seldom rises higher than 15,” Kozol said. “If very small class size and the individual attention is good for the children of a senator or president or corporate executive or big-time CEO, than it’s good for the poorest child of the poorest mother in America. Don’t let our leaders get away with this hypocrisy.”

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