Educators march in D.C. this weekend

Updates about the SOS March and a related two-day educators’ conference in Washington D.C., this weekend have been all over Twitter and Facebook for months now.

“The Save Our Schools March is being held in response to recent destructive ‘reform’ efforts which have undermined our public educational system, demoralized teachers, and reduced the education of too many of our children to nothing more than test preparation,” reads the event website.

The Save our Schools March & National Call to Action runs July 28-31 and centers on the march in Washington, that will attract everyone from actor Matt Damon to edu-pundits Diane Ravitch and Jonathan Kozol and many more.

There will also be thousands of educators from around the country, including from Wisconsin. Based on the tweets I’ve seen there will be folks from Madison, Lake Geneva and other Wisconsin locales.

According to a source, MTEA president and Rethinking Schools co-founder Bob Peterson is attending and running a Rethinking Schools workshop while there. At least a couple dozen teachers are expected to attend from Milwaukee and the Madison Teachers Inc. reportedly has a couple buses headed east to the rally.

About 10 Milwaukee teachers have RSVP’d on Facebook for a meetup on Saturday morning in Washington. The rally begins at noon at the Ellipse and marches over to the White House, where it is expected to arrive at 1:30 p.m.

Among the many speakers on tap at the D.C. rally is what the SOS website describes as “A Wisconsin education delegation, led by Amy Mizialko.”

Mizialko is an MPS district mentor and former teacher.

Related events are taking place across the country, in cities like St. Louis, Denver, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Seattle, among others. A rally in support of the march is being held at the State Capitol in Madison on Saturday at 3 p.m. That event has about 200 Facebook RSVPs at the moment.

An SOS Film Festival is already underway in D.C. screening films like “Race to Nowhere” and “The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman.”

It will be interesting to see if President Obama or Secretary of Education Arne Duncan show up in support of public education this weekend, too.