Getting the Attention of the White House: Using Facebook to Promote Teacher Knowledge about School Reform

Abstract

In the chapter I will discuss how the participants in the Facebook project Teachers’ Letters to Obama discussed and communicated the need to go beyond a focus on testing. Some of the policies we advocated for were additional resources and support for teachers, mentoring programs to make sure expertise is shared and turnover reduced, an increase in school libraries, and programs to respond to the health needs of students living in poverty and turmoil. Proponents of test-heavy reform policies continue to declare these challenging schools failures and to offer them a narrow, punitive range of “turnaround” models. We argued that, instead, reform efforts must address the conditions of our students’ lives and create real chances for them to learn and thrive.