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Happy New Year! Let’s fight together to end the takeover, support students and teachers and fight for public education at the State Legislature this session starting this month.  

Find out how to get involved at the Saturday (1/11) CVPE meeting at Trinity Gardens Church of Christ. It is from 12:30-2:30 pm. RSVP at houstoncvpe.org/events.

On the agenda:

• Tips for Sharing your Story at the 89th State Legislative session against vouchers, for full public ed funding, against endless high stakes testing, and a repeal of the takeover. This includes visits to state legislators' offices and public hearings during micro-lobbying days and March 10th Public Ed Lobby Day 
• Rally Your Rural Relatives and Friends for Public Ed Campaign against vouchers
• Fighting for public education in HISD at the Jan 16th board meeting, supporting other critical winter campaigns by CVPE, opposing the harmful teacher evaluation "merit" pay proposal set for a March vote, and pushing back against the ban on full books

Stay informed:

• Vouchers 101 from Raise Your Hand Texas
• What to expect from Houston ISD in 2025: Metal detectors at high schools, teacher evaluations and more in Houston Chronicle

• 1 in 6 of HISD's AEDS flagged for expired, broken parts before Marshall Middle student's death in November Houston Chronicle

Here’s two more articles you might have missed.

In The Progressive on January 1, 2025, Carol Burris writes, “The 'school choice movement' has always been a bait-and-switch: charter schools for vouchers, and vouchers for market-based schooling. The goal is ending public responsibility for education, a vision advocated by Milton Friedman in 1955. Recent trends, such as Education Savings Accounts (ESA), shift responsibility and costs to families. As subsidies reduce, a fully for-profit marketplace could emerge. For those unable to pay, the libertarian right assumes philanthropy will fill the gap. In a pay-as-you-go system, rural families and special needs children will suffer the most, making democracy unsustainable. The libertarian right knows where this leads.”

The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2024 from “AI vaporizes long-term learning” to “Covid’s long tail” to “the science of reading meets real children.”

“Over the decades, “claims of a reading crisis have routinely surfaced in an effort to “justify a purging of past practices.“ But phonics is just one crucial piece of the reading puzzle—a skill which must eventually be applied to authentic reading materials such as books and short stories, as “a regular part of the reading diet.” 

“In the end, of course, reading instruction is about getting real reading results for real students—and that’s a complicated matter indeed. According to kindergarten teacher Margaret R., who left a comment on Edutopia’s website in August of this year, “I always had a kiddo or two that came in as a reader,” and another “who never heard a story or held a book. It is my job to design instruction that moves both children forward.”

And that is why Miles’ scripted one size fits all approach is bad for kids.