PRESS RELEASE 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:  July 20, 2014
More Information Contact:

Marla Kilfoyle, General Manager, BATs

Melissa Tomlinson, Asst. General Manager, BATs

contact.batmanager@gmail.com

Badass Teachers’ Association -  http://www.badassteacher.org/

The Badass Teachers’ Association (BAT), an activist organization of over 50,000 teachers, will be holding a rally in Washington D.C. to protest the devastating educational policies of the United States Department of Education and Arne Duncan.   The rally will be held on July 28, 2014, at the USDOE Plaza beginning at 10 a.m. and will draw thousands of teachers, parents, students, and educational activists from around the country.  BAT will demand such things as ending federal incentives to close and privatize schools, promoting equity and adequate funding for all public schools, and banning all data sharing of children’s private information.

Co-founder Dr. Mark Naison states in an interview with Suzie Parker of TakePart, “I think that many teachers hoped that if Barack Obama was re-elected, he would ease up on the testing, and the school closings, and the test-driven teacher evaluations. Instead  he doubled down on all of those, leaving teachers with no other option than to speak out in the most forceful way possible; say, ‘enough is enough;’ and demand a seat at the table in shaping education policy, which they emphatically do not have now.” 

In the same interview with Parker, Co-Founder Priscilla Sanstead proclaims, “I want big changes in education. I want standardized testing to be reined way back, portfolios to become an accepted way to assess students, and for teachers to get a voice in setting education policy. I want smaller class sizes and the way to do that is to spend money hiring more teachers.”

Marla Kilfoyle, General Manager of BAT, states about the event, "Teachers, parents, and students have had enough! We want our public schools returned back to our communities, we want adequate funding to  meet the needs of our children, we want child poverty to be addressed as a major issue of why children struggle in school, we want mayors to stop closing schools, and we want the USDOE to stop pushing top-down reforms that aren't working!"

BAT will demand that both state and federal governments stop blaming teachers for child poverty and the societal inequalities that impede a child’s learning.