Duncan Kirkwood is the Alabama State Director for the Black Alliance for Educational Options. He took the time to tell us about National School Choice Week and how there will be a rally downtown on the steps of the Capitol. Here’s what he had to share!
Tell us about National School Choice Week.
National School Choice Week provides an unprecedented opportunity, every January, to shine a positive spotlight on the need for effective education options for all children. Independently planned by a diverse and growing coalition of individuals, schools, and organizations, National School Choice Week features thousands of unique events and activities across the country. The Week allows participants to advance their own messages of educational opportunity, while uniting with like-minded groups and individuals across the country.
Participants in National School Choice believe that parents should be empowered to choose the best educational environments for their children
The NSCW march and rally are going to be held on Jan 28th in Montgomery. There will be over 2000 educators, students, parents, and community members in attendance all to celebrate the different types of options in education. There will be traditional public schools, magnets school, home school students, private school students, and religious school students all represented from across the state of Alabama. This rally will be a celebration of education and a plea for the powers that be to continue to expand those options.
Parental choice (often called school choice) is the idea that parents should be able to choose what educational setting is best for their child. More specifically, usually when we are talking about parental choice in Alabama we have a focus on low income and working class families because in Alabama if a family cannot afford private school, their child’s quality of education is dictated by the zip code that child was born in.
Education Reform is important in Alabama because everyone knows that in Alabama there are a large number of students that are not receiving a world class education and haven’t been for years. We need to take a different look at how we educate our children, because doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Many people in Alabama are protectors of the status quo, or who believe the false information about the education reform movement think that education reform means that we are against teachers. In fact it’s quite the opposite; we understand that the best way to ensure that students succeed in school is to have an amazing teacher in front of them. Furthermore, we believe that those amazing teachers should be rewarded for the incredibly difficult job that they do. We do not think that seniority should be the deciding factor for hiring/firing, raises and other incentives. We believe that as in every other profession, educators are rewarded based on how well they perform at their job of educating children.
In Alabama it is especially important because we have so many children not able to perform on grade level, so many children dropping out of school, and so many children who don’t even believe they can be successful in life. And, we can begin to change our education system on the front end, or we can continue to build more prisons on the back end.
We hope to bring a massive awareness to the importance of educational options, we hope that the people of Alabama, and the legislators understand that every school environment doesn’t work for every child. What I think will be the most impactful will be letting the education community and elected officials see what parental choice looks like, letting them see the children who we are supposed to be doing this for.
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