Someone send us this letter below to send back to the PTA when they ask for donations. It’s a good template so we’re publishing it. Someone else emailed us concerned that the local PTA’s are doing a lot of good in the schools in spite of national and state leaders pushing them to endorse Common Core. While this may be true, their dues are supporting the national agenda. This person recommends that everyone show up at PTA meetings to help explain to people what Common Core is all about and help educate these parent volunteers. She said that as long as you don’t join PTA, donations that are given after membership drives stay local. I do not know about this myself, so I’m just posting it as a possibility. The best thing would be to check if your school has a PTO (most charter schools do, most district schools do not). A PTO is 100% local so all funds stay at the school. If you have a PTA at your school and can disband it and form a PTO, that’s a great objective.
Dear PTA,
This year I will be withholding my annual PTA donation. I am concerned about the financially indebted relationship that has developed between PTA and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Gates’ push for the academically experimental Common Core. I refer to the following announcement, found on the Gates Foundation website:
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National PTA to Mobilize Parents for Common Core Standards – Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Receives $1 million grant from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to engage parents in four states.
CHICAGO — – National PTA is positioning itself as a key player at the front line of education reform. The association today announced a new three-year effort to mobilize parents to advance key education priorities, beginning with common core state standards—a voluntary, state-led, internationally benchmarked set of high academic standards in English language arts and mathematics. A $1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will help support the effort.
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I would support the formation of a local PTO where all monies collected from parents would go to the school, rather than being sent to the national group.
Sincerely,
Yes you can donate and every penny stays local. If you join and become a member then 90% of your membership fees go onto council, region, state, & national.
The PTA at the school my child attends considered going PTO but we don’t have the volunteers to do the leg work to change. But it may come up again next year. Instead we decided to push parental involvement & volunteering over collecting members.
We are talking about $6 in annual membership fees that will provide parents a voice at the national level, whether it is to lobby congress or to put the interests of students, teachers and parents at the forefront. There is nothing stopping anyone from paying that $6 in fees and continuing to donate later to have their funds used locally or continuing to volunteer time at school to improve education at your neighborhood school. If the PTA is endorsing the common core, could it be that parents at the national level are interested in the benefits and the promise of common core ? $6 is a small price to pay to garner the attention of the US congress that is notorious for it’s lack of attention span.
Local is great for many things but when it comes to education, it goes against the definition of education to be preoccupied by Local vs. non-local. If we had just local funding and ideas at the university level, our state would be poorer both for the money and the education.
Not everything is wrong with the common core. It was adopted at the national level. We are after all part of the same nation. Let the schools teach what is best in the name of education. Let the parents and churches teach values that they cherish. Let the children make up their own minds. They can be critical thinking beings if we give them the credit they deserve. There is no need to cast them in the parents mold and clone our thinking onto theirs.
It’s easy to make comments anonymously in my opinion, but to me they are hardly genuine. I don’t support the PTA financially. I give money to the school when they need it but don’t join the PTA because they support so many things I am against. They support teachers who shouldn’t be teaching, unions who drive up costs, and national agendas that are not in the best interest of my child. They put on event after event at the school that bring private businesses in, hype up the kids about buying things from the private business, and then gouge the kids selling overpriced worthless goods claiming that a portion goes back to the school. It’s a very small portion. I just keep asking myself, so what exactly are my tax dollars paying for if the school has no money? All it tells me is that we are still a long way from any meaningful reform in education.
And the key is local control. It does not go against the definition of education to be concerned about each individual student. That’s so silly. It is the definition of education! Education cannot be universal, that is indoctrination. Education is an individual event. Each child spread out on a beautiful spectrum of ability and aptitude mastering concepts at their own pace, excelling where they can and getting assistance where it’s needed. Universal minimums, with all their good intentions, simply become universal maximums in our one teacher 30 student public system. Because, once the student reaches the minimum they become an observer as teachers scramble to get everyone to the minimum. It ignores the very nature of the human race, that we are all different.
Local control reduces costs, encourages parent teacher communication and empowers teachers to assist each child to their maximum potential. The arguments made anonymously above are disingenuous and full of fallacy and inflammatory language. My children are not clones of me, and I hope they are cast from an even better mold than I, but I do have a responsibility to teach them morals and values,