Are you really telling me you don’t know difference between choices made by mills of disadvantaged & minority families today, & segregation? https://t.co/JJCBMsnS2i
— Jeanne Allen (@JeanneAllen) July 21, 2017
Here in Washington, DC, most summers are pretty quiet. Not for the Center for Education Reform.
In May, our CEO Jeanne Allen interviewed Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos at the ASU + GSV Summit. The event took place in Salt Lake City, where hundreds of professionals in the ed-tech community were gathered, and was covered by the Associated Press and many other outlets across the country. Then, to cap things off, our board member Michael Moe, the founder and host of the summit, delivered the summit’s keynote address.
But if you know CER, you know that was just the beginning. When the Supreme Court handed down its verdict in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, we again were all over the media. Jeanne also penned an op-ed about the case for the Orange County Register.
In the meantime, CER made news about educational opportunity in Illinois (check out our op-ed in National Review), and we turned an invitation to appear on Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly into a speaking slot for our board member David Hardy. (David recently retired as president of the Boys’ Latin Charter in Philadelphia.)
Finally, no recap would be complete without mentioning Randi Weingarten. In July, the longtime boss of the American Federation of Teachers ignited a firestorm by likening advocates of school choice to — wait for it — segregationists. CER wasted no time fighting back: we issued statements, we wrote op-eds, we secured op-eds from concerned parents, we started a hash tag, and we created a webpage that features a variety of voices testifying to the outrageousness and dishonesty of Weingarten’s comments.
Of course, it’s only August, so there’s plenty more summer left. Stay tuned for more. (Hint: it involves the NAACP.)
Update 8-24:
And as promised, here’s our new NAACP page. Also, since we last checked in, Jeanne has written two op-eds: one, for HuffPost, about a new EdNext poll, and another, for the Wall Street Journal, about our #ResignRandi campaign.
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