It's Poverty Stupid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71O0ChPFzAI This is a link to a quick interview I did in 2012 discussing poverty and our public schools. Please consider watching, and will help you understand  my blog today a little better.

Friends our Connecticut SBAC scores were released this week. Test scores are being released all across the nation this week. Some six months after they were given. Imagine your doctor saying look this test is really important, it going to hurt, and in six months' time we get the results back.

What do these standardized test scores actually tell us?

In my professional opinion, they showed what they have always shown. That 49 states in America that spend more money on their wealthy schools than their poor schools.

Yes, our Connecticut State Department of Education is running around telling children, parents, and teachers how low they scored. Meanwhile Wall Street is singing the economy is booming. I'm not buying this CDSE sideshow. I'm not buying any of these your test scores are low sideshows. I'm holding these deniers of inequity accountable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71O0ChPFzAI

America, the song remains the same. There is no booming economy in a nation where half our children attending our public schools live below or at the poverty level.

We cannot fix our schools, without fixing poverty. Half of our children and teachers are living with trauma. I don't want to hear Wall Street is singing, while our children are crying any longer. You cannot raise test scores without raising the hopes of parents living from paycheck to paycheck. Tax cuts for billionaires will not lift our schools. Let me call it what it is another Structural Racism sideshow playing the blame game once again.

Occupy poverty,

Dr. Jesse P. Turner

Moral Monday Connecticut Education Ambassador 

If you want to listen to the song that inspire my morning walk today its Barry Lane's "Jesse Turner is a Walking Man" https://barrylane.bandcamp.com/track/jesse-turner-the-walkin-man