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Editorials & Backgrounders

We are the Kansas NEA and we will not be silenced!

By Christy Levings
April 2004

Words and pictures are powerful teaching tools. We use them every day to instruct, to clarify and to challenge.

As members of the educational community we are accustomed to using language to express ideas, build creative thinkers and explore new frontiers of thinking. We set standards in our school environments on how words can be used and we provide consequences when our students use language to harm others.

Hence, our outrage when Secretary of Education Rod Paige uses his position to call us names in order to promote an agenda that damages our profession.

It is intolerable to demand that members of the NEA be quiet on federal legislative measures that cause our schools to fail and seek to destroy public education. A few days before his famous name-calling remarks, the secretary had given a speech outlining some of the real agenda of the current NCLB and its purpose in promoting vouchers and diminishing the role of the public schools.

He was correct in thinking that members of the NEA would have a great many words to say about an anti-public school, pro-voucher agenda. The bullying tactics he chose to use demonstrate his need to silence people who care about public schools.

His semi-apology was indicative of the frustration he must feel in facing 2.7 million members of the NEA who intend to use words and pictures like the one on this page to speak out for children and schools.

Well, Mr. Secretary, let me just have a final word on this unfortunate incident. We will not be quiet on the needs of public education. We see that this is an attempt to publicly dismiss the members of NEA and their support for public schools and we will not be silenced.

Let us be clear that not all elected policy-makers have bought into this anti-public school and anti-educator agenda. Representative Ward Loyd (R-Garden City) shared with his fellow Kansas legislators that they needed to look at something besides the "three R's."

Instead he said we should focus on the "four P's" for teachers - "power, pay, prestige and preparation." Loyd argued that Kansas needs to empower teachers who work in the classroom, pay them a decent wage, restore to them the prestige they deserve for delivering one of the best education systems in the nation, and prepare them to better deal with the changing student population.

I thank Representative Loyd for reminding us that there are many enlightened elected officials who do understand the importance of public education as the backbone of a strong state and a strong nation.

We should not be quiet in November in speaking for those candidates who do support public schools and exposing those who do not.

I have traveled thousands of miles across Kansas in my role as president of KNEA. I have talked with hundreds of you and visited hundreds of schools, and I am in awe of your commitment to your students. I know that regardless of whether you look into the faces of preschoolers or college students, each day the commitment to making each student successful is the same.

We will not be quiet on their needs. We know that in order for the next generation of Kansans to be successful they need highly qualified professional educators to serve them.

We will not be quiet on the needs of a strong profession. We know that we must have appropriate salaries and affordable and adequate benefits for all educational employees.

We will not be quiet on the needs of our members. We are the Kansas National Education Association and we will not be silenced.

Christy Levings is the president of the Kansas National Education Association. An elementary teacher on leave from the Olathe School District, she lives in Osawatomie.

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