National Petition Drive Changing People’s Attitudes about Public Education
As the Forum’s national petition campaign, www.willwereally.com, enters its fourth week, public support of the campaign’s core ideas is already growing in significant ways.
On January 30, the Senate joined the House in passing a bill to expand healthcare coverage to uninsured children, a major step toward addressing the Forum’s campaign promise that “every child deserves high-quality health care,” and a powerful acknowledgment of our need to address the myriad out-of-school factors affecting young people’s capacity to excel in their lives.
Two days earlier, a national study conducted among 312 self-reported Democrats, Republicans and Independents revealed that after watching The Forum’s campaign video, support for allocating a tax increase toward education doubled, from 10% to 20% among all parties.
The study was conducted by HCD Research to measure the participants’ emotions using the Ayer Emotion battery, which allows viewers to select from a list of nine positive and nine negative emotions to indicate the emotions they felt while watching the video. (To learn more about the study, and to watch the participants’ emotional reactions unfold in real time, visit www.mediacurves.com/Politics/J7244-EduAdvocacy.)
While both of these stories provide cause for celebration, there is much work to be done before the conclusion of the campaign, which runs through the end of President Obama’s first 100 days in office.
If you have not done so yet, please visit www.willwereally.com and sign The Forum’s petition to President Obama. (You may also join the cause on Facebook at apps.facebook.com/causes/186425?m=7bf7bab2.) And please — urge your friends, family and colleagues to do the same. Together, we can turn the hopeful energy of the Obama presidency into the actualized promise of a better society for our children, and a more hopeful future for our democracy.
Forum launches new Web site, unveils new strategy
In January, The Forum unveiled a new Web site, as well as a newly articulated organizational strategy.
As Executive Director George Wood explained, The Forum was created “to help America’s schools ensure that all young people develop the skills and abilities they need to exercise a powerful voice in shaping their own lives — and our nation's future. To help us achieve that mission, The Forum has organized its future efforts around the strategic interplay of three sets of three’s — issues, audiences, and strategies.”
To learn more about The Forum’s strategic plans, and to access articles, research reports, and books by its fourteen conveners, visit www.forumforeducation.org.
Featured Resource
On December 7, Forum Convener Carl Glickman visited the national radio program “Voices of the World” to talk about his book Those Who Dared: Five Visionaries Who Changed American Education. To listen to the conversation, visit www.voicesofourworld.org/download.cfm and click on the December 7 broadcast.