April 22nd: NCLB Conference Call for Unitarian Universalists

Promise the Children is organizing a conference call for Sunday, April 22nd, at 9pm EST, for children’s advocates to discuss No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Tamara Wilder will be our guest speaker. Ms. Wilder, an expert on NCLB, will talk with us about the pitfalls of NCLB, and how it must be changed to improve public education in the future.

Ms. Wilder is a Ph.D. candidate in Politics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She holds a M.A. in Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences from Columbia University. Her research focuses on equity issues, accountability, school choice, and parent and community involvement in schools. Prior to graduate school she worked as a community organizer in Oakland, CA.

To register for the call, please e-mail me ()

NCLB is legislation that impacts public education and is up for reauthorization by the U.S. Congress this year. NCLB was enacted in 2002 with the goal of improving student assessment and achievement. However, NCLB has been widely criticized for placing a strong emphasis on standardized testing, and for imposing unfunded federal mandates.

The more informed Unitarian Universalist children’s advocates are about NCLB, the bigger an impact we can have on the reauthorization debate. So please join us on Sunday, April 22nd, at 9pm (EST), and e-mail me () to register today.

New URL for Promise the Children’s Blog

As part of our move to a new hosting provider, we have a new URL for the blog:

www.promisethechildrenuu.org/blog

This is part of a larger change to how we do URL’s on the website, which you can see are now shorter, thankfully.

Happy to Be Back

It is a relief to finally have our website up and running again. I missed updating you about the latest children’s news! The site was off-line for several days due to some severe problems with our hosting provider. We’ve now switched to a new host (phew). Over the next couple days, our staff will be fixing some remaining website errors, and updating the site with current children’s issues news.

Stay tuned for new legislative updates, stories about what is happening in our denomination, and information about Promise the Children events. We have been very busy these last few weeks, and I have a lot to tell you about in upcoming posts.