Verona Educator D.C.-Bound for Convention

With 35 years of educational experience in both suburban and urban public schools, Verona resident Terry Moore considers himself a curriculum activist who fought to change and improve school curriculums to be more progressive.

“All my work was creating better curriculum in my own classroom and teaching teachers,” said Moore. “I knew that when I retired one of my passion projects would be to work on the political end.”
Moore is getting that chance now as the information coordinator for the New Jersey chapter of the Save our Schools National Convention this weekend.
Moore describes Save our Schools as a two-year-old nationwide organization with a goal of “protecting public education.”
The convention, which runs Friday through Sunday at the National Mall, is part of the organization’s credo to “develop strategies to ensure grassroots voices are heard on key education issues including testing, privatization, and school funding leading up to the November elections and beyond” and will feature keynote addresses by noted educators Jonathan Kozol, Deborah Meier and Nancy Carlsson-Paige as well as civil rights attorneys Rose Sanders and Shanta Driver.
The convention will feature different workshops on a wide array of topics like overhauling “No Child Left Behind,” stopping arbitrary school closings, defending the rights of educators and addressing poverty as the real cause of poor academic achievement.
“There is misinformation that the schools are failing in New Jersey when that couldn't be further from the truth,” said Moore. “We have the third best education system in the country.”
“There are schools that clearly need help and one of the reasons those schools fail is because of the socio-economic situation that they are in,” he said. “Schools in the urban districts like Camden, Trenton and Newark have low graduation rates and problems in the school because of poverty. These schools often don't receive the right funding.”

The guiding principals of the Save Our Schools March are:

• Equitable funding across all public schools and school systems
• An end to high stakes testing used for the purpose of student, teacher, and school evaluation
• Teacher, family and community leadership in forming public education policies
• Curriculum developed for and by local school communities

The convention is being held in early August to precede the Democratic and Republican National Conventions so that these guiding principles will be sent to people at both the conventions, said Moore.
More than 8,000 people attended the convention last year and actor Matt Damon even attended as a speaker, he said.
For more information about the convention, click here.