With all that’s at stake in each state, you may be startled to learn that most legislatures remain boys’ clubs, with women so severely underrepresented that the political process suffers.  (No need to single anyone out, but let’s just say that at 9%, South Carolina is a great place to be when you can’t wait long for the ladies’ room!)

Guest blogger Laurie Kretchmar, media director for The 2012 Project, delivers an impassioned plea for women to seize the opportunities open in this year’s election below.  Read the original post via Care2 here, and heed her call to consider running for state office.  There’s still time to jump into a race…and there’s clearly still a deep need for informed, engaged, experienced women (why not you?) to shape the policies that affect your family every day. 

On video

I’m a sucker for those movies. But I have a love-hate relationship with them because inevitably, in order to lionize the hero, they have to make all the other teachers in the school less than heroes. They have to make the principal a bully. Movies need a good guy to cheer for and bad guys to boo over. Así es la vida. That’s the way it goes.

Chester Upland, a poor and predominantly minority district, is a long way from Hollywood, but it does have a star in Sara Ferguson.

She’s a teacher of literacy and Math. She’s a good teacher who loves her students passionately. But that’s not why she was interviewed on the Ellen Show and the Ed Show. That’s not why President Obama invited her to sit in the First Lady’s box to hear the State of the Union address.

She came to the President’s attention because she has been the face of the sad saga that has become Chester Upland School District.

She’s passionate about her students, yes. But she’s the first one to tell you that she’s only a representative of her colleagues who all love their students passionately.

She’s proud to be one of them. She thanks her union for supporting them in their struggle during the funding crisis in her district that resulted in 204 teachers and 64 education support professionals being told a few months ago that due to budget cuts by Governor Tom Corbett there just wasn’t enough money to cover their paychecks. Sorry.

The first story of Chester Upland is about those 204 teachers and 64 education support professionals and their union getting together to discuss a crisis that meant closing the doors of their schools located in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Pennsylvania. This was not a layoff.

This was the result of the meat cleaver the Governor took to state school funding support without knowing (at best) or not caring (at worst) what that state funding support meant to the poorest school districts which simply did not have the property tax base to make up the difference.

The way the axe came down on Chester Upland’s students would have meant locking the doors and wishing the children luck in finding a new school. Except the heroes of Chester Upland, those teachers and support professionals and their union decided, without permission from anyone, not to let that happen.

“We are adults; we will make a way,” Sara Ferguson told her local paper this month. “The students don’t have any contingency plan. They need to be educated, so we intend to be on the job.”

They decided to keep working even though the district told them they could not guarantee them they would ever be paid. The heroes of Chester Upland understood the risk. Their union understood the risk. But the heroes of Chester Upland were not about to give up on their students or the community that was counting on them.

They also weren’t going to sit idly by and hope that someone rescued them. They got to work through their union to get the word out as to what the Governor’s cuts had done to poor children.

They talked to the press. They got the attention of some big national programs like the Ellen Show and the Ed Show. Sara spoke with calm, but with all her heart why she could not abandon her students and why she and her colleagues were going to stay and fight for them.
Her union did a full-court press on state politicians. They called on the public to put pressure on those politicians to find a solution. And finally relief – albeit temporary relief – came in the form of emergency aid that should carry the district through (hopefully) the rest of the year.

Politicians were shamed into keeping the doors open in Chester Upland by brave heroes who stood by each other to show a united front to their students and send them the essential message: You are worth fighting for. The parents stood with them. The public stood with them. Teachers and support professionals all over the country stood with them. But the rest of the story is left to tell.

The rest of the story is about a school funding system could allow such a thing to happen in the first place. What message does it send to poor children that their schools are funded so poorly that their teachers have to offer to work without pay while rich districts would never face such a dilemma?

Chester Upland and its brave employees dodged a bullet that was aimed directly at them and their students. But why did they have to?

Adequate and equitable school funding is a civil rights issue. Neither Chester Upland nor any school district in the country should ever again be the victim of the gamesmanship of a governor, mayor or any politician. We will be fighting this fight again and again until we address the funding systems in our states that allow Haves and Have-Nots within our public schools.

Chester Upland is blessed with many lion-hearted professionals who stood ready to sacrifice for their students. But the fight must not stop there. Unions and parents and civil rights groups and people who care about justice for all students have to roar like lions until the politicians get it. Every child deserves a great public school and it takes dollars to make that happen. The cold, hard fact is that it will take cold, hard cash to get to a happy ending for every school and a happy beginning for every student.

A truly clueless if well-intentioned column by Gene Marks titled “If I Were A Poor Black Kid” in Forbes magazine is getting righteously ripped from journalists all around the web. They’re correctly pointing out how bereft Marks’ column is of history, research, practical awareness, racial sensitivity, or the sheer realities of hunger or even homelessness that low-income children face. Marks seems to suggest that kids from impoverished backgrounds – all too many of whom are African American – can simply access computers and lift themselves up by their digital bootstraps to use free websites and enter elite prep schools or colleges. Maybe a handful of motivated kids will manage a heroic feat like that despite all the odds, but is this going to work for the majority of poor kids?

And here’s exactly what’s wrong with Marks’ perspective and why it’s indicative of a 1% mentality among billionaire education philanthropists (Silicon Valley included) that results in failure to truly invest in public schools, despite those same businesses relying on a highly skilled and educated workforce: solutions lie in privatization — individuals hands on individual (digital) bootstraps.

But also privatization of another kind: web-assisted businesses that hollow out the public school system and see it as nothing but a lucrative market. Marks’ list of ed-tech resources is lengthy and a roll call of ideas, good and bad, to bring education into the computer age. But as recent article after article has pointed out, online education companies hawking virtual schooling are providing low quality schooling to at-risk kids with no accountability, and at the same time siphoning off public money intended for neighborhood schools on the corner. Billionaire philanthropists thwart democratic decision-making about taxpayer priorities by using string-laden foundation donations as a form of education policy, instead of those same businesses or their owners paying taxes to fund public education. For example, in Seattle, titans of Microsoft corporation donated to groups that swatted down a 2010 ballot initiative to tax millionaire incomes that would’ve funded public schools in Washington state.

This isn’t a partisan issue, it’s a greed issue. Many of these well-meaning “edupreneurs” are Democrats who are reliably liberal on stopping climate change, or banning genetically modified foods. But when it comes to the nation’s schools and cherishing the fact that every public school serves every child who comes to the door as they are, conveying important ideas about citizenship, diversity, democracy, and a common good to the nation’s children, “edupreneurs” miss the rainforest for the money tree. Our open, publicly-funded public school system, deeply woven into the fabric of our open, freedom- and innovation-loving society, is the gem in the crown of America that people from around the world for decades have tried to replicate. Certainly it’s our bricks-and-mortar universities, and not mediocre for-profit online colleges, that are still the envy of the world. Close the door of equal opportunity to children, especially poor children, and we turn our backs on our legacy as the land of opportunity.

Is the answer to reject technology, to do as 19th century Luddites did and smash laptops, the equivalent of mechanized looms, in order to save schools? Emphatically no, and here’s where I think many miss an important point about Marks’ misguided piece. The internet provides the same frictionless means to disintermediate middle men as it provides opportunities to insert middle men. And today’s education middle men are testing companies, textbook publishers, online learning companies, teacher certification companies, and standardized test prep companies, sometimes all rolled into the same conglomerate — taking a giant, profitable chunk from states and school districts even as money that goes to classrooms where kids are gets cut.

So here’s what I’d like to see: flip this state of affairs. Disintermediate high-tech middlemen selling silicon snake oil. State departments of education could start acting in the public interest and creating FREE and OPEN SOURCE websites where best practices in teaching, outstanding examples of curriculum, test prep materials, tests themselves, teacher certification, syllabi and other resources are made available to teachers and any student who wants to improve herself. With the millions saved from not buying an international conglomerate’s tests, curriculum, online school materials, test prep, or online teacher certification, there’d be plenty of money for small, intimate classrooms, plentiful well-trained and well-paid teachers, and every child who needs wrap-around services would have them. With the money saved from eliminating the middle man, we’d have plenty to invest in after-school enrichment, high-quality daycare, remedial help, special ed shadows, children’s dental or medical care, fully-funded music/art/sports programs, nutritious real vegetables (not pizza-like vegetables), and gifted and talented education.

The longstanding problems that kids from disadvantaged backgrounds face need a broad social and political response, not solutions that are occasional feel-good stories about one or two motivated kids who figure out how to do calculus online. Realizing you can use library computers to access the internet for free isn’t going to fill the stomachs of some 20% of all children –white, African American, Latino, Asian, Native American — under 18 who are struggling this very minute.

Poverty, hunger, homelessness, parents who are ineffective or unable to parent – these are all analog problems kids have that need the help of other people, not only computers, to solve. What Gene Marks and other Silicon Valley “edupreneurs” forget is that we live in a complicated three-dimensional world that doesn’t fit on a spreadsheet or a computer screen. Digital bootstraps aren’t enough; to help all the nation’s kids we need lifelines offered face to face to real kids, from a person who cares in their neighborhood schools.

Cynthia Liu is founder of the grassroots education news site K12NewsNetwork.com, which empowers parents, educators, and students to report on important events at their local neighborhood schools and provides tools for maximum civic engagement in support of public education. This piece originally appeared in Technorati.

So how am I supposed to feel now that she produced a rather moving music video in support of Occupy protests all over the world? It does a great job of using its genre to celebrate the democratic right to protest and bear witness to its (sometimes brutal) repression. If Cyrus is still popular among young people, it probably has a shot at awakening interest in organized dissent. For a certain (young) age group it might make civic activism cool.

I emailed my Occupy/Miley dilemma to some of my wiser colleagues. Actually, my email read, “Does this mean we have to start liking her or stop liking the Occupy Movement?” One immediate response was, “I never disliked her. Blame the handlers, not the kid.” Here’s another, “It’s great she did this video. It will draw in a lot of young people, I hope. Miley is used and exploited too.”

And of course they’re right. We can expect that the suits at Disney knew exactly what they were doing to little girls by marketing Miley Cyrus as Hannah Montana. We might expect that the other adults in her life knew, too. But we can’t expect a girl in her early teens to know.

Cyrus was only 12 when she auditioned for Hannah Montana—and 13 when it became one of Disney’s biggest hits, with the attendant toys, clothing, accessories, video games, jewelry, and so on. She was just 15 when she posed apparently covered only by a sheet for Annie Leibowitz. My colleagues would say that she was objectified by adults who profited obscenely from her objectification. And because celebrity culture carries so much weight, even with the very young, the glorification and amplification of her image has vast consequences. We only have to search as far as YouTube to see girls as young as 2 playing at being Miley Cyrus playing at being a teenage rock star playing at being an adult playing at being a certain kind of sexy.

But does making a video that promotes civic action transform Cyrus into a positive role model for girls? Well. . .maybe, depending on age. I can just about imagine having a nuanced conversation with my 9-year-old granddaughter about the pros and cons. But I doubt that her 5-year-old sister could old grasp the nuance of someone being a great role model in some ways but not in others.

So where does this leave me, Miley, and Occupy Wall Street? For the first time, ever, I find myself wondering about her. I wonder what she thinks, or will think in the future, of how Hannah Montana was marketed to children. I wonder why she made this video. I wonder what her managers/agents/handlers think about it. I wonder if they weighed the cost/benefit to her career before it was posted. I wonder if she even tries to reconcile her ties to Disney, one of the biggest entertainment conglomerates in the world, in light of the Occupy Movement’s spotlight on greed and the abuse of corporate power.

The Yiddish word “farkakte” means simultaneously “crazy, screwed up, and gone bad”; Sometimes it’s the only word that will do. It’s a farkakte world where 1% of the population gets richer at the expense of everyone else; where corporations purposely sell four year olds on fake sexuality; where thousands of unknown viewers can watch repeatedly the parent-posted videos of tiny daughters as Hannah Montana imitators shaking whatever booty they have; where kids are indoctrinated to celebrity culture before they even enter preschool; and where a 19 year old’s celebrity means that her political opinions matter.

But I have to say—I like the video. I’m glad she made it. Thanks for this one, Miley Cyrus.

The documentary shown on Oprah’s OWN network takes on the disparagement of women and girls in the media in a comprehensive way. Marianne Schnall talks to “Miss Representation” filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

We tend to pay attention to negative media treatment of women and girls only as isolated incidents spark an outcry—a sexist statement by an on-air commentator, a skeletal model on a magazine cover, a controversial advertising campaign. The full scope of the problem, and its dire implications for our democracy and our planet, rarely rates a national discussion.

That may change, with the premiere of filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s groundbreaking new documentary “Miss Representation,” which aired on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network Thursday October 20. The film features insights from an impressive array of influential women and men (including Women Media Center founders Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem and former WMC presidents Carol Jenkins and Jehmu Greene). It powerfully makes the case that the media’s limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls is not only at the root of such rising epidemics as eating disorders, self-mutilation and depression in teenage girls, but is largely responsible for the glaring under-representation of women in all positions of power and influence in America.

The film underscores the disempowering message that the media sends to young girls: that a woman’s value lies in her youth, beauty, and sexuality, not in her true voice or her capacity to lead. What Jane Fonda calls a “toxic hyper-sexualization of young girls” and airbrushed images everywhere make the ideal of beauty ever more impossible to achieve. And women and girls seem to internalize these harmful messages in such a subliminal way that we tend to become passive and apathetic.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom—a former actress who was once told by her agent to hide her age and her Stanford MBA—tackles these issues in full force through her film and a corresponding social action campaign. As the documentary’s writer and director, Siebel Newsom elicits stories from teenage girls, insights from activists and academics, and anecdotes from politicians (such as Condoleezza Rice, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Cory Booker) and media stars and entertainers (Katie Couric, Rachel Maddow, Geena Davis, Margaret Cho, Rosario Dawson). The interviews intermix with shocking images and a bombardment of thought-provoking statistics. To give just a few examples: the United States ranks 90th in the world in women’s representation in national legislatures; 65 percent of American women and girls have an eating disorder; rates of depression among women and young girls have doubled in the past ten years; cosmetic surgeries performed on youth 18 or younger more than tripled from 1997 and 2007; and 15 percent of rape victims are girls under the age of 12.

As a teen, Siebel Newsom herself fell victim to sexual assault, and she talks in the film of suffering from low self esteem and eating disorders. Another factor in making the film was her sense that “injustice towards women in the media has worsened over time with the 24/7 news cycle and the advent of infotainment and reality television.” She also was disturbed by the often misogynistic treatment of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential campaign and of the first female speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Closest to home, Siebel Newsom was ultimately “compelled” as a mother of a young daughter to make the documentary. She dreams of a better future for her daughter, in a culture that doesn’t “demean and degrade and disrespect women on a regular basis.” She hopes the documentary and action campaign can point to “a path that recognizes and empowers women and girls.”

Siebel Newsom says she made a point to include men in the film, saying that having just given birth to a son, she finds herself “particularly concerned about the culture that he’s being raised in, and the kind of man he’s going to be.” She says, “the media is this huge pedagogical force of communication—it’s dictating our cultural values and our gender norms.”  She adds, “What unfortunately happens is girls and boys buy into this belief system, this construct, and then boys continue to perpetuate it, by objectifying women and not valuing women or giving them the seat at the table.” The men in the film are some of its most outspoken advocates and allies. Siebel Newsom’s husband, Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California, says in the film that he makes a point of appointing women to high positions. “If people knew that Cuba, China, Iraq and Afghanistan have more women in government than the United States of America,” he says “that would get some people upset.” Newark’s Cory Booker speaks from his point of view as mayor of a struggling and rising city: “We’re shortchanging voices that are urgently needed in public forums from ever getting to the table.” Siebel Newsom underscores Booker’s point, citing research proving “that the more diversity and more women you have in leadership, both in government and business, the greater the productivity, the creativity and the bottom line. We need to get women into the pipelines.”

Adding to the scope of the problem is another crack in the pipeline—women currently hold only 3 percent of clout positions within the mainstream media industry itself. At last week’s East Coast premiere of “Miss Representation” at the Paley Center for Media in New York City, Pat Mitchell, president of the center and also in the documentary, led a spirited panel that included  Christiane Amanpour, who confessed she found herself “enraged” by the film. Lamenting that many women newscasters today “are forced to wear skirts and v-necks down to here,” she also called it an “outrage” that, given “so many competent and brilliant” women, “there is still no female head of a television news network.”

In “Miss Representation,” Katie Couric says she did see her role as the first solo female anchor of a network TV evening news program as an “opportunity to mix it up a little,”  to send the “message that a woman could be as confident as a man in an important, powerful role.” However, the film discusses how much of the media coverage about Couric at that time focused on what she was wearing or her dating life, or, later, pitting her against another female evening news anchor, Diane Sawyer.  Observes Couric, “whenever there are two women who are working in similar professions, it’s automatically positioned as a catfight.” Another important thread throughout the film focuses on the need for women to support, encourage and mentor each other, to work against a climate that would have them do otherwise.

Siebel Newsom is hoping that “Miss Representation” will spark thoughtful dialogue on these pivotal issues and that “the discussion turns into action around valuing women in our culture.”    In addition to asking people to sign a pledge to “spread the message,” the MissRepresentation.org web site offers a host of resources, actions and tips on creating change. They also have embarked on an ambitious campaign to distribute the documentary and its educational curriculum to schools and libraries, believing that a critical part of the solution will be in helping younger generations become media literate.  Ultimately Siebel Newsom says her biggest hope and faith lies in each one of us learning “to recognize our own unique power. I want women to remember that we are 86 percent of consumers, and so we have a choice. We need to support good media, healthy media.”

Jennifer Siebel Newsom is hopeful. “At the end of the day, I think once we start valuing women, and valuing the feminine, you’re going to see a huge cultural transformation. So that’s really my goal.”

“Miss Representation” premieres on OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) on October 20, 2011, at 9pm EST/MST/PST (8pm Central), followed by a one-hour special with Rosie O’Donnell in which Jennifer Siebel Newsom and guests, including WMC’s Gloria Steinem and Carol Jenkins, will highlight the film’s call to action. Find out more at MissRepresentation.org.

To read the full interview with Jennifer Siebel Newsom, as well as additional insights from many of the people featured in the film, click here.

This article originally appeared at The Women’s Media Center.
***

Marianne Schnall is a widely published writer and interviewer. She is also the founder and Executive Director of Feminist.com and cofounder of EcoMall.com, a website promoting environmentally-friendly living. Marianne has worked for many media outlets and publications. Her interviews with well-known individuals appear at Feminist.com as well as in publications such as O, The Oprah Magazine, Glamour, In Style, The Huffington Post, the Women’s Media Center, and many others.
Marianne’s new book based on her interviews, Daring to Be Ourselves: Influential Women Share Insights on Courage, Happiness and Finding Your Own Voice came out in November 2010. Through her writings, interviews, and websites, Marianne strives to raise awareness and inspire activism around important issues and causes. For more information, visit www.marianneschnall.com and www.daringtobeourselves.com.

On October 29, Link TV will be the only US television network that will be premiering a drama series featuring a female head of state. Borgen, the latest Danish drama sensation from the producers of the acclaimed series The Killing, features our hero: the smart and principled Prime Minister Birgitte Nyborg. Privately, Birgitte leads a happy life with her husband and two children, while professionally she is a woman with a burning passion for politics, a big heart and too little time. Borgen is a series that deals what it means to be woman in power and remain true to yourself, your ideals and your family. It addresses feminist issues such as female representation at the top echelons of the corporate world, media’s representation of female leaders, and the resulting public perception of those leaders. Borgen is a show that young American women, and ALL Americans, need to see.

As you are well aware, the American entertainment industry is woefully behind the times in representing positive female role models. Our hope is that Borgen will be a wake-up call to American television executives and filmmakers that powerful women leads do make for blockbuster television, and that audiences will embrace strong female characters in media.

Borgen has been a national hit in Denmark, where season two has just finished. On September 16, voters in Denmark elected the country’s first female Prime Minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt. Did the strength, smarts and perseverance of Birgitte blaze a trail for Helle? Will life imitate art as Borgen crosses over to American shores? Tune in to Link TV this fall to find out.

Federal health and consumer protection experts (known as the Interagency Working Group), have proposed reasonable, science-based nutrition guidelines to help provide a model for companies that market to kids. Unfortunately, the food industry and media companies are working overtime to get Congress to stop the IWG from finalizing these sensible recommendations.  And right now, they’re winning. Today the FTC released testimony that showed that they are already backpedaling on their guidelines—bowing to politics rather than standing up for kids’ health. Prevention Institute has launched a petition asking President Obama to step in and uphold the guidelines, to help make it fair for parents trying to make the best choices for our kids.

The food industry doesn’t profit off of families like mine—but they hold me up as a shining example of what parents should be doing. “Parents buy products, not kids,” they proclaim, while spending two billion on advertising to kids every year. “Parents have to say no,” they say, while putting sugar cereals at eye level on store shelves and queuing up candy and chips in the grocery store aisles where my son and I wait to check out with our Brussels sprouts and broccoli (yes, he eats them).

“I’m not normal,” my son wailed last week, as I denied his ten-thousandth plea to stop for ‘fast foods’ on our way home from work and school.  “I’m not normal” has been his automatic response for all of the things I don’t let him do that all of his friends do. No ‘fast foods’,  no buying cookies or brownies at the weekly school fundraiser, no slurpees at the movies, no Doritos for snacks, water instead of juice and crackers instead of cookies at his after school program (his after school teachers keep a separate stash they dole out for him; the other kids get juice and cookies for every snack). He has never had a Happy Meal. I make most of his food from scratch and he packs a bag lunch every day.

Still, my son is surrounded; everywhere he goes, by unhealthy food options. From the grocery store checkout line, to billboards, movie ads and the foods he sees his friends eating, to sports team sponsorships and even promo ads at his school.

The food industry has done something insidious, powerful and almost indelible. They have created a new normal for food that permeates virtually every nook and cranny of our lives. My son doesn’t even have to watch a tv, and my friends’ children don’t have to have any money to spend on food, to be affected by the culture of unhealthy food that surrounds them. What we think of as normal, everyday food has been shaped by the ads children and parents see, by the food that is available and accessible on the grocery shelves, by the food that our government chooses to subsidize. And of course, by the billions upon billions of dollars spent by food lobbyists and powerful corporations who don’t bump up their bottom lines by making their products seem like occasional treats.

I do what they say I should. I say no, all the time. And frankly, I’m exhausted. I could use a little help. Is it too much for me to ask that food and beverage companies give me a little support for the messages I give my son, instead of trying to undermine me at every turn?  Food companies that choose to follow the new voluntary guidelines will still be able to make all of the ads they want—they’ll just have to direct them towards parents, not impressionable kids.

Prevention Institute, parents, advocates, public health officials and organizations across the country are calling for President Obama to step in and protect voluntary guidelines for food marketing to children. Sign the petition and join us.

Despite important gains made by the LBGT community, 2011 is a lousy time to be trying to raise children of any gender with a healthy, nuanced sense of what it means to be male or female.   The unprecedented convergence of unfettered commercialism and ubiquitous screen media means that we are inundated with what the advertising industry calls “shockvertising,” ads or products designed to get our attention by being ever so much more outrageous than their competitors.   The pornification of little girlhood is just one example—but it’s particularly troubling.

Marketers claim that parents don’t have to buy these products—and that they don’t even have to look at the ads.  What they don’t mention is the power of advertising to normalize both the aberrant and the abhorrent.   As we gaze upon photos of Thylane Loubry Blondeau, the prepubescent sex pot and new darling of the fashion world, it seems positively quaint that we were so worked years ago when nothing came between a teenage Brooke Shields and her Calvins.  And, compared to the provocatively posed preschoolers now selling sex and lingerie, a ten year old nymphette seems—well, not so bad.

But actually, it’s all bad.  The commercialized sexualization that normalizes turning toddlers into teenagers, harms children’s health and well-being.  It teaches them to play consciously at sexuality without having any cognitive understanding of the meaning and consequences of their behavior.  And the sexuality they posture about has nothing to do with relationships—it has to do with sex as object, sex as power, and sex to sell.  Sexualizing little girls deprives them of middle girlhood—traditionally a time of great intellectual and creative exploration for girls who have all their basic skills down, but aren’t worrying about how they look.

Which brings me back to the Canadian couple so excoriated in the media for their counter cultural decision to shield their new baby from societal mores about sex and gender.  It’s not a choice I would make for an infant in my life.  But when I look at what a mess we are making of how children learn about the similarities and differences between boys and girls, opting out seems suddenly more appealing.

Public discourse about Breast Milk Baby is following the same lines. Arguments over the doll are centered on culture wars—whether it is appropriate for young children to witness breast feeding, imitate it, or even know what it is.

Fox News Pundit Bill O’Reilly worries that it will make kids grow up to soon. The American rep for Berjuan Toys, the Spanish Company making the doll, claims to have God on his side, saying ”We’re being called perverts and pedophiles for promoting feeding our babies the way God intended? Churches all over the world are filled with images of Mary nursing baby Jesus. . .” Dr. Logan Levkoff, a sexologist writing for the Huffington Post, is mixed about the doll. “How are kids supposed to make sense of Breast Milk Baby,” she asks, “if the majority of their dolls are missing genitals a la Barbie and Ken?” She’s concerned that without proper education, introducing the doll will fixate children on breasts.

It’s the wrong argument.

The real trouble with Breast Milk Baby is not that it promotes breast feeding. It’s that it undermines creative play. Like any toy that talks, sucks, walks or what have you—thanks to the wonders of modern technology—the doll robs children of opportunities to exercise their imagination, to truly interact with their toys, and to make their play personally meaningful.

Susan Linn, Ed.D., is Director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and Instructor in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

Here’s where I come down: Of course we should, along with the World Health Organization, Michelle Obama, the AAP, and myriad public health organizations, support breast feeding. Of course children should be allowed to see breast feeding if they encounter it naturally. And of course children should be allowed to pretend that their baby dolls are breast feeding. But they don’t need an expensive doll (suggested retail price: $69.99) specially designed for electronic sucking and sold with a special halter to play about nursing. The toys most useful for children, and the ones that generate the most fun, just lie there until children invest them with life or transform them into something else.

Let’s celebrate World Breastfeeding Week and speak out for the benefits of breastfeeding all year round. And let’s discourage parents from buying this ridiculous doll. It benefits the toy industry, not children.

It was powerful for the very fact that it started as the idea of a group of education bloggers who have for so many years called for a return to sanity – the radically sane idea of using test scores to measure no more than what they were designed to measure.

So many of us over the years have called for a rejection of the insanity of making stuff up and pretending that some standardized test is all you need tell the worth of a child, her teacher or an entire school system.

When test scores go up, we do not applaud. When test scores go down, we do not gnash our teeth and look for villains.

We are teachers and education support professionals and we know that neither celebrations nor Salem witch trials are called for based on a single standardized test which measures so very little of what a child will need to know to succeed in today’s world (or yesterday’s world or even tomorrow’s world.)

The brave sweating educators and parents at the rally were protesting a growing cancer on education – the bulbous growth in standardized testing.

The politicians on both sides of the aisle are out of control on this one. And it is politicians. There are no credible researchers, academicians nor educators who will, with a straight face, stand and defend the misuse of test data. It is a political invention from start to finish.

They have appropriated beautiful words like “accountability” and changed the definition to “blame the teacher”; and “standards” means standardized test score; “merit” means prizes for getting test scores up. They have so abused these good words that good teachers can no longer use them.

The abuse of testing data has hurt children. Abuse is not too strong a word. It is abuse because it ignores the whole and blessed child and entire systems are turning and spinning and accommodating themselves around a test score that is not valid and not reliable and is only pretending to measure what it was never designed to measure.

And that means teachers do not have the proper information they need to guide their instruction. It means parents do not have the proper information they need to know how well their children are progressing. Universities do not have the proper information they need to know if students are prepared to succeed.

And students themselves feel like total failures when they are highly successful in areas that are not subject to standardization, which, by the way, are the most important areas of learning. Or worse, students feel like total successes when they are not highly successful in areas that are not subject to standardization, which, by the way, are the most important areas of learning.

Some of my colleagues have felt so disrespected and discouraged that their pleas for sanity have gone unheard – that we measure appropriately what can be measured and we use the information to guide our instruction, not to give or deny bonus pay to teachers or to crack the whip on students who do not make their number.

Educators have become Alice trying to make sense of the Queen of Hearts yelling, “Off with their heads!” for not painting the white roses red quickly enough so that our schools at least look good on paper. Some of my dearest friends have quit teaching because they will not cheat their students from a real education, and in good conscience, they leave.

But thousands and thousands and thousands stay. Magnificent educators who also will not cheat their students. In good conscience they stay. And they stand. And they fight. They came to the Mall to rally against the insanity.

They held signs that said, “My students are more than a test score,” and “Save our Schools”. They came to stand in 100 degree heat and listen to people who knew what they were talking about: Jonathan Kozol, Linda Darling Hammond, Diane Ravitch.

They came to hear parents and colleague and members of the caring community tell them to stand strong and shout the truth until they were heard.

As I always do, I will say again, educators are not against giving their students tests. We are teachers. We invented tests. But we will never stand silently and condone the abuse of test data from some single standardized world to judge, punish and reward students, teachers, principals or entire systems.

Tests are limited in the information they give. We have always understood that. That’s why good teachers have an array of assessment tools. When you narrow the measurement of success or failure, you narrow the truth. When you narrow the truth of what success or failure means, it distorts reality and hurts very real children. The people who came to the rally will not let that happen.

The people, who in good conscience stay, will in good conscience fight.