The CAPE Archives

CAPE's 10th Anniversary 

The Community Alliance for Public Education turned 10 years old on December 4th, 2023.

Formed as a local non-profit community organization in 2013, CAPE has been active for a decade advocating for a changes in how public education is administered to our students. We believe that the current top-down, standardized, uniform, regulated system that was born of the 2001 federal No Child Left Behind law has in fact left millions of students far behind in their educations. By asserting a hyper-accountabilty model for receiving tax dollar funding - based on the over-use of standardized testing - the law has backfired. Badly.

CAPE is not alone in this critique; nationally many other organizations and individual researchers have challenged the narrative that in order to serve the traditionally underserved populations of students, we need a regimented, centralized, one-size-fits-all model that forces schools to prove their value by providing an endless stream of data, data, and more data. Our challenge is to convince the public that public education has been ill-served for over two decades, and it past time to acknowledge this profound error and seek redress for the millions of students - and their teachers - who continue to struggle in school. Using the same standardized test data collected by the state of Oregon and the US Department of Education, the “learning gap” between low-income and minority students vs. middle- and upper-class students remains. For 22 years this model has failed.

CAPE began as an offshoot of the Eugene Education Association’s Human & Civil Rights Committee that was formed in the late 1980s to address social justice issues brought from member teachers to the union. In 1991 the Committee earned the statewide teachers’ union Oregon Education Association’s Presidential Citation. Larry Lewin served as the Chair; he was by followed by Roscoe Caron, and then Linda Smart. 

In early 2013 Linda reached out to her two retired predecessors to discuss expanding the Committee into a wider community-based organization to attract more members. Linda’s idea took hold, and CAPE was born at the former Agate Laboratory restaurant on Willamette St. at 26th Ave in Eugene with over a dozen teachers, retired teachers, and UO professors attending. Retired teacher Pete Mandrapa came up the name of our group - the Community Alliance for Public Education - while pondering it beach walking.

In the 10 years, CAPE’s mission has been “Educate the public about public education” because we understand that it is the community’s right - and responsibility - to determine how our public schools function. Putting it another way, CAPE has worked to “Keep the public in public education” by advocating for dialogue, discussion, and debate over policies and practices that impact the schooling of our next generation. 

Our guiding approach is to “oppose and propose”:  Not only do we name what is not working, we offer concrete alternative methods, thus providing an different vision to the decades-old model. We believe in the wisdom and dedication of the educators in our community - the teachers, the principals, the educational assistants, all our school personnel - to be restored the influence and inclusion in the decision-making that impacts the students they were hired to educate. We propose defending the front-line educators as we oppose the top-down management that brought us the failed system we struggle with.

To accomplish this change in direction, we have employed many different strategies over the years:

• 13 public speaker / panel presentations featuring local, state, and national participants

• writing letter and editorial to local newspapers and radio stations; paid newspaper ads 

• monthly column in Eugene Weekly alternative paper

• work, as individual members, on local school board elections

• attend local school board meeting attendance and comments 

• meet with school board members in Eugene 4j, Bethel and Springfield School  Districts

• presentation in classroom at local high schools and in UO education classes

•  lobby with state legislators on education bills

• affiliate with the Oregon Public Education Network (OPEN), the Network for Public Education (NPE), and Parents Across America

• maintain a Web site and Facebook page

Victories require consistence and persistence, and we acknowledge the huge challenges we fare. We are proud of these wins:

• Supported Sen Lew Frederick’s SB ____, the Opt Out law which allows parents to remove their students from statewide Smarter Balanced standardized in the spring;

• Supported Rep Nancy Nathanson’s HB 4124, the Standardized Test Accounting Survey that require local school districts to inventory their locally mandated standardized tests;

• Many CAPE members as individuals worked on local school board campaigns and helped elect candidates to the Bethel, Eugene 4J, and Springfield school boards;

We are dedicated and eager to continue to participate in public discourse for another t0 years.  We are continuing to brainstorm and explore additional ways to advocate for progressive changes in our schools with our allies.

Contribute to CAPE!

Listen Up!: CAPE's blog for students, prarents, and community members. 

Reports from the Field:  CAPE's blog for 4J, Springfield, and Bethel teachers and classified staff. 

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