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The Activist Beat with Rose Aguilar, host of Your Call on KALW in San Francisco is a weekly roundup of progressive activism that the mainstream media ignores, undercovers, or misrepresents.

Thousands of teachers, students, and parents from across the country marched in front of the White House in 90-plus-degree weather on Saturday to tell the Obama administration that they oppose his corporate-driven education policies and want a seat at the table. They also demanded equal funding for poor schools and an end to No Child Left Behind and standardized testing.

It was the first time public school teachers gathered in DC to publicly protest education policies. Save Our Schools rallies and marches also took place in 11 states over the weekend.

According to estimates, between 5,000 and 8,000 people attended the DC rally. In an interview with the Washington Post, veteran teacher and event organizer Anthony Cody said the rally failed to attract more teachers and parents because they are demoralized. Many lack the time and money to travel. Others aren’t sure anything can be done.

While the march was overshadowed by the manufactured debt crisis, it got a fair amount of coverage with the glaring exception of National Public Radio. Most pieces led with quotes from Matt Damon’s speech about the importance of public education. If he hadn’t flown to DC, I wonder if the march would have been covered at all.

Unlike the foundation-backed think tanks whose mission is to dismantle public education, the teachers at last Saturday’s rally don’t have a voice in the national debate. When is the last time you heard a teacher talk about corporate reform and how budget cuts are affecting their ability to actually teach?

Diane Ravitch, another speaker at the rally, is on a mission to give teachers a voice and to expose the truth about the money behind the think tanks, but she has a tough time getting media attention. She’s the perfect interview. As Assistance Secretary of Education under George H.W. Bush, she supported standardized testing and performance based pay. She was affiliated with conservative think tanks. Years later, she supported No Child Left Behind. She believed these measures would empower poor families and close the achievement gap. She eventually realized she was wrong.

She’s now speaking out against the very policies she once supported. She doesn’t mince words and that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. The ultimate goal of corporate reformers is to privatize the public school system, coming largely through the charter school movement.

I interviewed Diane Ravitch back in April about the forces behind reform groups like Teach for America and Stand for Children. They are funded by Wall Street hedge fund managers and billionaire foundations run by Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Eli Broad, and the Walton Family.

At Saturday’s rally, Ravitch said, “We’re here to insist that the public schools are a public trust. We insist when children have low test scores, they need help, they need attention, they don’t need to have their schools closed. Education policy should be designed by educators and not by politicians. We are many, they are few. Let us strive for excellence and insist on equity. We shall persist and we shall prevail.”

Teachers have their work cut out for them as they prepare to begin the new school year. Last year, K-12 budgets were cut $1.8 billion nationwide. This year, the cuts could reach $2.5 billion. These cuts will be devastating for teachers, students, and families, especially those in low-income communities. And for some perspective: back in March, the US Army gave Raytheon a $2.5 billion contract to provide training and simulation services.

In a recent LA Times op-ed, Ellie Herman, a teacher in South Los Angeles wrote, “I’m willing to work as hard as I can to be an excellent teacher, but as a country we have to admit that I’ll never be excellent if we continue to slash education budgets and cut teachers, which is what’s actually happening in California despite all our talk of excellence, particularly in schools that serve poor children. Until we stop that, we’ll never have equal education in this country.”