Corporate education reformers often say that poverty is just an excuse for bad teachers. Michelle Rhee said that often, but seven years after she took charge of the D.C. Public schools (and was replaced by her deputy Kaya Henderson), D.C. remains one of the nation’s lowest-scoring districts.
Arne Duncan has often called poverty an excuse. Wendy Kopp and Bill Gates have said that if “we” fix schools first, poverty will take care of itself.
The rest of us are waiting for proof of this claim. One consequence of believing that corporate education reform cures poverty is that none of the 1% feels it necessary to do anything to reduce poverty. Just test more often, adopt Common Core, fire teachers whose students don’t get high test scores, close schools with low scores, and open many more charters.
None of this reduces poverty. But it makes the 1% feel righteous without raising their taxes.
A comment by a reader on this subject, with one correction. The U.S. is #1 in child poverty among advanced nations, not #2. Romania is not an advanced nation; its economic development was repressed by decades of Communist dictatorship.
The reader writes:
“I think it is very difficult to sustain the argument that the US does as much to promote child well-being as many other advanced nations. Most measures as indicated by this report (http://www.oecd.org/els/family/43570328.pdf) don’t appear to be in the US’ favor:
“High overall levels of child well-being are achieved by the Netherlands and Sweden and low levels by the United States and the United Kingdom. Even at the top performing end, both the Netherlands and Sweden have a dimension along which performance is at best only adequate (material well-being for the Netherlands and Family relationships for Sweden). At the bottom, both the United States and the United Kingdom perform worse than the median country on all dimensions.”
“Furthermore, the US’ relative child poverty rate (defined as living in a household that earns less than half of the national median) is extremely high when compared to other developed countries: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/04/15/map-how-35-countries-compare-on-child-poverty-the-u-s-is-ranked-34th/
“Just looking at how we stack up with Australia and Canada should be illustrative given our similar income levels, immigration rates (actually higher in those nations), and shared cultural heritage.”
Reformers do not realize THEY are part of the problem. Those who have never experienced poverty have no clue that Poverty is directly related to what happens at the top of all companies. Yes, top companies feed the beast known as poverty through not paying their help enough. As far as I know, Gates was from a upper-middle class family. Bill Gates has never experienced hunger, wondering where he will be staying, or whether he will be able to find work due to a corporation’s decision to go through temporary services or planning on cutting their work forces instead of their own personal salaries. I have and I would be willing to bet that those who are at the forefront of this “reformation” movement would never last very long if they were subjected to the life we, at the bottom, are forced into because of their greed and unwillingness to see their part in that which they claim does not exist and is only an excuse for “poor” teachers. While I know that there are poor teachers, the majority of teachers are excellent teachers whose hands have been tied by regulations which make it impossible to teach.
I don’t believe for one minute that “reformers” don’t know that in order for poverty to be reduced, people need jobs with livable wages.
Wealthy people see themselves as entitled, view others as less deserving and regardless of what they claim, they will do nothing they perceive as cutting into what they feel are their own “just” rewards.
Reformers do not resemble the population they are REFORMING. Hello Wendy Kopp who NEVER taught school and has no education creds. It’s time for a moratorium on all the testing. Students and their teachers will be the next bubble. http://blog.owlmountaincoaching.com/blogpost/moratorium-on-testing-part-one/
Lorraine Richardson
In today’s Washington Post Arne Duncan and Barak Obama seek better teachers for poor kids. They are tasking each state to come up with a plan that puts highly effective teachers into poor schools – excuse me, poorly performing schools. The DOE will spend $4.2 million to launch a new “technical assistance network” to help states publicly report their progress. “While there is little direct evidence that links those [highly qualified] teachers to poor outcome for students, low-income children clearly struggle academically.”
Duncan is quoted: “As a nation, we’ve had far too few incentives, and, frankly, lots of disincentives for the hardest-working and the most-committed teachers and principals to go to the communities who need the most help, and we have to get together and reverse that.”
This sounds like they need an incentive plan to lure those teachers – but that would require some kind of contract; Arne starts back-peddling: “unions and labor agreements could be part of the solution.”
Then the 10 invited teachers at Arne’s round table which took place prior to this newest initiative – persons not identified nor their states, cities, just “who work in high-poverty schools” got to have a voice. “The teachers voiced frustration at the lack of resources at their schools and their regularly changing demands of their jobs.” They said, “they stayed because of good working environments, with supportive prinicipals, and time and opportunity to collaborate with colleagues.” Did you infer: pay me more money, money will bring in a better teacher than me? I think its pretty clear, teaching in poor schools requires a committment because they are the teachers being savaged by value-added evaluations. They are the ones who deal with effects of poverty – and they cannot fix that no matter how dedicated they are.
Obama and Duncan look but don’t see; hear, but don’t listen. Don’t you just want to shake them?
I’ve said repeatedly — When I want to consider if a child who may not have eaten this morning and does not know if she will eat tonight can possibly concentrate on hours of state mandated testing that will be used to evaluate her teachers, I am not “making excuses” for “bad teaching”. I am saying that if we REALLY care about that child and her future, maybe we ought to care whether or not she is FED.
President Obama has said that the “best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education.” History actually suggests that the best anti-poverty program around, possibly the only one, is a strong union.
Only temporarily. Eventually, reality asserts itself, just like it did in the Rust Belt where high union pay and restrictive work rules drove the jobs south and overseas.
Via policies deliberately set that encouraged that flight, sure.
Surely you Don’t really believe that. Surely. Basic economics is not a conspiracy theory.
So then the solution to that is global unionization. Or at least national unionization with high tariffs on imports, off-shoring, etc.
Yes, protectionism and global governance — nothing scary about those.
Hey, we’re in agreement!
BTW, who is going to enforce “global unionization”? It’s a sure thing that certain countries (China, Mexico, et. al.) that are already benefitting economically from the West’s unions and high wages would cheer on such an effort but would refuse to participate. More of the economic pie for them!
High union pay? By whose measure? What restrictive work rules? Management is always looking for lower pay for the workers (not the CEOs or the top officers). Who can compete with the slave wages of China and Mexico. The German auto industry has a unionized work force (and they have works councils) with very good pay and work rules. Their auto industry is thriving and exports are up. There is no war against unions in Germany. Only 6.7% of the private companies in the US are even unionized and yet certain people keep blaming unions for the failures of the managers. I’m not buying this blame the union propaganda.
It is not the entire story, but your completely simplistic framing is hardly the story either. Certain jobs are not coming back onshore due to technological changes and innovations. But trade and tax policies are choices. Legislation regarding labor rights are choices. The technological changes that impacted the organized sectors of our economy were global, but the US has a uniquely steep decline in the percentage of the working population that is unionized.
Labor across the developed world has faced challenges in the past 4 decades that amount to standing on a precipice. In the United States it was PUSHED over the edge.
Joe — Restrictive work rules are a fact of most union contracts. Just three examples off the top of my head:
– When Hostess went bankrupt last year, one of the reasons was that the union refused to budge on work rules such as a contract requirement that each product line be loaded onto trucks by different teams. This meant loaders were doing a lot of sitting around waiting for “their” product.
– A guy I know who used to be an engineer at GM said that when the engineers would trip electrical circuits during tests, they were required to fill out a form and have a member of the electrial union come flip the switch back. Sometimes that could take half a day to happen.
– I was at a manufacturing facility one time with a group that was demonstrating a new machining technique that cut down the time to make a certain part from 20 minutes to 5 minutes. Everyone was impressed after the machinist made the first one. But when we looked around, we found the machinist sitting in a chair reading the newspaper. “Can you make us another one?” we asked. “Nope,” he replied. “My contract says that part takes 20 minutes to make. So in 15 minutes, I’ll make you another one.”
This is the kind of junk companies have to put up with when there is a union. But no, I don’t know of anyone who blames unions for the failures of non-unionized companies.
And yes, the Germans are doing very well making very high-end luxury vehicles that have a high mark-up. But notice that even they put their U.S. plants in the South.
Daniel — The Wagner NLRA is still very much in effect, but part of freedom is having the freedom not to join a union. If the unions cannot compete, if they refuse to join the 21st century, if workers don’t want to join, the unions have only themselves to blame.
Anecdotes are not facts, Jack. And those anecdotes sounds so contrived as to be questionable.
That’s impressive hand waving away of the legislative and policy choices that have contributed to labor’s decline in the US which has outpaced that in countries that made different choices and still manage to flourish economically.
Also, if you think German car manufacturers only make high end luxury cars, then you really do not know the German car market. For example, the Smart? Division of Daimer. Nobody will call VW’s Polo a luxury car.
Jack, please read this study from CEPR:
Click to access unions-oecd-2011-11.pdf
“In this report, we review unionization data for the last five decades for 21 rich economies. We find that trends in unionization have varied substantially across these economies. Union coverage (the
share of workers whose terms of employment were covered by a collective bargaining agreement) changed little and even rose slightly in a substantial number of countries, including the period since
1980. Union membership (the share of workers who are members of a union) fell in most of the rich economies, with the United States experiencing losses (from a low initial level of unionization) near
the middle of the distribution. These differences across countries exposed to broadly similar levels of globalization and technological change suggest that neither factor mechanically determines national levels of unionization.
One simple factor, however, does appear to explain much of the observed variation in unionization trends: the broad national political environment…These patterns are consistent with the view
that national politics are a more important determinant of recent trends in unionization than globalization or technological change.”
The steel companies of the rust belt moved to where labor could be exploited for pennies an hour, not because of Americans demanding a decent standard of living. We already have “global governance” at the corporate level so your argument is mute. In some cases, US muscle or the threat thereof is used to protect companies globally. If our government engaged as vigorously on workers’ rights as we do on banking and intellectual property issues, we’d see a stronger middle class. Markets without adult supervision degrade to massive wealth inequality, exploitation of resources, and inhumanity.
Adam Smith wrote of market “liberty”, but with good governance of the public good including education. He also believed that “a general plenty diffuses itself through all the different ranks of the society”. That has not happened. What Reformers and free market libertarians now embrace is far from good governance of the public good nor sharing of the wealth of our nation. Instead, we see loss of individual freedoms and a government controlled by a wealthy few. In short, a caricature and perversion of free market economics and a system in decline. You can’t blame teachers for that.
My reading bucket list includes Smith’s “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”. In business school, they pushed Wealth of Nations and Ayn Rand almost as a religion. To question was heresay. An essay I read recently proposed, after reading “Sentiments”, that Smith suggested economies could function **in spite** of complete self interest, not because of it. I am no expert on Smith and certainly modern economic and behavioral theory has (hopefully) evolved. But too many “free marketers” have lost all rationality and perspective.
MathVale,
When your so despite for work that you are willing to be paid pennies an hour the person offering you the job is not seen as someone exploiting you, but someone saving you.
It should be “desperate” in the post above.
Well, Duh …
Monetizers don’t care about child poverty because there’s no money in it.
There are several issues here. First, the definition of poverty used in this study is reductive sophistry. Living in a household at one-half of the median income means different things in different countries. In terms of material wealth, America’s poor stack up pretty well compared to the poor in many other developed nations, particularly when you consider that the U.S. does not count transfer payments and government benefits when calculating the poverty rate.
Second, the comparison of immigration rates with Australia and Canada is dubious, at best. Is this comparison considering the high number of illegal aliens we have compared to those countries? Remember that our illegals tend to make below-market wages due to their legal status and low skills. How do the immigrants in those other countries stack up to ours in terms of education and skills? It is no secret that the children of immigrants are disproportionately poor in the U.S. (high birth rates + low skills and low wages are not a good combination).
But as for the bigger question: Yes, the reformsters are trying to fix society through the schools. We have raised taxes and increased welfare spending, yet the problems persist. So in desperation, much of the technocrat set (in both parties) has settled on education as the silver bullet. Too bad that in real life, socio-economic silver bullets don’t exist.
While the “corporate” part of the reformsters’ efforts certainly came from the right, much of their rhetoric unmistakably has its origins on the left. After all, we were told for decades (and we still hear this, by the way) that the only reason schools in the poor part of town don’t do as well as those in the suburbs is inadequate funding. Poverty, culture, etc. were just “excuses” people used to justify the status quo. This is still the attitude at the DoJ, for instance. Well the reformsters have completely bought this notion and are now running with it.
The idea that “poverty is just an excuse” certainly did not come from teachers or social workers who work with children in poverty every day. And regardless of whether our poor in the US have it pretty well (so you say), the fact is (as every teacher who works in a high poverty school knows) that some come to school without food, without vision correction they need, without dental work they need, without having had a good night’s sleep that they need, without the emotional stability that they need, with the differences in thinking that come from being raised on a steady diet of precarity and instability, and sometimes frustration-induced child abuse, except when they need to miss school because they have to stay home to care for younger siblings so their mom can work or when they themselves are experiencing the higher health problems that people living in poverty do in fact have. And the idea that these kids can do just as well on ridiculous-seeming standardized tests as their suburban peers who NEVER have to sleep on the couch, who ALWAYS know they’re going to have a meal and soon, who ALWAYS go right to the doctor when they need to, who NEVER wait for months to get new eyeglasses or for dental work, and who don’t stay home from school to care for their younger siblings EVER is completely absurd, and completely the point.
You’re preaching to the choir, Julie. I’m just explaining the reformster’s thinking, not agreeing with it.
America is the richest most powerful nation on earth, not some third world back water. The poor in many other developed nations have universal health care and a social safety net we can only dream of.
The kind of “social safety net” you dream of is much easier to afford when you outsource your primary national responsibility (defense) to Uncle Sugar and when you don’t have a massive illegal alien problem.
If we practiced national defense instead of foreign adventurism, there would be a great deal of money for taking care of our children.
Priorities.
As Krugman recently said, supply side economists are delusional.
You’re right about poverty being a very complex issue and it’s quite likely that we have long ago past a point of diminishing returns to education.
I think you have to consider several related aspects:
1. We’ve been living in a me-myself-I culture for nearly three generations now. Our post WWII consumer mentality is just now bearing its most bitter fruit.
2. The big winners in our (Ayn) Randian utopia are people who view their rewards as just. They are the top of our meritocratic selection process; they deserve everything they have. Because we have a meritocracy, they owe nobody anything—They’ve earned it all themselves. If you don’t have anything, then it’s your own damn fault.
3. Most of these folks are true believers. Many believe it’s morally just to avoid charity.
4. Denial of either points 1. or 2. would mean taxes and a denial of their “superiority”.
We have a long row to hoe.
Sadly, *this*!
The United States is number 1 in child poverty AND imprisonment.
The two are related, of course.
They are related by immorality.
Immorality by the avaricious bastards at the top who can’t ever get enough jack.
Duane, it is a disease with them. yes, a deep dip of immorality and its first cousin, sociopathy.
High rates of incarceration basically reflect the demographics of the US. Large numbers of blacks and mestizos with much higher rates of crime than European or Asian populations.
You write such blatantly racist comments.
Study after study after study show that black defendants are sentenced to jail at rates far exceeding that of white defendants.
Defendants of color go to jail for selling and using drugs nonviolently.
White defendants get probation or sent to rehab facilities.
Defendants of color go to death row for murder.
White defendants get life or even shorter sentences.
I could go on but I know that I won’t make a dent in the racism of mad hammer and Jim so I’ll stop.
Your kind is declining in numbers, influence, and power, thank God, and will be all but extinct in a couple of generations. You will not be missed.
High rates of incarceration basically reflects falling demand for workers. The unemployed and unemployable have to do SOMETHING to earn a living, and so they turn to the underground economy. Despite the fact that we have had steady increases in productivity, wages have remained basically flat since the 1970s.
Click to access bp-working-for-few-political-capture-economic-inequality-200114-en.pdf
cx: reflect, not reflects
And yes, there is overwhelming evidence that we have two penal systems in the United States–one for blacks and another for whites.
Have a look at this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/04/the-blackwhite-marijuana-arrest-gap-in-nine-charts/
Jim, your comments are often borderline racist; your comments about IQ cross that line. If you do it again, I will ask you to leave the blog.
No doubt the weekend body count in Chicago is due to Chinese driving in from the suburbs and shooting people at random.
No, JIm, I imagine it has something to do with idiots having guns, such as the 11 year old boy who shot and killed his grandfather after the grandfather shot his father. All white people, Jim. And rural, not inner city.
And then there was the White Supremacist who shot and killed 3 people at a synagogue, remember that. And they were white Christians because he was a racist idiot.
And Mother Jones actually looked at the data of mass shootings since 1982 (up to 2013) and found that:
“The killers: More than half of the cases involved school or workplace shootings (12 and 20, respectively); the other 30 cases took place in locations including shopping malls, restaurants, and religious and government buildings. Forty four of the killers were white males. Only one of them was a woman. (See Goleta, Calif., in 2006.) The average age of the killers was 35, though the youngest among them was a mere 11 years old. (See Jonesboro, Ark., in 1998.)”
You keep repeating your racist fantasies to yourself though, Jim. I’m sure it provides comfort when you lie to yourself and claim that dark skinned people are less human than you are.
Me, I’m done with you. No more wasted words for you –just prayers that one day you will drop the scales of hatred and fear from your eyes and heart.
Black crime rates are far higher than white crime rates. Rates of crime in the US among whites are very close to crime rates for whites in Western Europe. Switzerland has extremally high rates of gun ownership with little crime. South Africa has very strict laws against guns with horrific rates of violent crime. All over the world East Asians have exttemally low rates of violent crime.
Race is the most important variable connected with crime. Crime like any aspect of human behavior is multifactorial but genetics is clearly involved. The rate of the 2-R allele of the MAOA gene is about 5% in US black males as oppossed to about .1% in US white males.
Here’s an interesting TED Talk about a psychological study of being rich and the effect it has on your personality and thinking:
“Does Being Rich Make You Mean?” (the answer is yes)
Quote from DSWright:
“Those who were wealthy or put in scenarios where they were wealthy displayed a high sense of entitlement which included stealing from and cheating others.
‘The reason, it turns out, is that even thoughts of being wealthy can create a feeling of increased entitlement — you start to feel superior to everyone else and thus more deserving: something at the centre of narcissism. They found this was true of people who were, in real life, better off. Wealthier people were more likely to agree with statements like “I honestly feel I’m just more deserving than other people” and place themselves higher on a self-assessed “class ladder” that indicated increasing levels of income, education and job prestige. This had straightforward and clearly measurable effects on behavior.’
This has some rather profound implications for American politics, particularly the politics of wealth inequality.”
The plutocrats want the impoverished to be kept impoverished, as do the politicians. A politician’s job is to keep his voting base voting for him. If they fix the problems, the voters and the money go away. Someone online wrote this so much more in depth and eloquently than I could ever do.
The Elite rich and the politicians embrace the status quo; and make it worse. The divide between the haves and the haves nots grows annually.
How sad to think that povery is an excuse. As a special education teacher in a Title 1 high school in CT, I can assure you that poverty is no excuse. It’s a way of life for far too many of our youth. Please tell me how one can learn, although able, when one hasn’t slept, eaten, or has proper love and care for? Those that blame teachers should be ashamed of themselves. How can you start from the top down?? So teachers should teach kids in hopes that they learn and can go home and all of a sudden have all of their primary needs??? It’s a bottom up shift and until that can be done, teachers will strive their hardest to close those achievement gaps but you cannot change economic status of others.
Easy answer. You can’t monetize child poverty. If you could the deformers would be all over it.
I think the idea of teacher equity for low income students is wonderful and Duncan and Obama are right to put it out there.
The problem is that SYSTEMIC support systems for impoverished children and their families are not mentioned in this plan, and $4,200,000 is but a molecule of federal money that will not go far across 50 states to help implement a plan that is incomplete.
Great teachers for poor children is the right thing to do; by itself, it is inadequate, when families like these need food, healthcare, education, housing, job training, childcare, and domestic violence prevention counseling (I’m talking about the parents and caregivers of these children) themselves.
Even Randi has written robustly about such wraparound services.
Wow, Randi.
However, Mr. Duncan can do all he wants with teacher equity and quality for impoverished children, but it’s an approach connected to the “great paradigm”, something he, Obama, and most members of Congress refuse to change by questioning what is causing so much poverty and poverty’s growth throughout the United States. Obviously, causation is inextricably and heavily linked with far more than just trickle down economics in the mindset and practice of free, unfettered and lightly regulated open markets.
There lies a much more profound question – the question of poverty – the anwers of which are complex without being so complicated to understand. And when our elected officials really confront the answers in other than a free market approach, then maybe we can sit down and rethink the rest of public education. Not all reform is bad, but the reforms put into place have a one-way valve and therefore a one-way flow.
Surprise, surprise.
Let’s all maximize teacher quality and equity (that’s a good thing, so sarcasm here!), but let’s just gloss over poverty or give it a token aknowledgement, and let’s certainly not delve to deeply into causal nexus, correlation, and causality, because coming up with viable and tested solutions would change the paradigm of most of the American aristocracy.
Uh-oh. Just think what Mitt Romney and wife would have to face if they owned 7 prime vacation homes rather than 9, and the other two translated into public taxes paid to provide public infrastructure services.
That’s far too “socialist” and “communist” for most of the people in D.C. to conceive of. I laugh when I hear those “ists” being bandied about in political rhetoric because, althouth they are on a spectrum, their usage has been hijacked and bastardized to the point of almost no recognition. Just ask Bernie Sanders, who I love; he’ll tell you.
One bottom line here in the realm of metaphors is that you cannot treat coronary arrest with oxygen and anti-coagulants without ultimately doing the triple bypass.
This administration and the corruptions and disconnect of most of the GOP and now even democrats refuses to do the surgery . . . . . . When enough patients suffer and nothing gets done, then one can expect the patients’ families to eventually storm the hospitals with torches and pitchforks . . . .
Oh dear . . . . Then what?
Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, will the suffering ever end for Philadelphia’s teachers, parents and students?
http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/homepage-feature/item/70165-philly-cigarette-tax-for-schools-stalled-in-legislative-pingpong-match?linktype=hp_impact
What’s the solution to poverty? 1) Stop funding it.. 2) Stop defending sloth and immorality. 3) Speak well of Godly morality. Short of this, just accept it.
I think you need to read your Bible a little more carefully. Especially the part where Ezekiel explains the real reason Sodom fell. Oh, and the teachings of Jesus.
Nicely done. I had to go look up the passage. I also had forgotten that prostitution is even worse than failing to aid the poor.
Thanks Dienne! I started to post the same verse last night but gave up, thinking that it would be pointless taking on someone who gets it so wrong that it leaves you jaw-dropped and dazed.
“Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had arrogance, abundant food and careless ease, but she did not help the poor and needy.” — Ezekiel 16:49
Also this person seems to be ignorant of facts regarding SNAP and TANF. Any person with an arrest record is barred from receiving aid or living in public housing. There is a lifetime limit of 5 years of benefits for all recipients. The majority of recipients are elderly, children, disabled citizens, and the temporarily unemployed.
I guess madhammer, who claims Christian “persecution” on his/her website considers it funding immorality (?) to provide very meager food and shelter for old people and young children? Or that 80-year olds and 3-year olds need to stop being so lazy and get to work to earn their own keep? I can’t help but think this person’s real issue is believing that poor people have sex that he/she doesn’t approve of, although I don’t think many elderly women or young female children are at risk of pregnancy or are receiving birth control that he/she thinks is taboo.
It’s all standard Fox/O’Reilly/Limbaugh/Colter dogwhistle hatred of the poor because they are assumed to be black and brown and they are “taking” something away from “good” white people. Surprising how huge numbers of SNAP and TANF assistance are rural white poor people though.
This person is so ignorant of what the Christian bible defines as “Godly morality” (hint: it’s not about sex at all — it’s about loving one’s neighbor, taking care of the poor, widows, and orphans, taking care of the sick, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the prisoner, and the disabled) that it defies understanding.
I wish this person well, regardless. It has to be very difficult going through life with blinders on and plugs in one’s ears and the enormous effort it must take to ignore reality in service of a political ideology and to maintain xenophobic racism is Herculean. Bless their heart!
Such a silly question. All there is, today, is what’s in it for ME and MY family?
THEY DON”T CARE!!!
Many thoughts/questions come to mind concerning this issue. 4.2 million is not enough to support schools across the 50 states. Makes be think this movement are/will not be taken seriously by Obama /Duncan. If the effective /highly effective teachers go into the poor preforming schools, who will teach in the high preforming schools? Schools/teachers in the these poor performing school do not always have the materials/resources needed to support these students. Will the teachers of the poor preforming schools have the same materials that the present teacher? It will also be the same students with parents who probably do not value education, are poor, maybe even suffering from unemployment substance abuse, domestic abuse, hunger, homelessness, etc. So, teachers will not be able to chose where they can work, interesting.
Why don’t the y care: because they do not believe the strong positive relationship between poverty and academic (school) success. To support that relationship would undercut their core arguments and assertions and require them to support governmental measures to reallocate, redistribute income: the corporate boys and women ain’t going to help slit their own throats by giving up one iota of their ill gotten wealth, or their continuing sources of income from privatizing schools.
Robert Creamer sums it up well: “The ability for ordinary working people to organize and collectively bargain over their wages and working conditions is a fundamental human right. It is a right just as critical to a democratic society as the right to free speech and the right to vote.
Over the last 30 years many in corporate America and the big Wall Street banks have conducted a sustained attack on that human right. Unionization dropped from 20.1 percent of the workforce in 1983 to 11. 3 percent in 2013 — and the results are there for everyone to see.
During that period productivity and Gross Domestic Product per capita both increased by roughly 80 percent in America. But the wages of ordinary Americans have remained stagnant. Virtually all of the fruits of that increased productivity have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.”
The rest of his article is at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/why-collective-bargaining_b_5570047.html
Click to access bp-working-for-few-political-capture-economic-inequality-200114-en.pdf