Enron may have gone bankrupt, and its employees may have lost their life savings, but it left some people very rich.
Here EduShyster tells the story of Texas billionaire John Arnold. He is one of the lucky few who managed to walk away from the Enron debacle with more than $3 billion. Some former Enron execs are doing time. Not Arnold. You know he must be smart because he got out before the roof fell in, and the bottom fell out.
And how does he spend his vast wealth?
He does what canny investors do: he pours millions into the struggle to privatize American public education. He has given millions to KIPP, StudentsFirst, and TFA. And he has a special interest in making sure that teachers don’t have pensions.
Billionaires have a hard time understanding why anyone needs a pension. They don’t need pensions. Why should teachers get them?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We are at a point where we no longer need to be buried with the true horror tales of the abuse…we need to discuss the solutions. Do we all march on the White House? Sit in before the doors of major corporations and departments of education? Block the congressmen and women from entering our capital building? What do we want to stop, and what do we want to replace the abusive policies with?…We need organization, big organization to resolve the big problems..We all know about the abuses…let’s work en masse to stop them. I know my teachers union in Hawaii is incapable of such action…there is something wrong with how things work in that union…but we can work outside of the pretend unions en masse. Other teachers with similar unions, or no unions can do the same. Chicago is a great role model. I really think if we do not throw ourselves into the cogs of the wheels to stop the machine it will continue to roll over us.
I personally am so angered about what I see going on, I feel duped that I was asked to become a teacher, and I feel abused because I love teaching so much. I want to stop it, and I am done talking about it.
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The only way to get rid of NCLB and CCSS is to get them voted out or defunded. At the federal level, we have the re authorization of ESEA supposedly occurring this summer in congress. Senator Grassley would like to simply defund the Common Core. We can all get our friends and neighbors to call our senators to get behind that. In the House we have Representative Luetkemeyer who is upset about the unconstitutionality of implementing the CCSS and has written Arne Duncan a letter about that. We can copy this letter (link below) and get friends and neighbors to send it to their representatives to spur them on to introduce a bill that would completely revamp ESEA to eliminate AYP, teacher evaluations tied to testing, and the longitudinal data collection systems required by CCSS. The Kline bill, the Student Success Act, is a beginning but very inadequate to really turn things around (and it has some horrible ideas in it about allowing military recruiters the same access to high schools that they have to colleges.)
The states really hold the power even though the directives come from the federal government. They can opt out of PARCC and SBAC. They can refuse to enforce the CC mandates at the district levels. The state superintendents can refuse to participate in the data sharing scheme of Bill Gates and Rupert Murdock called InBloom because it is unconstitutional and immoral to collect 400 points of data on our children including “sensitive information” such as parents sexual orientation and associations with ministers and lawyers. We can alert our friends and neighbors that all of our private lives are about to be compromised by this outrageous plan implemented through the CCSS. Most people can be motivated to get real political all of a sudden when they realize this.
We can work with tea party groups who are actively informing themselves about the CC and organizing to fight it. Yes, we can overcome our differences to get together to fight this.
Write letters to the editor. Go to your school’s board meetings and speak out. Question why they are so ready to embrace the CC when it is a completely untested system.
Dear Secretary Duncan,
As you know, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) allows Congress to authorize and allocate funding for public K-12 education and, most importantly, is the primary vehicle in which we implement education policy reform. Most recently reauthorized through the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), the ESEA’s authorization expired on September 30, 2008, and has yet to be reauthorized. Since the ESEA’s expiration, the Department of Education (Department) has moved forward with education policy reform without Congressional input. Such action is, at best, in contravention with precedent.
In addition to expressing our concern with the Department’s circumvention of Congress to reform education policy, we are writing you to express our concerns with the implementation of Common Core standards and changes to federal data collection and disbursement policies.
We ask that the Fiscal Year 2014 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Bill include language to restore state decision-making and accountability with respect to state academic content standards. The decision about what students should be taught and when it should be taught has enormous consequences for our children. Therefore, parents ought to have a straight line of accountability to those who are making such decisions. State legislatures, which are directly accountable to the citizens of their states, are the appropriate place for those decisions to be made, free from any pressure from the U.S. Department of Education. –
See more at: http://www.educationnews.org/education-policy-and-politics/sen-chuck-grassley-authors-letter-against-common-core-agenda/#sthash.XNHUGE3V.dpuf
Here you can find the exact letter from Grassley which you could download and send to your senator to sign and send to Grassley so that he knows he has senate support.
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Thank you for this, Dawn. I’m ready to make moves in these directions. I have one major need, however:
I’m sure that the main counterpoint I’ll be hearing is that our educational system, nationwide, is in need of an overhaul. That our academic standing has plummeted, internationally. I know that the Giuliani administration doctored NYC’s test scores to put us last in the state, years ago. It was then revealed that we were the only city that included special ed scores. Without that, we ranked 3rd.
Is there similar data that I can use to counter the concept of our failure, as a nation? Can someone supply me with links? Our nation is so “data” driven. I’d like to have something concrete to show to the “harumphers”.
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Have pensions always been such a point of contention from those who don’t have them?
I hear people, even my husband who is self-employed, carry on about how teachers have not realized how good they have had it because of pensions. Is it resentment that even those who don’t teach in public school (custodians, cafeteria workers etc) get them too that has fueled the resentment or what?
Anyone?
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I believe this discontent has been fostered and manipulated in order to divide the very people who need to stand together against corporate greed. Remind those who complain that instead of fighting against the benefits that others enjoy we should unite in fighting for everyone’s right to retire with dignity.
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Well put Mary.
Also, I agree that the discontent has been “carefully taught” (a favorite lyric…for my friend Joanna). If we are all busy fighting each other we are less likely to notice who is really looting us.
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Exactly, Mary–the old ploy “divide and conquer.” Where I live, people are told that we actually receive a golden parachute–free health insurance for life! (Has never been the case.) When I tell the truth (and I tell all retired teachers to tell everyone they know)–that we PAY for our health insurance–people immediately soften and become more sympathetic.
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It’s very easy to rile people up over pensions. After all their taxes help fund them. Of course, my taxes help fund them too, and I get to contribute 9.4% of my salary, which is a substantial sum of a substitute teacher’s salary and certainly was not peanuts before I was laid off. People also forget that in exchange for a pension, our wages are lower than comparable workers in the private sector. In my state our social security benefits are substantially reduced even though those dollars were earned before teaching. The same is true of survivor benefits. How many people with a 401K have their social security reduced because of those contributions?
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Arkansas Teacher Retirement System was invested in Enron. Lost everything they had invested. Don’t know how many other pension plans might have gone the same way.
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Useless DOJ (Corzine is still free), yet another violation of our rights. The gov’t constantly violates our rights.
They violate the 1st Amendment by caging protesters and banning books like “America Deceived II”.
They violate the 4th and 5th Amendment by allowing TSA to grope you.
They violate the entire Constitution by starting undeclared wars.
Impeach Obama.
Last link of “America Deceived II” before it is completely banned:
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