Mercedes Schneider has closely analyzed the union-busting techniques of the so-called Center for Union Facts and its leader Richard Berman. Here she digs out the details of Berman’s long-planned strategy to damage unions with negative advertising. Now Berman is plastering New York City with billboards and radio ads to lower the public’s opinion of the United Federation of Teachers. A poll a year ago showed that New Yorkers trusted the union and the teachers more than they trusted Mayor Bloomberg to protect the interests of children.
She suggests a counter-attack, which she calls Operation Berman Boomerang.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on CWC – Berkeley Marketing and commented:
The war against the working man and the labor unions that helped build the Middle Class in the United States. Do the super wealthy want a return to the age of the Robber Barons when most Americans lived in poverty and were mostly low paid slaves to their wealthy masters.
I think they want their way without opposition. They don’t see this as necessarily poverty inducing even though it is. They are blind to any consequences except those they imagine their policies will cause.
I can see that I re-blogged this piece to the wrong Blog. Darn!
Mike, it’s possible they are blind to the consequences because the money men behind the movement to destroy the public schools mostly grew up with wealth and have no clue what it’s like to grow up in poverty in a home where the parents don’t read even if they can read.
It’s obvious that the more wealth there is the more education in the family and the more the family reads.
The opposite is true for those who live in poverty.
But there is a possibility that some of these billionaires are elitists and don’t care. These individuals don’t care if we return the United States to the era of the robber barons where many American families were so poor they had to sell their children as young as age five into servitude to work sixteen hour days six days a week in factories and coal mines. In fact, industry felt children who were not teens or adults were easier to manage and they could pay them a lot less. The federal child labor laws in the early part of the 20th century changed this when education became compulsory to age 17/18. When parents lost the right to sell their children into servitude, this also ended the practice of selling young children, mostly girls starting at age seven, into prostitution.
The elitist billionaires are only interested in growing their wealth no matter how many suffer. They are sociopaths. The Walton family is a perfect example of this. Wal-Mart is known to pay poverty wages to most of its employees. And yes Wal-Mart does offer healthcare but the programs they offer come with co-pays that cost too much for most of Wal-Mart’s employes to sign up because they don’t earn enough for the co-pay. In fact, Wal-Mart has classes for its poverty wage earners to teach them how to apply for food stamps. I read a study that the feds subsidize Wal-Mart to the tune of more than $400,000 a year per store through the food-stamp program. This allows Wal-Mart to keep paying poverty wages to keep prices down and boost profits that adds to the family’s wealth. The Walton family is the wealthiest family in the world.
If you shop at Wal-Mart you are actually contributing to poverty and supporting a family that is one of the critics and enemies of public education.
Yes, the best defense is a good offense. It’s time for teachers to unite against The Great American Education Fraud.
Parents and other citizens know that the people who put students first are the people willing to be in the nation’s classrooms. They will always side with teachers when they know the truth.
Here is one particular lie that I’d like to see exposed: “the unions” protect child molesting teachers. Of course the truth is that a child molesting teacher is so rare that when it occurs, it often makes front-page news in the city in which it happens. When it does happen, if the police are called, the educator is placed on immediate leave and is always gone for good once convicted. Of course that person also loses his credential.
I would be willing to bet that there is not a single convicted child molester in any school in New York City or any other place in the United States. We need to get this fact out to the public.
The vast majority of teachers (99% ?) are protectors of children, and would die to protect them if necessary. That’s one lesson we’ve learned from the various school gun tragedies.
Greed does terrible things to people and the frenzied race to siphon off school tax money has caused this unconscionable attack against our nation’s schoolteachers. Shame, shame, shame!
Seems almost strange anymore but one time education was the search for “truth”. That perception has usurped this fundamental ideal does not speak well for our future. [The understatement – at least of this blog.
Thanks for this information. As a reminder from history, though, let’s not forget that in the USA the attacks on unions are as old as American capitalism and as new as the latest charter school approvals by the Chicago Board of Education (January 22, 2014). As we research the “Center for Union Facts” and these other McCarthyite actions, hopefully we can complete history for a new generation, going back to the use of soldiers against unions in the late 19th Century, the Palmer raids, Taft Hartley, and of course the ongoing work to divide working people along racial lines that continues to this week with two Chicago aldermen trying to tell the unions and progressives to “stay out of our community” (while promoting WalMart, union busting charters, and their own pocketbooks…).