The teacher walkouts continued and grow larger in Kentucky, where teachers are massing by the thousands in the State Capitol to protest changes to their pensions. The two largest districts in the state are closed.
“School districts across Kentucky will once again shut down as teachers plan to flood the state Capitol on Friday to rally for public-school funding and protest newly signed changes to public pension programs.
“As of Thursday afternoon, at least 36 districts had decided to close Friday, citing teachers calling in sick or the likelihood that they would. The closures include public schools in Louisville and Lexington ― the two largest school districts in the state….
“That frustration began to boil over last year when the Legislature, fully in Republican control for the first time in nearly a century, passed a bill to allow charter schools in the state.
“The issue was the potential “diversion of public money into charters,” said David Allen, a former president of the Kentucky Education Association…
“That laid the groundwork,” Allen said.
”Then, in January, Bevin proposed drastic cuts to schools and public education programs, even though funding was already tight. In inflation-adjusted terms, Kentucky’s K-12 budget was down 16 percent since 2008, according to the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy.
“Bevin’s proposal prompted dire warnings from school superintendents around the state, who said some cuts would push Kentucky’s poorest school districts to the brink of insolvency….
”Many Kentucky teachers, meanwhile, have come to believe that Bevin’s approach to education isn’t driven by the interests of taxpayers or its public schools. They see it as part of a broader movement, led by U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, to further privatize education by deliberately undermining public schools.
“It’s a dismantling, step by step by step, of public education,” said Pam Dossett, a teacher in Hopkinsville. “So they can sit back and say, ‘Our public schools, they’re not working.’ And then they can replace them all with charter schools.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In related news from the guardian dot com: A nationwide network of rightwing thinktanks is launching a PR counteroffensive against the teachers’ strikes that are sweeping the country, circulating a “messaging guide” for anti-union activists that portrays the walkouts as harmful to low-income parents and their children.
The new rightwing strategy to discredit the strikes that have erupted in protest against cuts in education funding and poor teacher pay is contained in a three-page document obtained by the Guardian. Titled “How to talk about teacher strikes”, it provides a “dos and don’ts” manual for how to smear the strikers.
Top of the list of talking points is the claim that “teacher strikes hurt kids and low-income families”. It advises anti-union campaigners to argue that “it’s unfortunate that teachers are protesting low wages by punishing other low-wage parents and their children.”
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Link for the above article: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/apr/12/teacher-strikes-rightwing-secret-strategy-revealed?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Collections+2017&utm_term=271298&subid=17966701&CMP=GT_US_collection
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The leaders of the New Feudal Order in the United States and their wind-up toys in office (e.g., the governor of Kentucky) will continue to push their toy until it breaks. This always happens near the end of an empire.
Since 1975, productivity in the US has increased 82 percent. In other words, the average worker today creates almost twice the value as did the average worker in 1975. However, real wages have increased by only 2 percent. ALMOST ALL OF THAT INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY HAS GONE TO THE OWNERSHIP CLASS. This is why workers are angry, even if they don’t recognize it. This is why they voted for Obama (for change) and for Trump (for change). But they have seen more of the same and increasing extirpation of their benefits, pensions, grievance rights, and credit and consumer protections,
Today, only 11 percent of American workers are unionized, and most of those are government employees. The extreme right has created the conditions for a second resurgence of the sort of worker unrest that roiled the country in the first part of the twentieth century.
But like the fat-cat owners of the latifundia in Rome in the second century CE that had replaced the small family farms on the backs of which the country grew to greatness, our oligarchs, the lords of our New Feudal Order, are clueless about the amount of real struggle and desperation among the poor and ex-middle-class in our country.
From Politifact:
“Sanders said the Walton family ‘owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people.’
The latest comparable figures, from 2013, support his claim. We rate it True.”
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Strike the word “second” in the passage above. It’s redundant.
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Looks like tax cuts aren’t working in Kentucky. it’s a GOP dream to give to the wealthy and have the economy grow. When will people wake up to the damage that ‘trickle down’ is doing?
I support Kentucky teachers and hope this spreads to all red states that are having funding problems due to the negligence of politicians.
Indiana had at least 22,000-32,000 protestors go to Indianapolis to protest the Right to Work law. It was passed anyway. Since then wages have gone down. GOP legislators keep telling us what a wonderful state Indiana is for businesses. Haven’t noticed the ‘wonderful tax cuts’ bringing us business but have noticed a lack of funding in almost everything.
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That last paragraph says it all. Everything since at least Reagan’s flawed and fraudulent report called “A Nation At Risk” has been deliberate with this goal in mind. But maybe this war on the public sector is older than that.
What came first, ALEC or A Nation At Risk?
The answer is simple: ALEC is 45 years old. That was 1973. Ten years later Reagon released “A Nation At Risk” and the next domino to fall was the manufactured obsession with testing to rank and punish only public schools and unionized teachers.
Testing led to TFA, corporate charter schools, and then vouchers. I’m sure there are many other things that should be on this short list. This is a deliberate “war” that will eventually sink the U.S. Constitution and the Republic it was written to create, protect and support.
Trump is also a weapon of the less than 1-percent to destroy our Constitutional Republic and its democratic institutions.
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Ironic, isn’t it, that DT is thought of by millions of blue-collar Americans as the “working-class billionaire.” What became of his trillion-dollar infrastructure plan to put Americans back to work? A few tax incentives. And where is his healthcare program that was going to be “cheaper than Obamacare” and would “insure everybody”? Moonbeams. Predictably, his big corporate tax cut went not to increased wages and benefits but to stock buy-backs. Evidently, American workers fall into the “you can fool me twice” category.
What do I mean by that? Well, workers also voted for change with Obama, and he packed his cabinet with people from Goldman-Sachs–the janissaries of the the oligarchs of the New Feudal Order. Obama bailed the banks and other big financial institutions–covered their losses from the subprime mortgage fiasco and the credit default swaps–and let the “little people” lose their homes and investments, and instead of pushing for national, single-payer healthcare, he instituted Mitt Romney’s plan nationwide–a windfall for the insurance companies. And he, too, did not deliver the work programs that he hinted at during his initial campaign.
Fool me once. Fool me twice.
Hmmm. Maybe the third time is the charm.
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“let the “little people” lose their homes and investments,”
Yep!
Been there!
Hard to work one’s way out of peeon status when the cards are stacked against the peeons. . .
. . . and then the health issues hit!
So be life, better than the deep nothingness!
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Bob, the ignorance of the American people is very dangerous.
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FYI, almost everyone you interact with on this blog is an American person. Of course you would never mean to suggest that they’re ignorant, but just FYI.
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“…the ignorance of the American people is very dangerous.” I agree. Look at how many people vote against their own best interests. Look at how many people support Trump even though he is working to destroy our democracy, our environment, our schools, our healthcare, beliefs in our media, our allies and immigrants while exploding our deficit. He picks people for his administration who work to destroy their agencies. He works to get money for himself and demeans everyone who disagrees with him.
Tell me that the ignorance of the American people isn’t dangerous! I find this ongoing ignorance to be frightening.
Yes, there are people on this blog who are Americans and see through what is happening. That still doesn’t negate the ignorance that is flourishing.
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I’m a big believer in the notion that people are pretty much the same, wherever you go. Whenever I find myself thinking that “the American people” are woefully ignorant (and I do find myself thinking that from time to time), I remind myself how few Norwegians, Englishmen, Germans, Russians, and Chinese I interact with daily. My assumption (and now and then I read polls that reinforce this assumption) is that if I talked to enough of them, I’d come to the view that they’re pretty ignorant, too.
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FLERP: I agree that there are ignorant people all over the world. There are many reasons for this to occur. Some of this is due to poverty and some to government control of the media. In many countries, people don’t have the ability to read. Some are too busy trying to exist to pay attention to the larger picture.
The BIG problem is that the US has the power to destroy and often uses its military and political might incorrectly. Electing someone like Trump, who is ignorant and has power, is a recipe for horrible things to happen. Electing the wrong politicians has disastrous consequence for the whole world. How many are being bought out by billionaires whose only belief is the necessity of having more for themselves? The environment, healthcare, schools, infrastructure, etc. all suffer.
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“Evidently, American workers fall into the ‘you can fool me twice’ category.”
Lincoln described who Trump’s hardcore supporters are, the 38-percent (I’ve read).
“You can fool all the people some of the time, AND SOME OF THE PEOPLE ALL THE TIME, but you cannot fool all the people all the time (the other 62 percent).”
A hardcore Trump supporter is defined by four words: “Willingly ignorant and deplorable.”
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Trump has nothing to do with the working class other than to hoax them out of their money
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It’s going to be a long uphill battle for teachers here, in Oklahoma, and in many other states. It pains my heart to see how hard teachers are fighting to get more funding for education and for a better pay. There’s a lot going on and it is going to take a long time until teachers finally get the pay we deserve. Times are changing and I support the teachers in the strike.
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More teachers must run for office. If you can’t persuade the legislators, run against them.
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