North Carolina joined the wave of teacher protests against underfunding.
Read about their protest hereand here (great photo)and here (where teachers cornered the legislator who called them “thugs”).
In the last link from the local paper:
“Rep. Mark Brody spent a lot of time Wednesday explaining that when he wrote “union thugs” were behind the rally that brought thousands of educators to Raleigh, he wasn’t talking about individual teachers.
“It was not intended that way,” he told one group.
“Brody, a Monroe Republican, said he was referring to the National Education Association in his Facebook post.
“Teachers made it a point to find Brody on Wednesday to tell him that they were hurt, shocked or offended when they heard about his comments.
“I’m a grandmother, not a thug,” said Ira Reed. She works for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg arm of the N.C. Association of Educators, retiring from work in local school districts after 39 years.
“Reed defended unions after Brody said his strong opposition to public employee unions were at the root of his “thugs” Facebook post.
“I’ve been schooled a lot in the last couple of hours,” Brody said. “I support the message that you’re bringing. I just don’t support the method.”
“Brody said teachers shouldn’t have had their rally on a school day. At least 42 school districts, including the state’s largest, canceled classes Wednesday.
“During the wide-ranging conversation, Brody agreed with Reed that teacher “pay-for-performance” was wrong. He said also that he wants to eliminate end-of-grade exams, eliminate Common Core standards and return control of school calendars to the local districts.”
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article211269714.html#storylink=cpy
Diane Ravitch's blog 
More than half of North Carolina school children were out of school yesterday because their teachers had to lobby the statehouse to get basic funding for public schools.
Meanwhile, in edreformland, where public schools and public school students don’t exist, the US Department of Education is spending this workweek traveling the country promoting vouchers for private schools:
https://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/prepared-remarks-secretary-devos-alfred-e-smith-foundation
Every public school in the country could shut down and the ed reform speeches and think tanks and plans and award ceremonies and conventions would continue apace- it wouldn’t matter a bit to any of them. They’re made themselves completely irrelevant to 90% of the families in the country.
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“I support the message that you’re bringing. I just don’t support the method.”
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the North Carolina teachers have tried many, many other methods. Which one of those did you support, Mr. Brody?
I hope Mr. Brody is remembered come next election.
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A wonderful view of the future: to see North Carolina take everything back from those who have brutally locked it down.
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“Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates saw an opportunity with a new federal education law that has widespread repercussions for American classrooms.
His nonprofit Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given about $44 million to outside groups over the past two years to help shape new state education plans required under the 2015 law, according to an Associated Press analysis of its grants. The spending paid for research aligned with Gates’ interests, led to friendly media coverage and had a role in helping write one state’s new education system framework.”
The nonprofits say the Gates funding doesn’t influence their research or advocacy, but you can check for yourself.
Go to any of the hundreds of ed reform orgs and lobbyist sites that are available online and look for a single critical word on anything Gates backs.
I’ve never seen one. If no one is influenced by Gates funding one would think there would be some criticism of the agenda Gates backs, somewhere, by someone. Unless they all just miraculously reach the same conclusions he does every single time he launches one of these. Which seems unlikely in any kind of actual, open debate, that kind of lock-step consensus, particularly because these agenda items he bought are supposedly “experiments”.
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Somebody should send Gates the NEPC’s recent legitimate study of virtual and blended learning. The conclusion is that these approaches do not work as well as traditional brick-and-mortar schools. Gates has been trying to work with or perhaps work on public schools to get them to adopt his cyber trash. He will most likely continue to buy people at the top to entice schools to adopt his “vision” for the rest of us. State boards of education and superintendents should read the NEPC report.
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Given Gates complete ignorance of education issues, it’s actually very ironic (and funny) that he just released a video of himself talking about how in a meeting with Trump, Trump asked about the difference between HIV and HPV.
Gates was making fun of Trump for asking about something “obvious”, while Gates himself normally just plows ahead with his ignorant, unadvised experiments on millions of school children and teachers without asking anyone.
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Tennessee said Cohen had a seat at the table because it sought national experts in addition to state officials, community advocacy groups and traditional and charter schools. Eve Carney, who led the plan’s development for the Tennessee Department of Education, said it was impossible to quantify the specific impact of each of the 67 stakeholders across six working groups.
“It’s important to have diversity in voice and different points of view, however, the influence of one over the other is not there,” Carney said.
Yes, this is true – of course it is. The middle school principal is exactly equal in influence to the massive Gates Foundation with their giant bags of “free” funding.
Gates should fund a study to research the influence of Bill Gates on US public schools. See how many of Gates’ priorities Tennessee adopted compared to those of the middle school principal. He loves data. Let’s see some on him.
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“Mansplaining”
I didn’t really mean
The thing I really said
The word I used was “green”
But what I meant was “red”
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California is having problems with a charter friendly fellow running for governor. Billionaires from out of state are funding him. Will there ever come a time when the wealthy do something useful? This is wearing on my brain!
,,,,,,,,,,,
Billionaires vs teachers union: Charter school fight amps up race for California governor
By Laurel Rosenhall | May 16, 2018
What do these billionaires have in common? They aim to shake up public education by promoting charters—schools that receive taxpayer funds but are not required to follow all the rules that govern traditional schools. And their newest goal is to try to elect California’s next governor.
Several wealthy business leaders have poured millions of dollars into a campaign backing Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat and former mayor of Los Angeles. Their spending, which follows similar efforts in key legislative and school board races, has made the California governor’s race the latest front in a long-standing war.
Charter advocates see teachers unions as caring more about working conditions for teachers than learning outcomes for kids. Union leaders see charters, most of which hire non-union teachers, as threats to their livelihoods. But the two sides also clash more broadly over how to improve public education.
It’s an urgent question in California, where less than half of students meet standards in reading and math, and performance by children from poor families is almost the worst in the nation.
Today ads by the charter group are beaming Villaraigosa’s smiling face onto TVs and into mailboxes, while radio commercials by the rival teachers union criticize “out-of-state billionaires… trying to buy our politicians.”
The big-money battle has injected serious competition in the race leading up to the June 5 primary, from which only two of 27 candidates for governor will advance to the November general election. The frontrunner, Democratic Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, earned the state teachers union’s endorsement after telling it in a questionnaire that he does not want to increase the number of charter schools in California. (His spokesman said Newsom wants to pause new charter approvals until there’s agreement on conflict-of-interest rules.)…
https://calmatters.org/articles/billionaires-vs-teachers-union-a-fight-over-charter-schools-amps-up-race-for-california-governor/
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Priceless:
“Dahlresma Marks-Evans, a middle school teacher from Durham, said the conversation with Brody led to “a better understanding” about his controversial remarks.
Reed, however, compared Brody to U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, saying he was making decisions about something he didn’t understand.”
Bulletin board trim on some of the protest signs – a classic :0)
One young teacher had a sign that read “WTF?!?” Underneath it read “Where’s The Funds?”
The state superintendent wasn’t anywhere near the rally.
https://www.wral.com/as-thousands-of-teachers-rally-in-raleigh-nc-superintendent-will-be-100-miles-away/17555551/
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This was posted on Truthout. Good grief. Gad, this cruel red state makes teachers pay for their own sub. I’ve never heard of such a thing. What happens if you get really ill? This could run into teachers having to pay the district back. Guess you can’t get sick in N. Carolina. Wonder if legislators have to pay if they take off work. HA!
…….
“To work around vacation day rules, the newspaper reports, “organizers of Wednesday’s march encouraged teachers to use a provision in state law that allows them to take personal leave with at least five days’ advance notice — as long as a substitute is available and the teacher pays a $50 ‘required substitute deduction.'” Dozens of districts canceled classes, meaning those educators won’t be forced to pay the sub fee.”
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Actually, we do earn 10 sick days a year. The reason I am told for paying $50 for our personal day is for the sub b/c students are in session. If the school district closed, the teachers did not have to pay that $50. In the guidelines for personal days, it states if you’re going to a protest or some political rally to use a personal day.
Trust me we get sick! LOL
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NC teachers earn three kinds of leave days: sick, annual, and personal. Using a sick day (you earn 10 per year) does not require teachers to pay for a sub. Personal leave days, which are earned at a rate of two days per year, are the leave days that most of them took, because state law dictates that a personal leave day cannot be denied if the teacher gives at least five days notice to the school, (barring extreme circumstances like the first day of a school year or the day after a holiday) the catch being that the “sub fee,” as we called it, has to be taken from your salary. If a regular sick day was taken, it might have caused punitive action to be taken by the school and/or district given that protesting certainly is different than being sick. (And not that you asked 😀 but annual leave days are similar to what regular state employees earn for their actual vacation days which for us can only be used when students are not present; they are the days we officially use for Christmas and Spring Break and with enough years we can earn enough to use during teacher workdays).
Source: 10 year N.C. teacher currently working in S.C.
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Alex and MELANIE A MEREDITH: Thanks for the explanation. I stand with all of you and praise all teachers who are willing to do what is necessary to get better salaries and conditions in the schools that make good teaching a possibility. Shame on politicians and any billionaires or millionaires who don’t see that you are working to help the students.
I am retired and am appalled at the horrors that now exist in schools. I didn’t realize things had gotten so bad. Life for me was rough which is why I left the country to teach my last years.
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Republicans don’t get it. Now the problem is that teachers are liberal…but they’ll be back teaching their classes.
…
Teachers Take School Funding Fight Straight To North Carolina’s Capitol
By COLIN DWYER • MAY 16, 2018
…The average teacher salary in the U.S. now stands nearly $10,000 higher than that of the average educator in North Carolina, according to the National Center for Education Statistics….
Republican lawmakers, for their part, point to the fact that teacher pay has risen each year over the past half-decade, during which time the GOP has held a commanding majority in the Legislature.
“Our state’s teacher salaries are among the fastest rising in the country,” state Sen. Phil Berger said Wednesday, in the midst of a tweetstorm asserting that “Republicans have [been] increasing every year we’ve held the majority.”
When asked by Ari why teachers are marching in protest then, GOP House Speaker Tim Moore answered: “I’m scratching my head over that.”
“The folks organizing it tend to have more of a liberal political agenda, and so I think that’s a big partisan part of it. And that’s why, frankly, a lot of teachers that I know have said on Wednesday they’re going to be in school teaching their students,” Moore said…
http://www.tinyurl.com/y8x7ytqs
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His statement is laughable. Who does he think the union is? Got news fr him the union is teachers.
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He knows the union is made up of teachers.
Trying to draw a distinction between them is the only (lame) excuse he could come up with for what he said.
Brody not only thinks teachers are thugs. But he also thinks they are all stupid enough to buy his lies.
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I just saw this comment on HuffPost. Bill Gates as science advisor?? One certainly doesn’t have to know anything to be on Trump’s team. Trump doesn’t believe in science so why not have an advisor who also knows nothing?
…………………
“Trump reportedly offered Gates a job as a White House science adviser at their meeting this March. Gates told Stat News in April that he rejected the proposal, as it wouldn’t be a good use of his time.”
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