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Florida: Senate Approves Bill to Punish Teachers’ Union

By dianeravitch
March 4, 2018 //
31

 

At a time when teachers in Parkland proved that they are braver than armed guards, the Florida Senate struck a blow at the union that represents the state’s teachers. One senses the ugly hands of Jeb Bush and his consigliere, Patricia Levesque, behind the scenes.

“The Senate on Friday narrowly defeated an effort to eliminate part of a major education bill that could force teachers’ unions to disband if they don’t meet new membership standards.

“In a 21-17 vote, the Senate rejected a proposed amendment by Sen. Perry Thurston, D-Fort Lauderdale, that would have removed the controversial provision from the bill (HB 7055). The provision could cause teachers’ unions to lose their state certification if their membership falls below 50 percent of the employees they represent in the collective-bargaining process. If decertified, a union would have to reorganize and seek another majority vote from the members they are seeking to represent.

“Thurston said the provision was singling out teachers among all unions and that there is already a decertification process in state law that would allow teachers to disband a union if they were unhappy with the representation.

“It’s not right that we say teachers are the only ones we are going to punish,” Thurston said.”

Maybe it is time for a statewide teachers strike in Florida.

The articulate students at Parkland should speak out for the teachers who saved their lives. Name the bill for the teachers who lost their lives shielding students.

Start a fund to defeat the senators who voted for this bill. I want to contribute.

This is an outrage.

 

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Florida, Teachers, Unions

West Virginia: Why Teachers Are Still Striking

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2018 //
15

 

In this article, a teacher in West Virginia explains why teachers decided not to end their statewide strike. Promises from politicians are worthless. They want action.

Here is the interview. Go online to open the links.

“Public schools in West Virginia were closed for a sixth day on Thursday, as teachers striking over health care costs and pay largely rebuffed a deal this week between Gov. James C. Justice and union leadership aimed at getting them back to school.

Mr. Justice has ordered a task force to examine health care costs and the State House passed a bill raising wages by 5 percent. But with the bill’s fate in doubt in the Senate and scant details on health care funding, many teachers remained angry, and they flooded back to the Capitol, wearing red and black, to protest on Wednesday and Thursday.

We spoke on Wednesday night with Katie Endicott, 31, a high school English teacher from Gilbert, W.Va., about why she and many other teachers are not yet prepared to return to school. The interview has been edited and condensed.

What are the origins of the strike?

They told us that essentially if you weren’t a single person, if you had a family plan, your health insurance was going to rise substantially. As a West Virginia teacher — and I’ve been teaching 10 years — I only clear right under $1,300 every two weeks, and they’re wanting to take $300 more away for me. But they tell me it’s O.K., because we’re going to give you a 1 percent pay raise. That equals out to 88 cents every two days.

They implemented Go365, which is an app that I’m supposed to download on my phone, to track my steps, to earn points through this app. If I don’t earn enough points, and if I choose not to use the app, then I’m penalized $500 at the end of the year. People felt that was very invasive, to have to download that app and to be forced into turning over sensitive information.

Go365 was thrown out. Of course they decided to give a freeze [on insurance rates], and I think people thought that might be enough. But we understand that this is an election year. They can freeze it right now, but what happens after the election? The feeling is, we have to get this fixed, and we have to get it fixed now.

What compelled you to strike?

I take care of the bills in my family and knew I can’t afford it, I can’t. I have two children, I live paycheck to paycheck. When I realized that they were taking hundreds of dollars and then they tried to tell me they were giving me a pay raise of 1 percent, I knew I can’t just sit back. I can’t be complacent, something has to change.

We went to the Capitol on Feb. 2, we stood in solidarity, and they would not talk to us.

When we walked out of there, my husband looked at me and he said, “I feel so defeated.” They didn’t listen to anything that we had to say.

We were just walking silently from the Capitol and one teacher said, “Guys, we’re really going to have to strike.” At that point, I knew.

What was it like to leave your classroom?

I teach seniors and 10th graders, my kids are aware of everything that’s going on. I’m the pep club leader at my school, the prayer club leader, on the prom committee. My first period senior class, I started crying and I said, “Guys, I legitimately don’t know when I will be back.” I have an A.P. exam on May 9, and that is not going to change.

We have been having local rallies as well as going to the Capitol. Our son is a little confused because we’ve been wearing bunny ears because the governor called us dumb bunnies. He’s been telling everyone that if his mommy and daddy are dumb bunnies he’s a dumb bunny, too. He insists on wearing bunny ears in public like we’ve been doing at the protests.

[Tuesday] was my day to be at a local rally. I was at that rally for approximately three hours. I got in the vehicle with colleagues, we drove several hours to Charleston to the Capitol. There was music playing, the crowd was singing “Country Roads.” It was really amazing to see all the educators come. So many people were there. Students were there. People brought their kids.

How did you feel after the deal was announced?

Initially a lot of people around me were very happy, because we thought we won. I was excited. And then the union leaders came out and talked to us and we realized really quickly we did not win anything. The crowd turned very angry very quickly. Just because the governor suggests a 5 percent pay raise doesn’t mean it’s going through.

Now they’re saying you get 5 percent and well P.E.I.A. [the public insurance offered to teachers and state employees] is still frozen. At that point the crowd starts chanting, “A freeze is not a fix.” Everybody was very angry, very angry that we were told to go back to the classroom when we felt like had not achieved what we set out to achieve.

Our county said we would not be returning to the classroom. We did not want to go back with a promise. We wanted it signed, sealed and delivered. We wanted it to be fulfilled, not just empty words. We knew that if we went back and there were not details of a plan and a true commitment, then we could easily lose everything.

Where do you think the protest goes from here? What do you hope to achieve?

They are telling us that P.E.I.A. cannot be fixed overnight. While we understand that, simply saying there will be a task force is not enough. We need to know who is going to be on this task force. We need specific details about how this is going to be fixed.

The governor mentioned, I think, three different sources of possible revenue to fix it. Which one? How much? We feel like the plan is too ambiguous right now. We need to know.

West Virginia has a long history of protest. How does this strike fit into that?

We know that we come from these mountains and we are strong and we have pride and we love this state. We come from an area that is known for standing up for what they believe in. The union wars, they originated in the south in Mingo County.

We believe we’re following in their footsteps. We believe the movement was started years ago through the mine wars. We’re just reviving the movement that was started years ago.

Categories Resistance, Unions, West Virginia

West Virginia: Teachers Strike Across the State for Pay, Health Care

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2018 //
14

 

West Virginia teachers went out on strike across the state, closing down every public school.

“Teachers across West Virginia walked off the job Thursday amid a dispute over pay and benefits, causing more than 277,000 public school students to miss classes even as educators swarmed the state Capitol in Charleston to protest.

“All 55 counties in the state closed schools during Thursday’s work stoppage, Alyssa Keedy, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Education, said.
 “Work stoppages by public employees are not lawful in West Virginia and will have a negative impact on student instruction and classroom time,” West Virginia Superintendent of Schools Steven Paine said in a statement this week. “Families will be forced to seek out alternative safe locations for their children, and our many students who depend on schools for daily nutrition will face an additional burden. I encourage our educators to advocate for the benefits they deserve, but to seek courses of action that have the least possible disruption for our students.”

“Data from the National Education Association show that in 2016, West Virginia ranked 48th in average teacher salaries. Only Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Dakota sat below it in the rankings, which included 50 states and the District.

Categories Teacher Pay, Unions, West Virginia

Norm Hill: Dr. Martin Luther King’s Last Crusade: For Sanitation Workers in Memphis

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2018 //
21

Trump, DeVos, and other Republican enemies of a good and decent society falsely claim to be leading “the civil rights movement of our time,” that is, for vouchers and charters and school choice and against teachers’ unions. It is worthwhile to remember why Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis on the day he was assassinated. He was fighting for the city’s sanitation workers. They were ill-paid and worked in dangerous conditions. They wanted to form a union to demand their rights. He was there to help them.

Norm Hill was a close associate of Dr. King. He was with him in Memphis on the day he was murdered.

He tells the story here. 

He reminds us that “at the 1961 AFL-CIO convention, King warned that black people should be skeptical of anti-union forces, noting that the “labor-hater and race-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other.”

Organized labor is under attack today. The far right wants to obliterate it. They want all workers to be part of the “gig” economy, with no pensions, no benefits, no collective bargaining, no representation. Voucher schools do not have unions; they are free to discriminate against students and staff. Let us not forget that more than 90% of charter schools are non-union, which explains why the anti-union Walton Family Foundation, the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, and ALEC are devoted to opening more charter schools. They are not interested in better education or civil rights. They want to break the last powerful unions: the AFT and the NEA.

Dr. King understood that powerless workers need unions to fight for them.

Hill ends like this:

While Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb continued to oppose the unionization of the sanitation workers, in the end, his opposition was overridden by the city council that felt the pressure from mounting constituent complaints about tons of garbage reeking in their streets.

Success.

Yet, on the 50th anniversary of the Memphis sanitation workers strike, organized labor faces new and powerful challenges. For example, the case of Janus v. AFSCME, which the U.S. Supreme Court is taking up, raises whether unions have the fundamental right to expect public workers they represent to pay union dues. The matter is likely to be decided this year. The implications of a decision, for obvious reasons, could be profound regarding public sector unions like, for instance, the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of Teachers, affecting millions of workers.

In response to a White House and far right that appears determined to not only turn back the clock — but break it — regarding organized labor in America, arises a new necessity. We must, following the example of Randolph and Dr. King, harness an emerging coalition of progressive forces that today must include not only traditional civil rights and labor groups, but also Black Lives Matter, and the #MeToo and related women’s movements.

At the same time, demonstrations of this collective power must be felt at the ballot box nationwide, especially as midterm elections draw near.

Randolph left us an indelible blueprint for action when he said, “At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can’t take anything, you won’t get anything, and if you can’t hold anything, you won’t keep anything. And you can’t take anything without organization.”

 

Categories Civil Rights, Unions

Florida: Stop This Horrible Legislation!

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2018 //
2

 

 

This just in from the Florida Education Association

 

CONTACT: Sharon Nesvig 850.201.2833 or 850.510.9346

Florida Education Association Launches Media Campaign against HB 7055

Tallahassee—Today, the state’s largest teacher’s union launched a media blitz intended to stop HB 7055 – a massive education omnibus bill being pushed by Speaker Corcoran; the second such measure in two years. The bill attempts to logroll nearly five dozen statutes and numerous bills into one giant mess, with virtually no public input or open legislative hearings.

“This monstrosity is a clear attempt to destroy our public schools while telling professional educators they simply are not welcome in Florida,” said Joanne McCall, President of the FEA, “Today we are asking lawmakers to stand up to Speaker Corcoran and for our children, for our teachers and for our public schools. We are asking them to say ‘enough is enough’.”

The campaign features a 30-second video titled, “The Swamp” which highlights the problems with Corcoran’s anti-student, anti-school, and anti-teacher measure:

It’s an attack on Florida families.

House bill 7055 is another Tallahassee assault on our local public schools.

Political insider Richard Corcoran has a plan to divert even more of our tax dollars to unaccountable private schools while slashing the pay of even our best teachers.

His bully bill wastes more money on failed programs while our schools starve, and our children suffer.

It’s time to drain the swamp…and we know just where to begin.

You may view the ad here: https://youtu.be/0CbkGMTwxvE

McCall also added, “There are so many things wrong with HB 7055, it’s hard to know where to begin except to say it takes even more tax dollars out of our public schools and diverts them into unaccountable failed private schools while punishing good teachers. If we hope to attract talent to or grow high quality jobs in our state, how can we do that as we tear apart our public schools?”

# # #

The Florida Education Association is the state’s largest association of professional employees, with more than 140,000 members. FEA represents pre K-12 teachers, higher education faculty, educational staff professionals, students at our colleges and universities preparing to become teachers and retired education employees.

Categories Education Industry, Florida, Privatization, Teachers and Teaching, Unions

Jennifer Berkshire: How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2017 //
93

This is one of the best pieces I have read about the pernicious effects of “education reform” on the the Democratic Party. I have consistently argued that the Democrats triangulated so far during the Clinton administration that they blurred the distinct lines between the parties, then ended up supporting the Republican policies of testing, accountability, and choice, which previously they abhorred.

Jennifer Berkshire here fills in the details with her sharp eye and wit. So thoroughly have Democrats joined with Republicans in demonizing teachers and unions, that there is hardly a dime’s worth of difference between them on education issues. Things have gotten so bad that one Democrat espousing privatization recently co,pare the teachers unions to Alabama governor George Wallace, blocking children as they try to escape public schools to enter charter nirvana.

She writes:

“To begin to chronicle the origin of the Democrats’ war on their own—the public school teachers and their unions that provide the troops and the dough in each new campaign cycle to elect the Democrats—is to enter murky territory. The Clintons were early adopters; tough talk against Arkansas’s teachers, then among the poorest paid in the country, was a centerpiece of Bill’s second stint as Governor of Arkansas. As Hillary biographer Carl Bernstein recounts, the Arkansas State Teachers Association became the villain that cemented the couple’s hold on the Governor’s mansion—the center of their Dick Morris-inspired “permanent campaign.” The civil rights language in which the Democratic anti-union brigade cloaks itself today was then nowhere to be heard, however. And little wonder: Civil rights groups fiercely opposed the most controversial feature of the Clintons’ reform agenda—competency tests for teachers—on the grounds that Black teachers, many of whom had attended financially starved Black colleges, would disproportionately bear their brunt.

“Hillary made the cause her personal crusade in 1983, trotting out anecdote after anecdote about teachers she’d heard about who couldn’t add or read. The reform package passed, cementing Bill’s reputation as a new breed of Democratic governor, one who wasn’t afraid to take on entrenched interests in order to tackle tough problems. “Anytime you’re going to turn an institution upside down, there’s going to be a good guy and a bad guy,” recalls Clinton campaign manager Richard Herget. “The Clintons painted themselves as the good guys. The bad guys were the schoolteachers.”

“By the early 1980s, there was already a word for turning public institutions upside down: neoliberalism. Before it degenerated into a flabby insult, neoliberal referred to a self-identified brand of Democrat, ready to break with the tired of dogmas of the past. “The solutions of the thirties will not solve the problems of the eighties,” wrote Randall Rothenberg in his breathless 1984 paean to this new breed, whom he called simply The Neoliberals. His list of luminaries included the likes of Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, Gary Hart and Al Gore (for the record, Gore eschewed the neoliberal label in favor of something he liked to call “neopopulism”). In Rothenberg’s telling, the ascendancy of the neoliberals represented an economic repositioning of the Democratic Party that had begun during the economic crises of the 1970s. The era of big, affirmative government demanding action—desegregate those schools, clean up those polluted rivers, enforce those civil rights and labor laws—was over. It was time for fresh neo-ideas.

“Redistribution and government intervention were out; investment and public-private partnerships were the way to go. Neoliberal man (there are no women included in Rothenberg’s account) was also convinced that he had found the answer to the nation’s economic malaise: education, or as he was apt to put it, investment in human capital. “Education equals growth is a neoliberal equation,” writes Rothenberg.

“But this new cult of education wasn’t grounded in John Dewey’s vision of education-as-democracy, or in the recent civil-rights battles to extend the promise of public education to excluded African-American communities. No, these bold, results-oriented thinkers understood that in order to fuel economic growth, schools had to be retooled and aligned in concert with the needs of employers. The workers of the future would be prepared to compete nimbly in the knowledge-based post-industrial society of the present, For the stragglers still trapped in older, industrial-age models of enterprise and labor, re-training—another staple of the neoliberal vision—would set them on the path to greater prosperity….

“Today’s Democratic school reformers—a team heavy on billionaires, pols on the move, and paid advocates for whatever stripe of fix is being sold—depict their distaste for regulation, their zeal for free market solutions as au courant thinking. They rarely acknowledge their neoliberal antecedents. The self-described radical pragmatists at the Progressive Policy Institute, for instance, got their start as Bill Clinton’s policy shop, branded as the intellectual home for New Democrats. Before its current push for charter schools, PPI flogged welfare reform. In fact, David Osborne, the man so fond of likening teacher unions to arch segregationists in the south, served as Al Gore’s point person for “reinventing government.” Today the model for Osborne’s vision for reinventing public education is post-Katrina New Orleans—where 7,500 mostly Black school employees were fired en route to creating the nation’s first nearly all-charter-school-system, wiping out a pillar of the city’s Black middle class in the process.”

Read the article.

It brilliantly describes how Democrats attacked their own base, embraced Republican ideas, and merged their thinking with that of Republicans. A sure-fire recipe for disaster, since Republicans are so much better at being Republicans than Democrats are. You can’t win by destroying your base.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Democrats for Education Reform, Deregulation, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Republicans, School Choice, Teachers, Unions

Wisconsin: What Happened to Teachers After Scott Walker Crushed the Unions?

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2017 //
24

David Madland and Alex Rowell of the Center for American Progress reviewed the impact on education of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s infamous Act 10, enacted in 2011, which crushed unions.

Some teachers left the profession or the state. Salaries and benefits declined. The average age and experience of teachers declined. Teachers moved from district to district, seeking higher pay.

They wrote:

“Six years ago, the state of Wisconsin passed the highly controversial 2011 Wisconsin Act 10, which virtually eliminated collective bargaining rights for most public-sector workers, as well as slashed those workers’ benefits, among other changes. These attacks on public-sector workers are spreading throughout the country. Iowa recently passed an Act 10-inspired law with similar policies affecting public-sector workers and their unions.1 Other states and members of Congress are considering enacting such policies, and with its ruling on Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the U.S. Supreme Court may act to weaken public-sector unions and teachers’ ability to collectively bargain.

“This issue brief examines the impact of the law on Wisconsin’s K-12 public education system and state economy. While this brief focuses on Act 10’s impact on Wisconsin teachers based on the data available, the same forces driving changes in the teaching workforce can also affect the broader public sector. Proponents of Act 10 insisted that reducing collective bargaining rights for teachers would improve education by eliminating job protections such as tenure and seniority-based salary increases. As Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) argued, “We no longer have seniority or tenure. That means we can hire and fire based on merit, we can pay based on performance. That means we can put the best and the brightest in our classrooms and we can pay them to be there.” However, the facts suggest that Act 10 has not had its promised positive impact on educational quality in the state.”

Teachers have lower pay, lower pension and health insurance benefits. There is more turnover as teachers move from one district to another seeking higher pay. Act 10 had its intended effect of smashing unions, which represented 14.1% of workers in 2011, but only 9% now.

What kind of country thinks the way to get better teachers is to cut their pay and benefits?

Scott Walker is a puppet of the Koch brothers. His vision of the future is mean and stupid.

Categories Koch Brothers, Teacher Pay, Teachers and Teaching, Unions, Walker, Scott, Wisconsin

California: Educator Explains Why John Chiang Is Best Candidate for Governor

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2017 //
13


In 2018, California will elect a new governor to replace Jerry Brown. Brown has been an ally to the charter industry, which has been allowed to proliferate with minimal accountability. This great blue state has put the future of public education at risk. Major funders—California’s Silicon Valley billionaires and of course Eli Broad—are all in for charters and privatization. Netflix founder Reed Hastings gives millions to the California Charter Schools Association, and he has asserted that elected school boards should be replaced by thousands of autonomous charter schools. Absent supervision and accountability, corruption is predictable.

Tom Ultican, who left Silicon Valley to become a high school teacher of physics and math, writes here about the governors’ race.

The candidate with the most money is Gavin Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco. He has received campaign contributions from Silicon Valley, like Trump friend Peter Thiel. Strangely, he received the endorsement of the California Teachers Association, although Newsom publicly said that he was neither anti-teacher nor pro-teacher. His money comes from charter supporters, but Newsom will have the troops supplied by CTA.

CTA has to d3cide whether it will have a seat at the table or will be on the menu. The Vergara case demonstrated how eager the tech entrepreneurs are to destroy unions and teachers’ rights.

Tom Ultican explains why he, as an educator, will support State Treasurer John Chiang.

Chiang has collected the second largest pot of funding, Not from Silicon Valley billionaires, but from mostly Chinese-Americans.

Ultican writes:

“Because of the relentless attacks on public schools and educators, candidate views on education are key. Many self-styled “progressive democrats,” have adopted education positions attacking teachers’ unions and promoting privatization (Rahm Emanuel, Corey Booker, Antonio Villaraigosa). Some position statements promulgated by Chiang’s campaign:

In 1988, California voters approved Proposition 98, which requires a minimum percentage of the state budget to be spent on K-12 education. Unfortunately, while Proposition 98 was meant to create a constitutional “floor” for education spending, it has turned into a political ceiling. As a result, California is grossly under-invested in public education.”

“We also must protect the collective bargaining rights of our educators, classified employees, professors, early childhood educators and child care providers. It is critically important that the people who interact with our students and children every day have a seat at the table and a voice on the job to advocate for the best conditions possible for our children to learn.”

“We must also increase both the quantity and quality of California’s early childhood education programs and assure free access for all working families.

“We also know that small class sizes are the key to improving student learning. We need to expand the Class Size Reduction program so our students have every opportunity to learn.”

“Cities and states across the nation are jumping on board and are finding innovative solutions to provide two free years of community college. California needs to find a way to get to that place, where we make community college free while ensuring students are on the right path through participation and graduation.”

“To reclaim the promise of quality education, we must ensure that children and their families have access to wraparound services to meet their social, emotional and health needs.”

Read about the candidates. If you vote in California, be informed.

Categories California, Politics, Teachers, Unions

The Working Notes for My Speech at Oberlin Conference on the State of American Democracy

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2017 //
19

Some readers have asked for a copy of the speech that was so beautifully illustrated by the graphic posted earlier today.

I didn’t have a speech. I made notes and used them as talking points, on which I elaborated. When some in the audience (composed of progressives) insisted that charter schools were saving lives, I should have pointed out that the single biggest funder of charters is the anti-Union Walton Family Foundation, which is known for low wages and resistance to workers’ rights. About 95% of charters are non-union. The best kind of social justice that could be done by the Waltons is to pay their one million employees $15 an hour and allow them to unionize, in the stores and the charters they fund.

Here are my talking points.

“War on public sector.

“Take any public sector activity and google it with the word “privatization.”
Police, firefighters, prisons,hospitals, libraries, parks, schools—and what we once thought of as public is either privatized or under threat of privatization.

“Powerful movement—some driven by profit, some by libertarian ideology—seeks to shrink the public sector and monetize it.

“My area of specialization is education.

“There is today a full court press to privatize public education.

“How many in this room went to public schools?

“The fundamental purpose of public schools is to develop citizens, to sustain our democracy. To prepare young people to assume the duties of citizenship, to vote wisely, to understand issues, and to sit on juries.

“Our current obsession with standardized testing has corrupted the purpose of schooling. Clinton, Bush, Obama. We are now locked into a marketization approach to education: Testing, Accountability, competition, Choice. This is market-driven education, with winners and losers.

“The Bush program: NCLB. The same children were left behind.
THE Obama program: Race to the Top. Same as NCLB. Where is the top? Education is not a race.

“Test scores are fundamentally a reflection of family income and education. They are now cynically used by rightwing politicians to declare schools to be failures and set them up for privatization.

“Public education is one of the foundation elements of our democracy.
The movement to privatize public schools is a threat to democracy.

“Education Policy today is decided not by deliberation and debate but by big money.

“The Queen of Dark Money in education is now Secretary of Education.

“Betsy DeVos sees education as a Consumer good, not a civic responsibility
She has Compared choosing a school to choosing an Uber or choosing which food truck to buy lunch from. These are trivial choices, consumer choices. They are not public goods.
She really doesn’t understand the role of the public school in a community, as part of our democracy

“Dark Money, major philanthropies, and Wall Street billionaires have collaborated in attacking democratic control of schools. They have encouraged State takeovers, Charters, Vouchers. Private management. Mayoral control.

“Goals:

“School Choice, which promotes segregation by race and social class
Get rid of unions
Attacks on teaching profession.

“Venture philanthropies back Privatization: Gates, Broad, Walton, Arnold Foundation, Fisher Foundation, the Helmsley Foundation, the Wasserman Foundation, the Bloomberg Foundation, Dell Foundation, Jonathan Sackler, many more

“Dark Money funneled to state and local elections— by such groups as: Education Reform Now, Stand for Children, Families for Excellent Schools, Democrats for Education Reform, the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, the Walton family. All have the same goal: Privatization.

“Half the states now have vouchers for private schools, enacted by the legislature, despite the fact that vouchers have always been defeated in state referenda.

“Betsy DeVos paid for a voucher referendum in Michigan in 2000. It was defeated overwhelmingly. So Michigan went for unbridled Choice with charter schools, no district lines. 80% of the charters in Michigan operate for profit, more than any other state. Michigan’s standing on national tests dropped from the middle of the pack, to the bottom, between 2003 and 2013. Detroit is overrun with charters yet it continues to be the lowest scoring district in the nation.

“Milwaukee has public schools, charters, and vouchers, and all three sectors are low performing.

“Demand for vouchers is actually very low: Indiana, only 3% use them, less in Louisiana. Only 6% in charters. Yet every dollar for vouchers and charters is taken away from the schools that educate the great majority of children.

“Katherine Stewart in the current American Prospect: “Proselytizers and Profiteers.” Religious extremists in the voucher movement made “useful idiots of the charter movement.” Community public schools replaced by Corporate charter chains. Some of the biggest charter chains are owned and run by evangelicals and fundamentalists.

“The real Dark Money wants vouchers, religious schools, homeschooling, charters, anything but public schools.

“DeVos, American Federation for Children
Koch brothers, Americans for Prosperity (Libre Initiative) (AZ referendum)
ALEC— model legislation for charters, vouchers, ending certification, breaking unions.

“Public schools struggle where there is high poverty.

“Income inequality is the scourge of our society.

“Privatizing public schools won’t solve poverty.

“Hopeful signs:

*Virginia election: pro-public schools, many of the winning candidates are teachers

*Douglas County, CO, rebuff to vouchers

*upcoming referendum in AZ on vouchers, which Koch brothers want to knock off the ballot

*In 20 State referenda, vouchers have lost every single time.

*support for charters dropped from 51% to 39% in the past year, among both Democrats and Republicans, largely in response to scandals, prosecutions, and also NAACP criticism of charters.

“The origin of school choice was in segregated states fighting the Brown decision.

“Betsy DeVos is such a polarizing figure that she reminds us of the importance of public schools.”

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing, Unions, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

The Billionaire Who Destroyed His Newsroom When the Employees Voted to Join a Union

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2017 //
43

This is a sad but instructive story of a billionaire, Joe Ricketts, who closed down his two popular news websites out of spite. He was angry because his workers voted to unionize.

Maybe it meant that his staff would be paid more. But the owner could afford it. He was angry because he didn’t want a union. Period.

Hamilton Nolan explains what happened:

“Joe Ricketts, the founder of TD Ameritrade whose family owns the Chicago Cubs, is worth more than $2 billion. He is the owner of DNAinfo, a local news site that covered New York City and Chicago with unparalleled skill, as well as Gothamist, a network of city-oriented websites that DNAinfo bought this year. He is also a major right-wing political donor of rather flexible morality. During the last presidential primaries, Mr. Ricketts spent millions of dollars funding ads that portrayed Donald Trump as an untrustworthy, dangerous misogynist. Once Mr. Trump secured the nomination, Mr. Ricketts spent a million dollars to support him.

“One might think that such flexibility would allow Mr. Ricketts to bend but not break when faced with every plutocrat’s worst nightmare: a few dozen modestly paid employees who collectively bargain for better working conditions.

“Alas, no.

“Six months ago, reporters and editors at DNAinfo-Gothamist announced their intent to join the Writers Guild of America, East. This is the union that my colleagues and I at Gawker Media joined in 2015, and the union that has organized major online media companies like HuffPost, Vice Media, Slate and Thrillist in the past two years. In that short amount of time, unionized “new media” workers have won substantial raises, editorial protections and other improvements that writers at more mature companies take for granted. In defiance of the conventional wisdom that unions are outdated, this young, high-tech industry has been one of the most visible recent successes for organized labor in America.

“The DNAinfo-Gothamist announcement sparked a zealous anti-union campaign: Management threatened employees by saying that Joe Ricketts might shut the whole place down if it unionized. Nevertheless, employees last week voted 25-2 in favor of unionization. And on Thursday, Mr. Ricketts abruptly shut the whole place down…”

Ricketts did not try to sell his news sites.

“Instead of bargaining with 27 unionized employees in New York City, he chose to lay off 115 people across America. And, as a final thumb in the eye, he initially pulled the entire site’s archives down (they are now back up), so his newly unemployed workers lost access to their published work. Then, presumably, he went to bed in his $29 million apartment…

“Labor unions have done more for the average American than all the rich industrialists put together. Unions are a legal right and the single most powerful tool that regular working people have to improve their lot. DNAinfo and Gothamist employees, who did the fundamentally important work of telling us all what is happening in our cities, were punished for exercising their rights.

“The business of journalism has always been fickle and grim. It is an industry full of idealist workers scrambling to cobble together a living at publications owned by a shifting group of cutthroat capitalists and incompetent rich dilettantes. The careers of most journalists feature constant uncertainty and heartbreak, interspersed with periods of life-affirming work that you hope make it all worthwhile. That uncertainty is why The Los Angeles Times, whose owners have been famously anti-union for more than 100 years, is now in the midst of its own union organizing campaign.

“The union movement in media is incredibly important beyond what it means to hundreds of employees at more than a dozen sites. Digital media workers have unionized because they understand how they are being exploited at work, and how to fix it. The visibility of their union campaigns can serve as an example to workers in other job sectors, where organized labor has grown nearly invisible, to the detriment of all.

“Just as the newspaper industry unionized in the 1930s to balance out the outlandish power of the publishers, so too will the online news industry unionize whether the bosses like it or not. Mr. Ricketts and other publishers will continue to fight back, framing their opposition to unions as an informed business decision. But it is an ideological one.“

Categories Billionaires, Media, Unions
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