Far-right groups sent $11 million to try to crush labor unions in California.
No surprise there. Need to know more about real donors.
Too many billionaires in this country trying to silence voices of working people, especially teachers.
Archives for category: Unions
This article explains succinctly why certain members of the billionaire boys club have decided that Washington State absolutely positively must have charter schools. Their recipe for school reform: the free market. And why not? The free market works for them. Will they put their own children (or in the case of the Bezos family, grandchildren) in charter schools? Don’t be silly.
A group called Education Voters of Idaho refused to disclose its donors until required to do so by a court order.
The biggest donor is a businessman who is an investor in K12, the online charter corporation ($250,000); the second biggest donor is Mayor Michael Bloomberg ($200,000).
EVI promotes the anti-union, anti-teacher, privatizing policies of state superintendent Tom Luna. Supporters of public education are seeking to repeal the Luna laws, which are deceptively called “Students Come First.” The phrase echoes Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst and Joel Klein’s Children’s First.
Luna has received heavy funding from technology corporations, and his laws mandate the purchase of a laptop computer for every student, and every student must take two online courses for graduation. They eliminate tenure and seniority. They require that student test scores count for 50% of every educator’s evaluation, including district superintendents, principals and teachers. All educators will have a one or two year contract. They initiate bonus pay based on test scores for all educators. Teachers will not get a written explanation if the principal decides to fire them.
A sample of one of the laws:
School districts no longer have to prove a financial emergency before reducing teacher numbers. School boards can reduce teacher numbers at their discretion but cannot consider seniority when deciding who to eliminate.
Thomas J. Adams, on the faculty of Tulane University, has a startling and funny column at Huffington Post about what the East Coast can learn from the Gulf Coast.
Now, New York, New Jersey, and other states have had their own version of Hurricane Katrina. Ours is Sandy.
Adams says we can do what New Orleans did:
The absolute first thing you have to do is fire all your public school teachers. Just fire them. We all know education is broken in this country and that teachers are to blame. So why not take this opportunity to do what you helped us do back in 2005? It might create a bit of confusion when the power gets turned back on and the debris gets removed, but that’s a small price to pay for our children’s future. Besides, if there’s a shortage of teachers we can help with that the same way you helped us. We certainly have a surfeit of energetic recent college graduates who we’ll happily send up there to fix your ailing schools. They may have no experience and most peer-reviewed education research concludes they’re not as effective as your former teachers, but they bring energy to the classroom! Sure, they may only stay for a year or two, but their M.B.A. and law school applications will be so much stronger because of it and they’ll make quality education a national issue.
Then he says, what follows easily is complete privatization and new opportunities:
After you get rid of your teachers it will be that much easier to turn control of your schools over to a variety of non- and for-profit groups. Don’t worry, you need not be concerned about whether these schools are effective or not, whether they cherry pick students, cook their test scores, get rid of education professionals in favor of computers, what kinds of salaries their board members are taking in, etc. As you’ve told us many times on countless of your leading editorial pages, this is the model for education reform in the country. In fact if you’re as lucky as us, this will lead you down an easy road to a voucher system in the next few years. Educational equality will come shortly thereafter, I promise.
While the privatization fever is raging, next to go is public housing, then free clinics.
Read it and remember that Arne Duncan said that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing ever to happen to education in New Orleans. I’m waiting to hear if he says the same about Hurricane Sandy.
The United Teachers of Los Angeles has steadfastly refused to allow its members to be evaluated by the test scores of their students. Unlike the district leadership, UTLA understands that scholars have found that value-added assessment is inaccurate, invalid and unstable. By this method, excellent teachers may be labeled “ineffective,” and poor teachers who teach to the test may be labeled “effective.”
Despite intense pressure by the Los Angeles Unified School District leadership and the federal government, UTLA has insisted that its members should be evaluated by evidence-based methods, not by “value-added assessment” that has not been proven to work anywhere.
UTLA refused to sign off on the district’s request for $40 million in Race to the Top funding, which would have subjected its members to value-added assessment.
UTLA recognizes that accepting $40 million for RTTT would eventually cost the district hundreds of millions of dollars to comply with the federal government’s mandates. This has been the experience of other districts, where teachers have been laid off and class sizes have increased solely because of compliance with RTTT requirements.
Because it has remained true to principle, because it insists on evidence-based evaluation, because it insists on honest accounting for the public’s dollars, UTLA is a hero of public education and joins the honor roll.
Teachers these days are confused by the high volume of attacks on the profession. Members of teachers’ unions are beset by the frequent, virulent attacks on the very idea of collective bargaining.
In conservative states, governors and legislatures are doing whatever they can to weaken or eliminate collective bargaining. Two Hollywood movies in the past two years have cast the unions as the evil force that protects incompetent, lazy teachers and causes poor children to get low test scores. Without unions, it seems, our test scores would be the highest in the world and probably there would be no poverty either. All the industries that fled to China because of labor unions would have stayed here and there would be full employment for anyone willing to work for $2 an hour and live in a dormitory near the factory.
Now comes a publication from the conservative think tank Thomas B. Fordham Institute of DC and Dayton showing just how powerful those evil unions are.
Its report purports to prove that there is no association between high levels of union membership and academic achievement. Massachusetts may be number 1 in academic achievement (93% unionized), followed at the top of NAEP by New Jersey (97%) and Connecticut (99%), but TBF has devised a different way to parse those figures and conclude that unions are actually an obstacle to high achievement.
Mike Petrilli of TBF claims that I am one of those people who say that unions “can’t possibly be to blame for lackluster student achievement…if anything, unionization helps raise achievement, they say.”
This is a falsehood, misinformation, or willful ignorance. Petrilli is annoyed because I pointed out on this blog that Romney boasts about the academic gains in Massachusetts at the same time he is determined to flatten teachers’ unions, never acknowledging that those remarkable gains were accomplished by unionized teachers.
Petrilli should read my book.
I never wrote that unions cause higher achievement. DC is unionized and has low achievement, but it is not because it has a union. Student performance on NAEP is very low for Mississippi and Louisiana is very low, but it is not because they have weak unions.
What I wrote in “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” is this: “No one, to my knowledge, has demonstrated a clear, indisputable correlation between teacher unionism and academic achievement, either negative or positive. The Southern states, where teachers’ unions have historically been either weak or nonexistent, have always had the poorest student performance on national examinations. Massachusetts, the state with the highest academic performance, has long had strong teachers’ unions. The difference in performance is probably due to economics, not to unionization. Where there are affluent communities, student performance tends to be higher, whether or not their teachers belong to unions.”
What the unions do is to give teachers a voice in decisions about the conditions of teaching and learning. They give them representation if they are treated unjustly. They guarantee due process. Further, they provide an advocate for public education when decisions are made about the budget. Had there been a strong union in Texas, the Legislature would not have cut $5.4 billion from the budget for public education. Had there been a strong union in Louisiana, the Legislature would not have authorized the creation of vouchers and charters that take money out of the minimum foundation budget for public schools.
And unions do something else that matters to our society: They create a middle class. It may not be a coincidence that income inequality has grown as union membership has declined. Norman Hill and Velma Hill, veteran civil rights and labor activists, pointed out in a recent post on the Shanker blog that “the wages of black union members are 31 percent higher than the wages of African Americans who are not union members. The union wage advantage for women workers is 34 percent; for Latino workers, it is a whopping 51 percent.”
Rightwing ideologues like ALEC and like-minded think tanks across the nation want a union-free America, free to drive down wages and increase the working hours of teachers and other workers. If they had their way, teachers would have alternate certification or none at all; would be at-will employees; would serve at the pleasure of the corporation that hired them; would leave teaching as easily as they entered it; and would have nothing to say about working conditions or pay or hours.
This would predictably destroy the teaching profession. Why anyone thinks it would improve education is beyond my understanding.
In a recent interview, Ann Romney was asked which issue she cared most about. This was her answer.
“AR: I’ve been a First Lady of the State. I have seen what happens to people’s lives if they don’t get a proper education. And we know the answers to that. The charter schools have provided the answers. The teachers’ unions are preventing those things from happening, from bringing real change to our educational system. We need to throw out the system.”
We may safely assume that Mrs. Romney is expressing the views of her husband, the candidate.
This is the line of thought:
1. Charter schools–privately managed, deregulated schools–are the answer to the problems of American education.
2. Teachers’ unions are an obstacle to the privatization that the Romneys favor.
3. “We need to throw out” the American system of public education, the system that has evolved since the 1820s and is embedded in every state constitution.
Make no mistake: this is not a conservative policy, it is radical and extremist.
Will any major journalist notice the far-right extremism of the Romney campaign? If Michelle Obama had said anything so outrageous, it would be reported on front pages across America.
Has any member of the large Romney family ever attended an American public school?
Jersey Jazzman points out in an illuminating post that Jonah Edelman was hired by the plutocrats to make sure teachers would never be able to strike again.
So Jonah Edelman and his deceptively-named group Stand for Children drafted legislation, bought up most of the high-priced lobbyists, and pushed through a bill to make the hedge fund managers happy. Now, said Jonah, the teachers will never be able to get enough member votes to strike again. This is what it means today to bear the mantle of “civil rights leader.” A civil rights leader in these days wants to crush unions and promote privatization.
But it didn’t work! Only months after the passage of Edelman’s historic anti-union legislation, the Chicago Teachers Union authorized a strike. Jonah had predicted it would never get the support of 75% of its members. It got the support of 90% (and 98% of all who cast a ballot).
And now strikes have broken out in other districts in Illinois. Some may have been inspired by the CTU strike.
Those Chicago equity investors picked a losing cause. They seem to have energized the teachers unions.
Many people with liberal causes have used change.org to launch petition drives.
In its founding, change.org declared its dedication to progressive values.
Many people were upset when change.org allowed Michelle Rhee to surreptitiously gather signatures on its site. You might sign a petition saying you want great teachers or you think teachers should be paid more, and without your knowledge or consent, you were a member of StudentsFirst. You would never get a notice informing that you had unknowingly “joined.” But you would be counted as a member.
Many were also upset that change.org hosted Stand for Children, which is anti-union, anti-teacher, anti-public education, and pro-corporate.
We thought those lapses were aberrations. But now we find that change.org is opening its doors to anti-union, anti-abortion, pro-corporate advertising. Its progressive veneer has simply disappeared. On October 24, the new policy will take effect. The news was leaked to Jeff Bryant, who wrote about it here.
Of course, that is their right. But beware. Don’t sign any petitions on that site. You never will find out what cause or group has just added your name to its membership rolls.
Just be aware that when they ask you if you support puppies and kittens, you might be signing a petition to give away public lands or to outsource American jobs or to bust a union or to support ALEC.
New Jersey is unquestionably one of the two or three highest performing states in the nation on NAEP. Given its extremes of wealth and pockets of dense poverty, it may well be the highest performing state.
As is obvious by now, Governor Chris Christie and his helper Chris Cerf hope to privatize as much of he state school system as they can while they can.
Jersey Jazzman is predictably wary of the Newark contract. Here is his take on the deal, which is funded in large part by private and non-recurring money.
Diane Ravitch's blog 