Over at The Political Carnival, GottaLaff wrote a nice rundown of Susan Moore Johnson's testimony in the Vergara trial. If you haven't been following the trial, basically a bunch of ed deformers are suing the state of California over teachers rights.
It comes down to very big money versus teachers and teachers unions. Big billionaire's argument is that fair working conditions for teachers are bad for students. Really. That's what they're arguing.
This needs to be emphasized more. The founder of StudentsMatter, the organization that brought the lawsuit, is a tech entrepreneur. He has no background in education.
The billionaires funding this have actively opposed more funding for California's public schools. And in fact, many of them actively supported the anti-union ballot initiative Prop 32.
These are the same people that call teachers and their unions "special interest groups."
I'm sorry, but teachers spend every day in the classroom. They know what they need. And the head of Harvard's education program stands with teachers, and more importantly refuted refuted StudentsMatter's argument.
Billionaires, who don't send their children to public schools, call teachers special interest groups. Teachers aren't a special interest group, the billionaires are.
I've never met a teacher who wasn't there for the kids. I stand with the teachers.
1 comment:
Sorry I haven't been around for a while been busy fighting the information war myself. But a few words about education from my own experience. I see our state pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into schools here and always wondered where the money went. It surely wasn't going to the classrooms as teachers had to set about to provide their own supplies. Then it dawned on me (I worked for a short time in a school district) all this money was going to the top. There were more administrators than I'd ever seen before. There was more vice principals and staff at the top than when I went to school. Then I look at the salaries of those at the top which ranged in the hundreds of thousands. So is it any wonder why we have a dysfunctional system.
The big push now is to make what was once public now for profit and private. And I'd be very nervous working in a public library because they just might seek to make that their next target.
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