Chicago Teachers Union Versus Astroturf Billionaires

Billionaires like the Koch Brothers, Betsy DeVos, and Bill Gates fund astroturf tools like Jonah Edelman, Rebecca Nieves Huffman, and Kyle Olson. Working with anti-working class politicians like Rahm Emanuel, these groups and individuals strive to privatize public education, union bust, and profit off the sufferings of the poor. Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is on the front lines of the battle to save public education, but they are fighting right-wing forces with limitless resources. Their bold actions in the face of overwhelming odds may well be the turning point in the battle to prevent the neoliberal project from eliminating public education nationwide. They need our support, please contribute to the CTU Solidarity Fund.

Here's CTU's introduction to the film:

The Chicago Teachers Union is currently on the front lines of a fight to defend public education. On one side the 30,000 members of the CTU have called for a contract that includes fair compensation, meaningful job security for qualified teachers, smaller class sizes and a better school day with Art, Music, World Language and appropriate staffing levels to help our neediest students.

On the other side, the Chicago Board of Education—which is managed by out of town reformers and Broad Foundation hires with little or no Chicago public school experience—has pushed to add two weeks to the school year and 85 minutes to the school day, eliminate pay increases for seniority, evaluate teachers based on student test scores, and slash many other rights.

Teachers, parents and community supporters in Chicago have fought valiantly—marching, filling auditoriums at hearings and parent meetings, even occupying a school and taking over a school board meeting. Most recently, 98 percent of our members voted to authorize a strike. But now we find ourselves facing new opponents—national education privatizers, backed by some of the nation's wealthiest people. They are running radio ads, increasing press attacks, and mounting a PR campaign to discredit the CTU and the benefits of public education.

North Carolina Republicans Don't Need No Stinkin' Accrediting Agency

The Koch heads in the North Carolina Legislature are pushing on with their plan to strip AdvanceED of its accrediting powers in the state of North Carolina.  Why?  Because AdvancED did not look kindly on the anti-democratic and socially unjust and educationally disruptive and pedagogically unsound and ideologically based re-segregation of Wake County Schools.  So Teabagger sponsors, Blackwell and Holloway, along with co-sponsors,  Avila;  Cook;  Dollar; and Stam, have offered this legislative masterpiece, Edition 1 [HTML], of John Birch Society problem-solving, and so we must wait to see if the North Carolina will be dragged further back into the Jim Crow era by the social antiquarians who now control government in NC.

Commentary from the Charlotte Observer:

Remember comedian Stephen Colbert's lampooning in January of the Wake County school board and its dismantling of the system's popular socioeconomic diversity school assignment plan?

That ridicule wasn't enough for some N.C. lawmakers. They're offering "help" to the Wake school board as it wards off accreditation problems resulting from the school assignment issue - and aid to school officials in Burke County too.

That help comes in the form of House Bill 342. The bill would give the State Board of Education new powers as an accreditation agency, with local school districts required to pay the board for the costs of the accreditation process. It also would force the UNC Board of Governors to adopt policies prohibiting its colleges and universities from using accreditation of secondary schools (other than from the state board of education) as a factor in admissions, loans, scholarships and other educational activity. State community colleges would face the same restrictions.

Burke County and Wake County face loss of accreditation from AdvanceED, a national school accreditation agency widely used by schools around the country. Both have dysfunctional school boards, and complaints about impacts on academics led to probes. Last week, the agency issued a scathing report on the Wake school board, saying it had created a climate of uncertainty and mistrust in the community by giving inadequate notice of major actions and making policy decisions, such as eliminating the use of socioeconomic diversity in student assignment, without compelling data. The agency gave Wake a year to fix problems or risk losing accreditation. Burke has until June.

But lawmakers, mostly from Burke and Wake, decided on a different way to tackle the matter. With House Bill 342, they are trying to make the national accreditation irrelevant. They assert that the state board would provide more accountability on standards than AdvanceED has anyway.

That's mind-boggling. A group funded by state lawmakers, wholly dependent on their support, is more credible on accountability than one with no ties to legislators and an established national reputation? We don't think so. This would be wink-and-a-nod accreditation. It's a worthless and wasteful idea.

Absurdly, the move also would burden local school districts with more costs. That's because many students seek admission to non-N.C. colleges and universities. National accreditation will still be desirable. This just sets up another accrediting agency for local school districts to pay for.

Lawmakers would be foolish to approve such a plan just to save face for a couple of school boards who don't want to or can't get their acts together. But if legislators do approve this folly, lawmakers and the rest of us should expect to become the butt of more jokes. We'll deserve it.

Read more: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/03/23/2163943/lawmakers-youve-got-to-be-joking.html#ixzz1HWVJZS3K