I've been remiss in not mentioning that Wake-Up Wal-Mart along with the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have asked everybody
to take a pledge to not shop at Wal-Mart for back to school items this year.
You know it's not because I don't agree with the idea. I guess I haven't mentioned it because I assume that the vast majority of people reading this aren't going to shop at Wal-Mart anyway.
I mention it now because it has prompted a response. Go to Wal-Mart for Teachers and you can see what Wal-Mart thinks will sway teachers to their side.
In short, Wal-Mart thinks they can buy them off. Their education facts begin:
Wal-Mart gave more than $45 million to education initiatives last year, including scholarships, literacy programs and grants to schools.
and the rest of it seems to detail how the money is spent. Now it would be easy to argue that this is a pittance for a company that made $10 Billion in profits last year. Heck, it's probably listed in their advertising budget. I'm also tempted to point out that this won't work against a basic act of solidarity: Wal-Mart workers are low-paid; so are teachers. So I guess Wal-Mart doesn't know the meaning of solidarity.
But I want to make an even more basic argument. Teachers unions oppose Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart wants to destroy public education in this country through vouchers. As USA Today wrote last year:
Wal-Mart's founders transformed U.S. business. Now they are taking on a very different subject: the nation's public schools. The Waltons -- the USA's richest family -- have quietly become top philanthropists in education reform, including controversial charter-school and school-voucher causes.
The late John Walton put it this way:
The people on the receiving end have absolutely no influence," he noted. "The money in education comes from the top, filters its way down, and various interest groups and factions pull off their share into what they think is important. The customers at the bottom just take what they're given. The best way to empower schoolchildren and parents is to let them direct the money."
As a teacher myself, this argument makes me want to scream. Education is not a commodity and students are not customers. Teachers, not businessmen, are the best judges of whether students are learning, not the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, NJ. Convince parents that teachers are failures and this justifies paying them Wal-Mart style wages.
To see more problems with this, just look at the details of the voucher plans. As one conservative web site explains:
[Walton's] scholarships pay, on average, 50 percent of the child's tuition. For many parents, that is enough.
For the poorest students, it isn't. Give money so rich and middle-class students can flee to private schools and there will be no public education system left for the poorest students. Kill public education and public school teachers are in the same position as the industrial workers whose job Wal-Mart has shipped overseas.
For some reason, the idea of teachers standing up against Wal-Mart drives some conservatives around the bend. See this, for example. Well I have news for you Wal-Martians out there: teachers aren't going down without a fight.
JR