Rahm: "Hmm, Chicago schools/school teacher's are not performing according to my spread sheet? Close the factories!! errrr, I mean the under performing schools, and fire the workers! errrr I mean fire the teachers!!"
Sound familiar?
It's painfully obvious something(s) are very wrong with this picture: One percenter representative - Koch Bros,-financed Paul Ryan enthusiastically supports Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel's approch to "fixing" Chicago's schools. anyone else here got a problem with this?
For me, it's very fitting this is blowing up on the one year anniversary of the Occupy Wall St. movement; the struggle for fairness and justice in the so called wealthiest nation in the world has come full circle.
We know the one percenters have been busy for decades in their greedy, pathetic attempt to destroy FDR's New Deal-- which many called A Fair Deal. Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney are clearly members of this mob... and apparently so is Rahm Emanuel.
I and a few others here saw the handwriting on the wall some time ago: The wall st casino banksters need yet another pile of public money to attach their grubby mitts to: the considerable public funding for our school system. they've got to get their hands on this to fund their NEXT financial scam/bubble... because that is the only way these crooks know how to make money.
Here's some food for thought:
In June 1995, the economist Milton Friedman wrote an article for the Washington Post promoting the use of public education funds for private schools as a way to transfer the nation’s public school systems to the private sector. “Vouchers,” he wrote, “are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a market system.” The article was republished by “free market” think tanks, including the Cato Institute and the Hoover Institution, with the title “Public Schools: Make Them Private.”
While Friedman has promoted vouchers for decades, most famously in his masterwork Free to Choose, the story of how public funds are actually being transferred to private, often religious, schools is a study in the ability of a few wealthy families, along with a network of right-wing think tanks, to create one of the most successful “astroturf” campaigns money could buy. Rather than openly championing dismantling the public school system, they promote bringing market incentives and competition into education as a way to fix failing schools, particularly in low-income Black and Latino communities.
Even before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United ruling deregulated campaign finance and unleashed millions in political donations, concentrated wealth has played a role in politics. Now in the limelight for its attacks on unions and the exposure of 800 model bills and documents, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has produced model bills favorable to its corporate and right-wing funders behind closed doors for decades (as In These Times uncovered in 2011)– including school vouchers and tax credit bills.
This concentrated wealth is reaching into America's classrooms state by state, promoting the transfer of public funds to private education through vouchers that allow parents to pay for tuition at private schools with public money. Promoting “school choice” through privately run charter schools doesn’t go far enough for these billionaires. Today, “private school choice” programs, as vouchers are called in the annual report of the Alliance for School Choice, are in place in 13 states and the District of Columbia. In 2011, a year when states across the nation slashed their education budgets, 41 states introduced 145 pieces of private school choice legislation.
Our democratic reps in congress just had a nice
five week vacation.. now many of them are out there wasting
more time and money campaigning to keep
their jobs. All while our public school teachers are being thrown under the bus as "greedy union members who just want more money".
DISconnect: Raising the bar high for our public school teachers-- while giving them nothing to assist them in meeting the new standards. and more or less zero evaluation of the effectiveness of our federal government, etc.
Sorry, Rahm, we're not making widgets in a factory here. we are talking about human lives, families-- many of whom are already under considerable stress due to the crappy economy-- an economy that was BTW, wrecked by your buddies in the one percent.
When given a clear choice, voters across the United States have consistently opposed school vouchers. Between 1966 and 2000, state ballot initiatives to allow public funding for private schools were rejected 24 out of 25 times. This dismal record led the pro-voucher strategists to rebrand the movement as “school choice” and as beneficial to public schools. In 2002, Dick DeVos suggested to a Heritage Foundation audience that the school choice movement should conceal its conservative roots. He advised that “properly communicated, properly constructed, [school choice] can cut across a lot of historic boundaries, be they partisan, ethnic, or otherwise.”
True progressives here and in the OWS movement would do well to latch on to the effort to destroy our public education system-- in order to transfer another pile of public money into the
private sector system-- where it will be used to create what? More huge profits for the one percent.
Enough of this BOGUS ness, folks. We're losing the war.
Congress? Total enablers of the one percent.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/...