This Labor Day there was something missing. Respect for teachers and their unions.

[madfloridian]

This Labor Day there was something missing. Respect for teachers and their unions.

From the Jacobin Magazine:

This Labor Day, Thank a Teacher

The assault on teachers unions and on teachers’ competence and caring (gender is a key element of the attack) should be seen in light of education being the final sector of the economy that is public and unionized. Education is being restructured in a global project to “marketize” schooling, using the rhetoric of “modernization” and “putting students first.” Throughout the world we see the same footprint of reform, which includes privatization and loss of democratic oversight; use of standardized testing to control what is taught and turn teachers into contract labor; increasing costs to “users” while simultaneously limiting access.

Teachers unions block the way to this project being realized. This explains the well-funded, well-orchestrated campaigns to weaken or destroy the unions, de-legitimizing them and eliminating the right to bargain collectively or gutting what unions can negotiate. Pushback in the US has been slow in coming, but it’s finally happening.

From the time Arne Duncan was appointed as Secretary of Education unions for teachers have been treated with disrespect.

From 2009:

Arne Duncan already confronting teachers' unions and threatening states

Legislatures in New York, California and some other states have enacted laws that limit, to one degree or another, use of student achievement data in teacher performance evaluations. Both national teachers’ unions oppose the use of student testing data to evaluate individual teachers, arguing in part that students are often taught by several teachers and that teacher evaluations should be based on several measures of performance, not just test scores.

“This is poking teachers’ unions straight in the eye,” Mike Petrilli, a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a research group that studies education policy, said of the proposed fund eligibility requirement dealing with student data.

In 2010 Arne warned states not to "water down" education plans to please unions.

Mr. Duncan said in an interview that he welcomed the friction between union and state officials but warned against states weakening their overhaul plans simply to win buy-ins from unions. "Watered-down proposals with lots of consensus won't win," he said. "And proposals that drive real reform will win."

He encouraged the friction.

In 2009 Jeb Bush highly praised the policies of the Obama administration.

Even the ACLU has taken legal stands against teachers unions. Through lawsuits teachers are losing many hard-earned due process rights.

ACLU wins their appeal against teachers union. L. A. teachers lose seniority rights in layoffs.

LOS ANGELES—A state appeals court has refused to delay a settlement that would protect 45 of the lowest performing schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District from layoffs.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California says the Second District Court of Appeal denied the teachers union's request Monday.

ACLU attorney Mark Rosenbaum says the decision is a victory for students at the troubled schools, which traditionally have high turnover of teachers. A last-hired, first-fired layoff policy has caused many untenured teachers at those schools to be the first to receive pink slips.

Even the Christian Science Monitor noticed the attacks on teachers' union before the elections in 2010.

Christian Science Monitor: Why is Obama taking on teachers' unions right before midterms?

Why is President Obama pushing so hard against teachers right now, weeks before the election?

..."He also pushed for a longer school year and admitted that his daughters would not get as good an education in the Washington, D.C., public schools as they get at Sidwell Friends, the private school they attend.

“I’ll be blunt with you. The answer is ‘no’ right now,” he said, when asked by a Florida woman whether Sasha and Malia could get the same quality education at a Washington school. He added that “there are some terrific individual schools in the D.C. system” but said that it is “struggling.”

And while Obama emphasized the importance of teachers – and announced plans to recruit 10,000 science, technology, engineering, and math (or STEM) teachers over the next few years – he clearly seemed prepared to ruffle some union feathers.

By June of this year Arne Duncan was openly standing with the lawsuits that are starting in states that mean to strip teachers of hard-earned rights of due process.

From Bloomberg News:

The Obama Administration Picks a Fight With Teachers Unions

Arne Duncan, President Barack Obama’s education secretary, was scorned last week by teachers union leaders and their supporters for applauding a California judge’s tentative ruling that the state’s teacher tenure laws are unconstitutional. “This decision presents an opportunity for a progressive state with a tradition of innovation to build a new framework for the teaching profession that protects students’ rights to equal educational opportunities while providing teachers the support, respect, and rewarding careers they deserve,” Duncan said.

Randi Weingarden, president of the American Federation of Teachers, chastised Duncan in an open letter for failing to defend California’s tenure rules. “Teachers across the country are wondering why the secretary of education thinks that stripping them of their due process is the way to help all children succeed,” Weingarten lamented in the letter, which was clearly meant to gird her members for battle.

It would be nice to think that a future Labor Day would find teachers again being respected, at least by the Democratic party.

[madfloridian]

1. The fight is becoming international.

From the Jacobin link above:

What’s more, important changes are occurring in Europe’s teachers unions, especially the UK. The upcoming national strike of the UK’s largest teachers unions, which may be joined by other militant public employee unions in that nation, should be watched. The National Union of Teachers (NUT), one of the unions that will strike, is consciously shifting the way it casts its demands, embedding in its vision for public education and developing on-the-ground alliances with parents and students.

We’re also seeing more international cooperation among teachers unions, encouraged by a former NUT president who maintains a website that chronicles global struggles of teachers and will shortly launch a research collaborative for scholars and activists to share information and analysis. Cooperation depends in good part on developing personal connections among leaders and activists, so the presence of NUT’s President at the Chicago gathering of union reformers from the USA in mid-August is a hopeful sign. In the Americas, the Trinational Committee to Defend Public Education, uniting teachers unions in the Americas augments work of Latin American teachers unions that collaborate with the British Columbia Teachers Federation. These networks are not new (the BCTF also aided Chicago Teachers Union reformers in their movement’s infancy) but they are becoming more formalized. Still, on-going struggles in Africa and Asia for teachers’ most basic rights, like being paid, deserve far more support than they receive from unions in the Global North. A major problem yet to be addressed is the AFT’s and NEA’s conservatizing stranglehold on the Education International, the international confederation of teachers unions.

Teachers are realizing they must fight back.

[Starry Messenger]

2. k&r

[madfloridian]

3. ....

Thanks for the only kick. I am giving a kick myself.

[madfloridian]

4. FL teachers union to take action against private vouchers which "decimate" public schools.

Adding this article, and in effect kicking. Getting attention to unions for teachers here is like beating a drum no one wants to hear. Why? Because the attacks on them go against all Democratic principles.

http://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/education/2014/08/28/fla-teachers-union-others-sue-voucher-program/14780585/

Saying it has reached a “tipping point,” Florida’s teacher union along with other groups filed a lawsuit Thursday aimed at ending one of the nation’s largest private school voucher programs.

The lawsuit filed in Leon County contends that a program that serves 60,000 students primarily from low-income families violates the state’s constitution by creating a parallel education system and by directing tax money to religious institutions. Most of the schools that utilize the vouchers in the nearly $300 million program are religious.

Those involved in the lawsuit, including the Florida Education Association, the NAACP, and the groups that represent school boards and school association, argued that the program was draining money away from existing public schools and the children that attend them.

“The public school system has been decimated,” said Dale Landry, citing cutbacks in the number of hours that children spend inside a classroom. “We need to go back and reinvest in our public school system.”

[leftstreet]

5. DURec

[madfloridian]

6. ....

Thanks.

[greatlaurel]

7. Kick and Recommend

Here in Ohio the money that flows into the private charter school CEOs' hands comes back to the Republican Governor Kasich and the Ohio GOP controlled legislature in the massive campaign contributions these crooks make to the GOP politicians who then make sure more money is stolen from public schools and handed out to the charter school operators in an ever expanding circle of corruption.
The GOP does not even try to hide what they are doing here, because the national media completely ignores the corruption here in Ohio fly over country and the local media is owned by extreme right wingers, especially the Wolfe family, the Lindner family and the New house family. Many of the very small local papers have been purchased by the Adams publishing outfit which is also right wing. Almost all the TV and radio outlets are owned by very right wing corporate outfits.

I wish more folks would wake up and realize that the attacks on teachers are attacks on everyone.