They Fired Everybody

Just watched a report about the closing of a Rhode Island high school on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams.

Huffingtonpost also has the story.

The gist is, the teachers there wouldn't work longer hours or do professional development without additional pay.

So the education board fired all of them.

Every one of them.

Said it was the teachers' fault that the school was so bad, that test scores and graduation rates were so low for so long.

And as part of Obushma's education policy, the lowest performing schools have to be shut down and all the teachers have to be fired.

So that's what they did in Central Falls, Rhode Island.

Secretary Duncan said he not only agreed with the board's decision, he "applauded it."

No comment from Obushma but we can assume he is happy tonight as well.

And there will be hundreds if not thousands more of these closures in the next three years unless somebody does something to wake the public up to the insanity of this,

You know, they will reopen that school with new teachers, new work rules, longer hours, all-year round school, Saturday school - all the things that Obushma and Duncan want - and there will be still be low test scores and low graduation rates.

Because the problems are not caused by the schools or the teachers.

The problem are societal. They are economic.

This school was in the poorest city in the state.

But Duncan doesn't care about that - instead he "applauded" the firing of over 100 teachers .

Hell, Duncan did all of this in Chicago and it solved nothing there either. In fact, it made things worse.

Obushma and Duncan must be stopped.

Those of us who made the mistake of voting for Obushma must know that we CANNOT vote for this union-busting corporate whore again.

At least if a Repub was doing this, the Dem lawmakers would be standing against it.

UPDATE: One of the trustees who actually voted against the closure berated teachers for not working extra hours gratis "for the kids":

B.K. Nordan, one of two trustees who voted against firing all the teachers, nevertheless delivered some of the harshest words of the evening to the high school’s teaching staff. Nordan, a graduate of Central Falls High School, now works as a teacher in Providence.

“I don’t believe this is a worker’s rights issue. I believe it’s a children’s rights issue,” Nordan said. “…By every statistical measure I’ve seen, we are not doing a good enough job for our students … The rhetoric that these are poor students, ESL students, you can imagine the home lives … this is exactly why we need you to step up, regardless of the pay, regardless of the time involved. This city needs it more than anybody. I demand of you that you demand more of yourself and those around you.”

Regardless of the pay, regardless of the time involved - you have to sacrifice for the kids.

They don't want teachers anymore - they want missionary nuns.

I guess only Obushma's buddies at JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs deserve compensation.

Just When I Thought I Was Out, They Pull Me Back In

I started blogging at reality-basededucator.blogspot.com back in March 2005.

Initially I started as an education blogger, but quickly turned into a political blogger outraged by the various high crimes and misdemeanors perpetrated upon the country and the world by George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Tom Delay and the rest of the Republican Party establishment.

In 2007 I started to blog more and more about economics as it became apparent that the bubble economy created and maintained by both the Clinton and Bush administrations was about to collapse around the nation's ears.

I quit regular posts at reality-basededucator in December 2007. I became a full-time contributing blogger to nyceducator.com for a while, but gradually blogged less and less. When the demise of the Bush administration and the rise of the "progressive" Democrats brought no real change to so many issues that are important to me - from the various wars we are currently fighting overseas to the closure of Gitmo to the extension of Big Brother's powers via the laws created in the wake of the WoT to civil rights for GLBT citizens of this country to fair work/fair wages for the working and middle classes to the continued extension of standardized-test based mandates to the privatization of the public school system to the trillion dollar welfare hand-outs both Bush and Obama have given the financial sector and Wall Street - I was disgusted and done with trying to effect even a small amount of change via my little blogposts.

But some things have happened in the past few months that have me feeling re-energized and re-outraged and ready to blog regularly again.

First, it became clear that the Obama administration, far from being a "change agent" that would usher in even a moderate amount of liberal reform to a country that has become owned and operated solely by and for corporate interests, is squarely interested in helping maintain the status quo (reign for Wall Street, pain for Main Street.) The financial bailout policy Obama has pursued has me outraged beyond belief - Nailin' Paylin and the other tea party people can call him a socialist all they want, it is clear that Mr. Obama is a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporatocracy (see Matt Taibbi's article in Rolling Stone for just the latest example of that) who is doing all he can to extend the power of multi-national corporations while further enslaving working and middle class people to working longer and harder to make less and less.

Next, Mayor Moneybags bought himself a $104 million third term here in New York City so that he could continue to destroy the NYC public school system. His reform movement consists of closing down every large high school in the city, firing all the unionized teachers and reopening charter and small schools in the same buildings that used to house some good schools destroyed by his administration's policy of shifting "at-risk" students to large schools without the necessary resources to educate them (see here for just one example of that.) Bloomberg and Klein have announced 22 schools closings this year and they intend to close 100 or more schools in the next four years (unless Bloomberg decides to overthrow the will of the people once again and runs for a fourth term or simply dispenses with the niceties of democracy itself and forms a military junta under the auspices of martial law - in which case he'll close ALL public schools.)

Finally, the Obama administration has decided that not only is No Child Left Behind the greatest education policy ever, they want to expand the testing mechanisms in the law by tying teacher pay and teacher's jobs to test scores. On top of that, they want to take Mayor Bloomberg's "Close All Public Schools and Reopen Them as Charter Schools Run by Hedge Fund Managers" policy nationwide through both the Race to the Top funds and the NCLB reauthorization next year. They have decided that public education needs to be privatized, because the boys on Wall Street need another punch bowl after the TARP/TALF bailouts, the Internet bubble, the housing bubble and all the rest of the government policies that have enabled Wall Street and top 1% to grab trillions at the expense of the working and middle classes of this country.

And so, just when I thought I was out of this lousy Internet shit, they've dragged me back in - Obama and Bloomberg and Klein and Duncan and Larry Summers and Treasury Timmeh Geithner and David Paterson and their allies in the press like Little Morty Zuckerman and Rupert Murdoch and GE Jack Welch and the rest.

My friend Norm at Education Notes Online has been asking me to get back on the front lines and fight the good fight against the corporate whores and multi-national lords in the great class war of the 21st century.

All right, Norm, I'm back, I'm mad as hell, and I'm ready to do battle at the barricades.