Older Americans Are Sabotaging Our Children's Future

Older Americans are sabotaging young people's future, according to YouthFacts author, Mike Males. Youth today express for greater tolerance and community ideals than their parents and grandparents generations, while older Americans exhibit increasing racial and religious bigotry, material selfishness, drug abuse and criminality.

• Take the issue of gay rights, for example, where 18-29 year-olds in Alabama are more supportive of gay marriage than seniors in Massachusetts.
• Or mixed marriages, where only 36% of whites over the age of 65 would be o.k. with a family member marrying a person of a different ethnicity (compared to almost 100% support by those born after 1980).
• Or greed, where 60% of seniors oppose slower growth in their retirement benefits in order to avoid higher taxes for younger generations
• Or misbehavior, where Americans over the age of 45 abuse drugs and commit crimes at a higher rate than any generation ever, according to FBI crime statistics

Working Class Hostility Toward Jersey & Philly Teachers

Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey has been trying cut teacher salaries and benefits (like many other governors) in order to balance his bloated budget. He has been filmed telling teachers to quit if they don’t like their pay. He has derided teachers for getting employer-paid health benefits, and called teachers unions disgraceful.

Which Side Are You On?

There are currently 19 school districts in South Jersey, and another 13 in the suburbs north and west of Philadelphia, that are in contract disputes. While teachers fight to hold onto their salaries and benefits, parents and taxpayers are getting riled into a lynch mob mentality against teachers. While it is understandable and justifiable that people are angry about their own financial insecurity and the gutting of their schools, it is misdirected anger when it is placed on teachers, rather than the rich and corporations who refuse to pay their fair share of taxes, or at the banks and financial institutions that created the recession and then received trillions of taxpayer dollars to be bailed out.

Teachers, like all workers, should be compensated fairly and sufficiently to live comfortably in the communities in which they teach. Everyone should get health care and be able to afford food and housing. Anyone who does not have this level of material security is getting screwed, by the bosses and the rich, not by other workers. Rather than attacking fellow workers and denying their right to a decent and secure life, we need to remember that all workers have far more in common with each other than we do with the bosses.

Don’t scab for the bosses,
Don’t listen to their lies.
Us poor folks haven’t got a chance,
Unless we organize.

Which Side Are You On (Listen to Billy Bragg)

Cut Teacher Salaries and Lose The Best Teachers

Interestingly, even executive teacher-basher Barack Obama believes teachers should be paid a decent wage. In the Audacity of Hope he wrote that, “there is no reason why an experienced, highly-qualified teacher shouldn’t earn $100,000,” although he did tie this to a weakening of tenure protections. While Obama would like to give administrators greater authority to fire teachers and weaken teacher authority and independence, he does at least recognize the relationship between adequate remuneration and the ability to recruit and retain the best quality teachers.

Despite the president’s good intentions, teacher pay generally lags well behind comparable jobs, which is one reason why it is so hard to recruit good teachers. The Economic Policy Institute wrote that teacher pay lagged 15% behind similar jobs, and that the gap has been widening. When I left the lab to become a science teacher, I took a 15% pay cut.

Parent Trigger or Corporate Bomb?

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

The well-publicized attempt to convert McKinley Elementary in Compton to a charter school, using California’s “Parent Trigger” law, has been hailed as a victory for parental choice and the movement to improve failing schools. Both claims are lies.

Underperforming, But Improving Dramatically Without Conversion

McKinley may have been a low-performing, low income school, but it had been making huge academic leaps, improving its API (Academic Performance Indicator) by 77 points over the last two years. With such dramatic improvement, McKinley should have been seen as a model of what is working, not as a poster boy for school privatization. Under NCLB’s absurd accounting methods, though, McKinley continued to be seen as a failing school, thus providing ammunition to the corporate vultures who saw a meal waiting to be snatched.

In Come the Corporate Raiders

Likewise, the vote to convert McKinley was led by a group called Parent Revolution, which is funded by Eli Broad, a billionaire financier and opponent of public education, and chaired by Steve Barr, former CEO of Green Dot Public Schools, Inc. Green Dot was also backed by Broad, and by Bill Gates. Parent Revolution targeted several low income communities in the Los Angeles area and went door to door to recruit parents. In other words, Compton parent trigger is looking less like a grass roots parental choice movement, and more like a gang of corporate raiders, hell bent on scamming tax dollars for their private gain.

Parent Revolution claimed that 62% of McKinley parents supported the conversion to a charter school. However, the organization has been denounced for bullying parents into voting their way. Parents were harassed at work and in their communities to vote for the Parent Revolution initiative. Many were repeatedly called after refusing to sign the petition. Some were even told they would be deported if the initiative failed. 50-60 parents have since asked that their names be removed from the petition. Many showed up at a petition-signing event attended by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, with picket signs saying, “Our Kids Aren’t For Sale.”

Governor Schwarzenegger has intervened on behalf of the corporate raiders, denouncing the “intimidation” tactics of those opposed the school conversion, but saying nothing about the dishonesty and intimidation of its supporters. Arne Duncan and Rahm Emanuel have both lauded the conversion, with Emanuel threatening to implement a parent trigger law in Chicago, once he becomes mayor.

Anything Is Better Than the Status Quo, Not

Parent Trigger advocates and other Ed Deformers have tried to convince us that anything is better than the status quo, which is just plain idiotic. Nevertheless, the more they bash a particular school, group of teachers, or system, the worse they appear to be, thus building a blood lust for change. The problem is, even if their criticisms were valid, change, in and of itself, is not always an improvement.

Take Celerity, which will take over McKinley. They have a reputation of excluding, or outsourcing kids they believe will bring down test scores, especially special education students. Vielka McFarland, founder of Celerity, said that she does plan to assess all students, but “only to better understand their needs.” Celerity also has a history of bullying teachers and suppressing their right to free speech and their academic freedom, including the firing of two of their teachers for teaching about Emmett Till.

Celerity was imposed on Compton without any competitive bidding. They have a very limited track record, and little indication that they will be able to improve McKinley, especially after they skim off a large portion of their tax financed revenues to pay their corporate salaries. They have not made any commitment to keep any of McKinley’s teachers and have a history of antagonism toward unions.

Continued Violence Against Students—This Time Rome

Student protests against fee hikes and program cuts continue throughout Europe. In Rome on Tuesday, students were met with more violence and repression, an eerie replay of events in England. Over 100 were injured and 23 arrested at the demonstration. The prosecutor plans to use an expedited criminal prosecution process known as “processo per direttissima,” which allows the judge to decide upon a verdict and sentence almost immediately.

Student protests also occurred in Pisa, on Saturday.

For footage and more information on the Italian student protests, you can visit the Uniriot website

For more footage of the demonstration, please see

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu42KFs8WZw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21GZTFRLvyk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2hx5oDXnCY