- Report to the Trinational, in Montreal, May 6, 2010

Six days after he took office, 17 months ago in January, 2009, President Obama made his first public appearance as president when he visited the Capital City Charter School in Washington, DC. This was a deliberate and symbolic act. It launched an ever-escalating wild-ride towards the corporatizing and privatizing the system of public education in the United States.

The United States was the first country to guarantee free, universal public education. It is now moving rapidly to becoming the first country to end it. The well-orchestrated effort to turn over public schools to private corporations is a part of a much larger joint corporate-government campaign to privatize everything that is public in the United States. This process has escalated drastically since the US bank collapse in September of 2009, and the bank Bailout with $13 trillion of taxpayer money. continue...

Snow on Mother\'s Day in Montreal hailed the end of the ninth Trinational Coalition for the Defense of Public Education Conference on May 9th, 2010. Despite the weather being unseasonably cold, the topics of fighting school privatization, education budget cuts, and strategies to save our public schools were hot topics addressed during the 3-day conference. A diverse gathering of over 200 professors, teachers, paraprofessionals, students, and union leaders represented colleagues from British Columbia, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Milwaukee, New York, Oakland, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Morelos, Ontario, Quebec, Guatemala, Grenada, Costa Rica, Brazil, Argentina and more. The event was co-organized by the Canadian Teachers unions in Quebec the CSQ (Centrale des sydicats du Quebec) and FNEEQ-CSN (Federation nationale des enseignantes et des enseignants du Quebec) with the support of CISO (Centre international de solidarite ouvriere). This year\'s theme was, "Towards Public and Democratic Education." continue...

Jinny Sims is the Director of the Professional and Social Justice Division of the British Columbia Teachers Federation. She was in Los Angeles for the annual conference of the Human Rights Committee of United Teachers of Los Angeles.

She agreed to talk with us about her work in Canada.

Q: What brings you to Los Angeles?

I'm here for the UTLA Human rights conference and to give a workshop on understanding the importance of the privatization agenda on the future of public education both in Canada and the U.S and other nations also.continue...