174 is the number of charter schools in the metropolitan are of Detroit today. We are talking about the epicenter of the economic crisis. Let's remember Detroit had a vision of the future and that vision was called the Ford Company. Today the Ford Company like many other industrial companies is investing in other countries to produce the same product for cheaper labor. What does this mean for the workers of Ford in Detroit? Lay offs of course, therefore, those people have to choose, either leave the city or try to make sense of it all and make a living. This is why having the social forum in Detroit was perfect! Detroit, the Motor City, was the city that grew along companies like Ford, yet it is also the one that has fallen the hardest, because of corporate globalization. continue...
(Proverbs 28:19)
- 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...
On March 4th, thousands upon thousands of Americans gravitated towards each other to defend public education -- and no one group was in charge! Over 700 activist students, unions and individuals had gathered in Berkeley on October 24th to propose a March 4th day of Strike/Action to Defend Public Education. Soon schools and communities across California were joining this effort, or organizing events completely on their own. Sources like Reuters and the New York Times reported that actions took place in about 30 states, at major cities centers, high school walkouts, and campuses of the UC, Cal State and Community College systems. continue...
Two members of Academic Professionals of California, five faculty from the California Faculty Association and a student from Dominguez Hills spoke to the CSU Board of Trustees on March 17th about the Early Start Remediation proposal. Their Statement is reproduced below, as are links to a recent article and short video on the subject. continue...
A spirited column of students, staff and faculty marched past UCLA's monument to greed and corruption on September 24, intent on changing the University of California. The campus Samueli Building is named after a convicted felon who founded the Broadcom Corporation. The march was part of a statewide one-day strike by UPTE, the Union of University Professional and Technical Employees, protesting wage cuts and student fee increases resulting from the crisis caused by people like Henry Samueli. At UC Berkeley, police estimated that 5,000 people attended the campus rally. They chanted their support of university faculty and staff, and that "Education should be free!" continue...
A strategy is uniting corporate and political elites: using budget shockwaves to bury public education under a landslide of privatization. But unions in K-12 and higher ed have reacted like shovelers standing back-to-back, each one blindly tossing dirt over their shoulder into the other's hole, sinking ever deeper.
Let's look at how this hurt them in California's May 19 special election, and on the issue of charter schools. In the election, educators not only didn't have a common plan, but actually worked against each other. While California Teachers Association (CTA) spent $9.2 million supporting Propositions 1A and 1B, the California Federation of Teachers CFT) spent $567,000 against 1A, and the California Faculty Association (CFA, the professors in the California State University system) spent $1.2 million against it. continue...
