‘Biggest Act of Civil Disobedience in Canadian History’ May 23, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Canada, Civil Liberties, Criminal Justice, Education, Quebec.Tags: bill 78, Canada, civil disobedience, civil liberties, classe, jean charest, montreal, montreal protest, quebec, quebec government, quebec students, roger hollander, student strike, student tuition, tuition hike
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Published on Wednesday, May 23, 2012 by Common Dreams
Marchers defy Bill 78; Neighborhoods fill with sound of banging pots and pans
“The single biggest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.”
That’s how yesterday’s Montreal protest is being described today. Hundreds of thousands red-shirted demonstrators defied Quebec’s new “anti-protest” law and marched through the streets of downtown Montreal filling the city with “rivers of red.”
Tuesday marked the 100th day of the growing student protests against austerity measures and tuition increases. In response to the spreading protests, the conservative Charest government passed a new “emergency” law last Friday – Bill 78.
Since Bill 78 passed, people in Montreal neighborhoods have appeared on their balconies and in front of their houses to defiantly bang pots and pans in a clanging protest every night at 8 p.m.Bill 78 mandates:
- Fines of between $1,000 and $5,000 for any individual who prevents someone from entering an educational institution or who participate in an illegal demonstration.
- Penalties climb to between $7,000 and $35,000 for protest leaders and to between $25,000 and $125,000 for unions or student federations.
- All fines DOUBLE for repeat offenders
- Public demonstrations involving more than 50 people have to be flagged to authorities eight hours in advance, include itinerary, duration and time at which they are being held. The police may alter any of these elements and non-compliance would render the protest illegal.
- Offering encouragement for someone to protest at a school, either tacitly or otherwise, is subject to punishment. The Minister of Education has said that this would include things like ‘tweeting’, ‘facebooking’, and has she has implied that wearing the student protest insignia (a red flag-pin) could also be subject to punishment.
- No demonstration can be held within 50 meters of any school campus
Bill 78 not only “enraged civil libertarians and legal experts but also seems to have galvanized ordinary Quebecers.” Since the law passed Friday, people in Montreal neighborhoods have appeared on their balconies and in front of their houses to defiantly bang pots and pans in a clanging protest every night at 8 p.m.
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* * *
The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) reports:
CLASSE spearheaded Tuesday’s march, aided by Quebec’s largest labor federations. The province’s two other main student groups, FEUQ and FECQ, also rallied their supporters.
CLASSE said Monday it would direct members to defy Bill 78, Quebec’s emergency legislation.
The special law was adopted last Friday, suspending the winter semester and imposing strict limits on student protests. Organizers have to submit their itinerary to authorities in advance, or face heavy fines.
CLASSE spokesman Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois said the special legislation goes beyond students and their tuition-hike conflict.
“We want to make the point that there are tens of thousands of citizens who are against this law who think that protesting without asking for a permit is a fundamental right,” he said, walking side by side with other protesters behind a large purple banner.
“If the government wants to apply its law, it will have a lot of work to do. That is part of the objective of the protest today, to underline the fact that this law is absurd and inapplicable.”
* * *
The Montreal Gazette reports:
A protest organizers described as the single biggest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history choked the streets of downtown Montreal in the middle of Tuesday’s afternoon rush hour as tens of thousands of demonstrators expressed outrage over a provincial law aimed at containing the very sort of march they staged.
Ostensibly Tuesday’s march was to commemorate the 100th day of a strike by Quebec college and university students over the issue of tuition increases. But a decision last Friday by the Charest government to pass Bill 78 – emergency legislation requiring protest organizers to provide police with an itinerary of their march eight hours in advance – not only enraged civil libertarians and legal experts but also seems to have galvanized ordinary Quebecers into marching through the streets of a city that has seen protests staged here nightly for the past seven weeks.
“I didn’t really have a stand when it came to the tuition hikes,” said Montrealer Gilles Marcotte, a 32-year-old office worker who used a vacation day to attend the event. “But when I saw what the law does, not just to students but to everybody, I felt I had to do something. This is all going too far.”
Tuesday’s march was billed as being two demonstrations taking place at the same time. One, organized by the federations representing Quebec college and university students and attended by contingents from the province’s labor movement, abided by the provisions of the law and provided a route. The other, overseen by CLASSE, an umbrella group of students associations, deliberately did not.
By 3: 30 p.m., a little more than 90 minutes after the marches began to snake their way through downtown, CLASSE, which estimated the crowd at 250,000, described the march as “the single biggest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.”
Other crowd estimates varied between 75,000 and 150,000 protesters. Montreal police do not give official crowd estimates but the Place des festivals, which demonstrators easily filled before the march began, holds roughly 100,000 people.
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Sea of red as hundreds of thousands protest Quebec’s austerity cuts and new anti-protest law, May 22, 2012. (Photo by @philmphoto on instagram)
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The Canadian Press reports:
[...] Shortly before the evening demonstration commenced, supporters in central Montreal districts came out onto their balconies and in front of their homes to bang pots and pans in a seeming call-to-arms.
As well, the powerful Montreal transit union also gave protesters a boost when it called on its members to avoid driving police squads around on city buses during the crowd control operations. Montreal police have for several years used city buses as well as their cruisers to shuttle riot squad officers around to demonstration hotspots and as places to detain prisoners. [...]
The daytime march was considered to be one of the biggest protests held in the city and related events were held in New York, Paris, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. [...]
Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, co-spokesman for the hardline CLASSE group, described Tuesday’s march as a historic act of civil disobedience and said he was ready to face any legal consequences.
“So personally I will be ready
Montreal streets turn chaotic as protesters clash with police May 21, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Canada, Democracy, Education, Quebec.Tags: benjamin shingler, graham hughes, michael moore, mick jagger, montreal police, montreal protest, police brutality, quebec, quebec liberals, quebec strike, roger hollander, snl, student strike, student tuition
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Protesters opposing Quebec student tuition fee hikes demonstrate in Montreal, Sunday night. The protest led to clashes with police and more than 300 arrests.
Graham Hughes/THE CANADIAN PRESS
For the second night in a row, police clashed with protesters repeatedly into the late hours Sunday in a chaotic scene that left at least 300 arrested and 20 injured, including 11 police officers. At least one person was taken to hospital with what emergency services called “non-life threatening injuries.”
Windows were smashed, construction cones and signs tossed into the streets, and there were reports a fire hydrant was burst open at the same spot where a bonfire was lit a night earlier.
Riot police used tear gas and sound grenades to try to break up the protest, which was deemed illegal moments after it began for not complying with the new law. The result was a series of violent exchanges between small groups of protesters and police in pockets throughout the downtown core.
One video circulated online captured what appeared to be a police cruiser moving forward briefly with a protester on the hood, before the protester jumped off to the side and the cruiser sped away. Police later denied a rumour that a person had been run over.
Two journalists from local newspapers also reported being arrested and later released.
The legislation passed Friday was intended to put an end to three months of student protests, but it appears only to have given the movement momentum.
“I think the government put the police in a difficult situation,” said protester Nino Gabrielli, who got his Master’s last fall at a Montreal university. “I think the population is mobilizing around this thing.”
As the scenes of unrest played out in the city the movement also gained some celebrity support.
Montreal’s Arcade Fire wore the movement’s iconic red squares during an appearance with Mick Jagger on Saturday Night Live. Activist and filmmaker Michael Moore also gave his support to the students, featuring links about the issue prominently on his website.
“Their uprising is inspiring,” he tweeted to over a million followers. “One of the most amazing mass protests of the year.”
The global hacker collective Anonymous took an interest as well, releasing two videos denouncing the legislation and the planned tuition increases. The group, which regularly hacks into government websites around the world, warned of future actions in Quebec.
“Resistance is futile,” a computer-modulated voice stated in one video. “The hour of war has come.”
The website for the Quebec Liberal party and the province’s Education Ministry were down for portions of the weekend in an apparent cyber attack. Anonymous, however, did not claim responsibility.
The newfound support came during a weekend marked by violence and vandalism. The unrest reached a climax with a blaze of plastic traffic cones and construction materials lit Saturday during a melee on a busy downtown street.
Meanwhile, police came under criticism on Sunday over an altercation caught on video that shows patrons on a bar patio getting pepper sprayed.
Surveillance footage, played in a loop on one of Quebec’s all-news stations, shows several people sprayed by riot police at close range. Customers are seen scrambling to get inside the bar as a police officer knocks over tables and chairs.
Another video from a local TV station shows the officers took action after one was hit by a flying chair. The chair was then flung back toward the patio. The bar owner said police went too far and he’s considering taking legal action.
“People were falling on each other running inside to get away from the pepper spray, breaking things, and then people left by the back exit,” said Martin Guimond, who runs the Saint Bock brasserie in the city’s lively Latin Quarter. His waitress was initially going to call 911 after it happened.
“And then she said, ‘But wait, it’s the police that are doing this,’” Guimond recalled. “That’s when you realize there’s a total loss of security.”
Police didn’t return a request Sunday for comment about the incident, which occurred only steps from where the fires were set.
Police were newly armed on the weekend with Bill 78, which lays out regulations governing demonstrations of over 50 people. It includes requiring organizers to give eight hours’ notice for details such as the protest route, the duration and the time at which they’re being held.
The City of Montreal also adopted a new bylaw that threatens protesters who wear masks with heavy fines. But it failed to deter dozens of protesters from wearing masks Saturday or Sunday night, and police said they would use the new law with discretion.
Montreal police took a tougher stance on the weekend than previously seen during the nightly marches. The march was almost immediately declared illegal on both Saturday and Sunday because, police said, they weren’t provided with a protest route and bottles and rocks were thrown at police.
Massive Student Protest Fills Streets of Montreal after Proposed ‘Emergency’ Law May 17, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Canada, Education, Quebec.Tags: Canada, charest, education, jean charest, montrea; demonstration, montreal protest, quebec, quebec government, quebec police, quebec students, roger hollander, student arrests, student protest, student strike, student tuition
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Published on Thursday, May 17, 2012 by Common Dreams
Thousands of student protesters flooded the streets in Montreal last night after Quebec Premier Jean Charest announced a proposal for a new ‘emergency law’ in a bid to end the ongoing 14 week old student uprising and strike.
Students protest in the downtown streets of Montreal against tuition hikes on May 17, 2012 (Photo: Rogerio Barbosa/AFP/GettyImages)
The proposed legislation would halt the spring semester, push up the summer holidays, and restart classes in August. The move would maneuver around the current student strike and walkouts, moving classes to later in the year, in an effort to ‘restore calm’.
The government also hinted at severe penalties for anyone who tries to picket or prevent students from entering classrooms; further details about the extent of the law and its penalties will be released today.
The demonstrations on Wednesday night followed this announcement, as several thousand students met with police, who have started cracking down on the protests across Quebec. Up to 122 students were arrested, as “the acrid scent of police crowd-control chemicals billowed in the cool nocturnal air,” National Post/CA reports. “This on a night when Charest shared plans to clean things up.”
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CBC News: Montreal student protest ends with 122 arrests
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National Post/CA: 122 Quebec protesters arrested in raucous night before proposed student-strike breaking legislation
The unrest on Wednesday night followed the Quebec government’s announcement it would suspend the current academic session for striking students in an effort to calm things down.
It also hinted at more punitive measures, without sharing details. [...]
In that charged atmosphere, thousands of chanting students spilled into the streets of Montreal, marching straight to the city’s main commercial district. Their demonstration was peaceful until some rocks apparently thrown at police resulted in riot squad charges to clear Ste-Catherine Street. [...]
Authorities reported 122 arrests, three injured police officers and also some injured protesters.
Charest’s legislation would temporarily halt the spring semester for the minority of faculties paralyzed by the walkouts; push up the summer holidays; and reconvene students in August so they can complete their session before starting the fall one in October.
The government also hinted at severe penalties for anyone who tries to picket or otherwise prevent students from entering classrooms.
Charest did not answer when asked about reports of stiff fines. He simply said those details would be revealed when the legislation is tabled — perhaps as early as Thursday.
He did make it clear the legislation will target the crowds of protesters who have blocked access to schools and even stormed into classrooms in an attempt to enforce what they call a legal strike.
* * *
Associated Press: Emergency law considered in Quebec student protest
Quebec was set to consider emergency legislation Thursday aimed at calming weeks of student protests over rising tuition costs, after thousands took to the streets once again and more than 100 were arrested.
Authorities said 122 were arrested late Wednesday as thousands of demonstrators spilled into the streets of Montreal, with some smashing bank windows and hurling objects at police.
Legislation could be introduced as early as Thursday amid student strikes. Dozens of protesters on Wednesday stormed into one Montreal university for the first time, breaking up classes.
Premier Jean Charest said he would table emergency legislation aimed at ending the disorder, while sticking to the planned tuition hikes.
Honoring a ‘Terror War’ Architect May 13, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Criminal Justice, Education, Torture, War on Terror.Tags: boston university, Condoleezza Rice, dan berrigan, drone missiles, edollhus towns, fordham, inquisition, jesuits, john brennan, ray mcgovern, rendition, roger hollander, steve almond, timothy cardinal dolan, torture, War Crimes
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Since even readers of the New York Times are aware of deputy national security adviser John Brennan’s open identification with torture, secret prisons and other abuses of national and international law, Fordham University’s invitation to him to give the commencement address on May 19 brought, well, shock and awe to many Fordham students, faculty and alumni.
It now turns out we didn’t know the half of it. Piling outrage upon indignity, Fordham announced this week that Brennan will enjoy pride of place among the “eight notables” on whom it will confer honorary degrees at commencement. The others receiving a Doctorate in Humane Letters, honoris causa, include Timothy Cardinal Dolan (Archbishop of New York), and Brooklyn congressman Edolphus Towns.
White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan Unlike his co-recipients, Brennan is widely known for his advocacy of kidnapping-for-torture (aka “extraordinary rendition”) and killing “militants” (including U.S. citizens) with “Hellfire” missiles fired by “Predator” and “Reaper” drone aircraft.
These practices and “Special Forces” operations guarantee an indefinite supply of anti-U.S. militants for what is now known as the “new normal” in the kind of wars that former Gen. and now CIA Director David Petraeus has said our grandchildren will still be fighting.
The endless supply of “insurgents” engendered by the violent tactics so beloved of Brennan makes Americans less secure. But there is no sign that Brennan recognizes that — or cares. Not that some of Brennan’s co-honorees are all that great, either.
Cardinal Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is best known for his outspokenness on pelvic issues, his stalwart defense of the first nine months of life, and his deafening silence on the taking of life in war. Since by all evidence he is far more interested in birth control than death control, it is impossible to know where Dolan or his fellow bishops stand on the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. He abjures any attempt to offer moral guidance on issues like war, preferring to defer — as the Fordham Jesuits do — to a good Jesuit-trained Catholic like Brennan to make decisions on such issues.
Edolphus Towns’s claim to distinction, in Fordham’s pre-commencement publicity, relates to his bringing “millions of dollars” to his district. Unmentioned is Towns’s membership in the Congressional Unmanned Systems (Drone) Caucus, which serves as a lobbying arm for drones — a new cash cow for the defense-industrial-congressional complex.
O Tempora, O Mores!
Since John Brennan has been accorded the dual honor of commencement speaker cum Doctorate of Humane Letters honoris causa, let’s try to piece together why Fordham’s Trustees decided to single him out for such glory. What, in other words, is the causa behind the honores? Why does George Orwell have a smirk on his face; and why are many past and present Jesuits holding their noses — Justice Jesuits like Rupert Mayer, Pedro Arupe, Dean Brackley and Dan Berrigan?
Could it be that Brennan is being honored for his role in serving up fraudulent intelligence to “justify” attacking Iraq in 2003? Or is it perhaps his open advocacy of kidnapping Muslim clerics off the streets of Milan (he calls it “extraordinary rendition”) and rendering them to “friendly” intelligence services more practiced at torture techniques than the CIA?
Is it the secret prisons he favored for “enhanced” interrogation techniques; or maybe his role in promoting illegal eavesdropping on Americans? Or could it be his stalwart defense of the intentional drone killing of American citizens without charge or judicial process? Or is it the aggregate set of abuses. And could intelligent Jesuits actually believe these approaches are okay because they are “keeping us safe?”
This would mean the teaching of moral theology at Fordham has changed markedly. Five decades ago, torture was very clearly put in the same category as slavery and rape — always “intrinsically evil” — no gray areas. I wonder where Fordham’s moral theologians now put remote-control drone killings of people on the hunch they are “militants.”
The causa of the honores could have a simpler explanation, one that risks damage to the mystique of Jesuit sophistication — no, not sophistry. Maybe the Fordham Jesuits and Trustees get their news from Fox. Perhaps their thought process was simply this: Brennan is a Fordham alumnus; he works in the White House; isn’t that enough?
Earlier Indignities
This is hardly the first time a Jesuit university has succumbed to the “prestige virus” and given a proven scoundrel high honors at a commencement. There are, sad to say, numerous examples, but one comes immediately to mind.
It is George W. Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who, according to ABC News, chaired White House deliberations in 2002 and 2003 at which CIA torture techniques were “almost choreographed” by the most senior national security officials. The objective was to determine which particular technique, or combination, might be most effectively applied to which “high-value detainee.”
Rice gave the commencement address at Boston College on May 22, 2006, and was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws (yes, George Orwell, that is ironic.).
An onlooker would be permitted the reasonable inference that one causa of the honores must be the promoting of torture that Rice and Brennan held in common. Maybe an objective history of the Inquisition, and the Jesuit role in it, was not included in the books available at Jesuit seminaries.
Or, worse still, maybe it is the case that ingrained habits — like jesuitically justifying torture — can apply for renewal after several centuries. Habits die slowly. Has torture and killing of innocents now entered some sort of gray area in moral theology because a Jesuit-trained, White House functionary now says these things are necessary to “keep us safe?”
O Tempora, O Morons!
It remains to be seen whether what happened when the hapless Jesuits of Boston College invited Rice turns out to be a harbinger of what is in store at Fordham next Saturday. Ten days before the commencement at BC, Steve Almond, adjunct professor of English, resigned in protest. Here are excerpts from his letter to BC’s president, Rev. William P. Leahy, S.J.:
“I am writing to resign … as a direct result of your decision to invite Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to be the commencement speaker at this year’s graduation.
“Many members of the faculty and student body already have voiced their objection to the invitation, arguing that Rice’s actions as secretary of state are inconsistent with the broader humanistic values of the university and the Catholic and Jesuit traditions from which those values derive.
“But I am not writing this letter simply because of an objection to the war against Iraq. My concern is more fundamental. Simply put, Rice is a liar. She has lied to the American people knowingly, repeatedly, often extravagantly over the past five years, in an effort to justify a pathologically misguided foreign policy. …
“This is the woman to whom you will be bestowing an honorary degree, along with the privilege of addressing the graduating class of 2006. … Honestly, Father Leahy, what lessons do you expect her to impart to impressionable seniors? … that it is acceptable to lie to the American people for political gain? …
“I cannot, in good conscience, exhort my students to pursue truth and knowledge, then collect a paycheck from an institution that displays such flagrant disregard for both. I would like to apologize to my students and prospective students. I would also urge them to investigate the words and actions of Rice, and to exercise their own First Amendment rights at her speech.”
Professor Almond was hardly alone. About a third of Boston College’s faculty members signed a letter objecting to Rice’s appearance. And here is how the New York Times reported the commencement event:
“Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice delivered the commencement address on Monday at Boston College to an audience that included dozens of students and professors who stood, turned their backs and held up signs to protest the war in Iraq.
“A small plane flew overhead twice, pulling a sign that said, in red letters, ‘Your War Brings Dishonor.’ Outside Alumni Stadium, where 3,234 students received diplomas, protesters marched up Beacon Street holding signs reading ‘No Blood For Oil’ and ‘We’re Patriotic Too.’”
“Inside, however, Ms. Rice received a standing ovation when she was introduced, and she drew applause throughout her address.”
Daniel Berrigan, S.J.’s Sad Prophecy
In his autobiography, To Dwell in Peace, Daniel Berrigan wrote of “the fall of a great enterprise” — the Jesuit university. He recorded his “hunch” that the university would end up “among those structures whose moral decline and political servitude signalize a larger falling away of the culture itself.”
Berrigan lamented “highly placed” churchmen and their approval of war, “uttered … with sublime confidence, from on high, from highly placed friendships, and White House connections.”
“Thus compromised,” warned Berrigan, “the Christian tradition of nonviolence, as well as the secular boast of disinterested pursuit of truth — these are reduced to bombast, hauled out for formal occasions, believed by no one, practiced by no one.”
The good news is that, despite an out-of-touch president, Rev. Joseph M. McShane, S.J., and his trustees, there remain people of strong conscience at Fordham — people immunized against the “prestige virus” infecting what some have come to call the Vichy Jesuits. There are students and alumni with a good sense of history; people aware not only of the Inquisition, but also of more recent history in Nazi Germany during the 1930s, when the Catholic and Lutheran churches could not find their voice.
Many Fordham people know they cannot in good conscience remain silent on such matters; they know that what is at stake is the very soul of our country. Justice-oriented students are now finalizing plans for specific actions at commencement. A new Facebook page briefly outlining the planning to date has already drawn intense interest — negative as well as positive. It appears that many students abhor the unpleasantness inevitably attached to witnessing to the abuses in which the main commencement speaker has had such a key role.
In addition, many of the faculty are signing on to a letter to President McShane requesting a sit-down with Brennan before commencement. They want to ask him how he justifies his support for the kind of cruel, inhuman and degrading interrogation techniques (aka, torture) that are banned by domestic and international law.
Meanwhile, many supporters of justice-oriented students are also planning appropriate protest actions. One activity is “Stop the Drone Week at Fordham.”
It may not be an exaggeration to suggest that, as Saturday goes, so goes Fordham.
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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President’s Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
In appreciation of the Quebec student strike May 8, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Canada, Education, Quebec.Tags: anne lagace-dowson, Canada, education, elise moser, quebec, quebec government, quebec strike, roger hollander, student protest, student strike, student tuition, students, tuition hikes, youth unemployment
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| May 8, 2012
Like sap rising in spring, the printemps érable showcases the talents and humour of Quebec students. Here are some examples:
Red-clad students board subway cars during the morning rush hour on the orange line of the metro. One per car, they stand silently looking straight ahead. When the car stops they get out, position themselves at equal intervals along the platform so that when the metro pulls out of the station passengers see a blur of red.
Red, the colour of radical movements, has been taken over by the students, who wear red knitted or crocheted squares, or squares of red felt, attached with a safety pin. Or just a plain old square of red duct tape.
Music students perform a professional calibre “Sacre du printemps” by Igor Stravinsky to cheer the protesters, a piece that sent the Paris establishment into paroxysms of rage when it was first played in the spring of 1913.
Students build red cubes, using them as part of a piece of street theatre at the Earth Day demonstration, the biggest demonstration in the history of Canada and Quebec.
Videos, installation art, signs brandished by philosophy students in Latin and Greek. Fine arts students make picket signs with wonderfully detailed portraits of Quebec politicians.
Poems, songs, videos and music clips. If the purpose of an education is to learn how to think creatively, then the education system is working.
For 40 years, older people have lamented self-absorbed, apolitical youth. Now that so many have taken their ideas to the streets, many of those same observers are outraged, calling them spoiled, pointing to their iPads and Starbucks coffees as evidence.
The unemployment rate for young people is at 14 percent and most of them end up burdened with huge debt when they graduate. Many students work while studying — 20 or more hours per week. They may have a Starbucks coffee from time to time. So what?
Supporters of the Occupy movement in New York speak admiringly of the Quebec student mobilization.
The Occupied Wall Street Journal, the newspaper of the movement, writes: “A deep democratic movement, something most of us have never seen and scarcely imagined, turned a small park near Wall Street into the centre of a global storm. Everybody knows the deck is stacked. But it turns out not everyone is willing to put up with it.”
Beautifully written, and who would have thought that the Quebec branch of this worldwide mobilization, with 300,000 people in the streets, would have become the most stupendous of all? Quebecers in the streets are united, with the world marching. Everyone knows something is profoundly wrong — with the economy, with the environment, with the political system, corrupted with cash.
André Pratte, chief editorialist of La Presse, who is in favour of the tuition fee increase, compares the upheaval to May 1968. Students around the world protested against the war in Vietnam and demanded a voice in their education. In 1970, four students were shot down and killed at Kent State University in Ohio. You have probably heard the song by Canadian Neil Young that starts with the line, “Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming…”
When it was all over, students had a say in the running of educational institutions.
Quebec’s student strike perplexes, annoys, thrills. Montreal writer Elise Moser says she supports it for three reasons:
a) The more accessible education is, the fairer, more stable and richer a society is, because we can develop the resources of all our people, not just the thin layer of entitled wealthy who can pay for education. That seems obvious, doesn’t it?
b) The strike is not just against a tuition hike, it’s for a much broader vision of an equitable society.
c) The investment in an undergrad degree produces much higher economic returns to the state than an equal amount in subsidies to industry.
On March 22, at least 100,000 people protested peacefully in the streets of Montreal against the tuition fee hike. That was the first sign that something really big was underway. In another song of the 60s, Bob Dylan sang, “Something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?”
The tuition fee hike amounts to a 75 per cent increase over five years – $325 per year for five years. About $325-million in all. The cost of the fiasco of a new building constructed by the Université du Québec à Montréal called L’Îlot Voyageur: $500-million. So why the insistence on the fee hike?
Ideology. An election promise. The need to be seen to be fiscally responsible.
After the World Trade Center attacks, social activism declined. The gap between the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent grew. Now over ten years later a new generation of activists is looking around and saying, ‘Wait a minute, this system is not so great. The neo-liberal model led to a worldwide financial crisis that brought the world economy almost to its knees. Just what is so great about the status quo?’
It has always been easier to stand back, cross your arms and do nothing. To go along with things as they are. But the reason we have public education, votes for women, public healthcare, libraries and paved roads is because people who didn’t just go along with the status quo built systems that defended the interests of the people.
They were called names too — “communists,” “anarchists,” “agitators.”
I was struck by an interview I saw with a government minister who said she doesn’t like demonstrations. No one likes demonstrations, Minister. It’s just that sometimes demonstrations are the only tool people have to make themselves heard.
Let the last word go to filmmaker Hugo Latulippe, excerpted from the poem he wrote called Nous sommes des millions, published in Voir:
“Puis, raillé nos enfants insurgés.
Minimisé l’envergure du geste, la largeur des idées.
Minimisé les milliers d’entre eux dans la rue.
Grave erreur.”
[...]
“Nous sommes arrivés à ce qui commence.
Le feu a pris pour de bon.
Nous sommes des millions.”
Anne Lagacé-Dowson is director general of the anti-bullying Tolerance Foundation. She is an award winning broadcast journalist and political analyst.
This article was originally published in The Hour and is reprinted here with permission.
Quebec Students Ignite the Popular Imagination May 3, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Canada, Education, Quebec.Tags: air canada, Canada, charest, classe, education, montreal police, quebec, quebec liberal, quebec strike, roger hollander, social justice, stefan christoff, student protest, student strike, student tuition, uqam
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By Stefan Christoff, rabble.ca | Report
Thursday, 03 May 2012 09:32
(Photo: Robin Dumont / Flickr)
Vibrant nightly protests over the past week in downtown Montréal, in solidarity with the Quebec student strike, are sparking global attention. As the Quebec-wide strike continues – it has now been going for over 11 weeks – a new energy is apparent in the city.
All across the city spotting the symbolic red square patches is easy; on any city bus or métro car patches are proudly pinned on jackets or backpacks.
Despite repeated incidents of police brutality, strikingly hostile mainstream media coverage and a sustained refusal by the Quebec Liberal government to negotiate in good faith, popular support and energy toward the strike is growing. Beyond surveys, or poll numbers, the Quebec student strike is historic in nature, a sustained mass protest movement creating political space to debate not only rising tuition fees but also fundamental questions of social justice.
A clear shift is occurring on the streets, as protests are now expanding to highlight environmental justice and the growing economic inequities in Quebec at a time of austerity-driven economics.
Today in Quebec the earning gap between the wealthy and the rest sits at a 30-year high, according to a recent study by Institut de recherche et d’informations socio-economiques. Economic injustice in Quebec is increasingly a focus of student protests and the upcoming May Day protests will illuminate points of unity between striking students and larger social movements on the streets.
Last week Aveos airline maintenance workers in Montréal, fired last month without due process, joined with striking students in a morning protest outside a shareholders meeting of Air Canada in downtown Montreal. On the streets, la Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN), a major union federation in Québec with a history of strong links to grassroots activism, has consistently joined striking students on the street.
In Québec the student strike is igniting the popular imagination.
Despite the growing protests, the movement does face incredible challenges, beyond just the usual cynical commentators across the mainstream media in Quebec and Canada.
Police repression has at times been extreme, with hundreds of students arrested and disturbing physical violence by police toward the protest movement. On the streets police often launch flash bang grenades. To take just one example, last week in Montreal one of these grenades exploded over a night demonstration, unleashing toxic CS gas on the protest.
Montreal police use the flash bang weapon, made by Defense Technologies, a subsidiary of the world’s second largest arms manufacturer, BAE Systems, despite the obvious danger to student protesters. Striking student Francis Grenier suffered a serious eye injury in early March due to an explosion close to the eye while playing harmonica and is still recovering.
Unity within the student movement is another major challenge, the more institutional Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ) and Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec (FECQ) are consistently facing divide and conquer offers by the Québec government pushing to exclude the protest-driven Coalition large de l’association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (CLASSE) from any negotiations. Despite a history of division in previous student mobilizations, the major student unions today are remaining strongly united in this mobilization to halt tuition hikes in Quebec.
Calls for a broader social strike, an effort to transfer the energy of student protests into larger struggles for social justice is strongly backed by CLASSE, a network of student unions that supports direct action and openly rejects the capitalist economic system.
Over recent years CLASSE has actively supported anti-poverty struggles in Quebec and international solidarity campaigns like the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in solidarity with Palestine.
Protests will continue in Quebec over the next days, from May Day to the upcoming Liberal Party general council meeting, scheduled to take place later this week. The Liberals have in fact announced they are moving their meeting from Montreal to Victoriaville, due to fears of mass protest.
As the momentum of the Quebec student strike continues to grow, with nearly 180 000 students remaining on strike, many open questions ring out beyond Québec.
Can the Quebec student movement, clearly a collective struggle against austerity-driven economics, spark or inspire broader mass struggles for social justice in Canada?
Stefan Christoff
Stefan Christoff is a Montreal-based writer, musician and community activist who contributes to rabble.ca. You can find Stefan at http://www.twitter.com/spirodon/
The People Behind the Lawmakers Out to Destroy Public Education: A Primer May 2, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Education, Right Wing.Tags: alec, arne duncan, charter schools, chris christie, cyber charter, diane ravitch, education, gates foundation, jeb bush, koch brothers, privatization, public education, Rahm Emanuel, right wing, roger hollander, teachers, teachers' unions
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Published on Wednesday, May 2, 2012 by Bridging the Difference Blog / Ed Week
What You Need To Know About ALEC
Since the 2010 elections, when Republicans took control of many states, there has been an explosion of legislation advancing privatization of public schools and stripping teachers of job protections and collective bargaining rights. Even some Democratic governors, seeing the strong rightward drift of our politics, have jumped on the right-wing bandwagon, seeking to remove any protection for academic freedom from public school teachers.
This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own “reform” ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the “reform” agenda for education.
ALEC operated largely in the dark for years, but gained notoriety because of the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. It turns out that ALEC crafted the “Stand Your Ground” legislation that empowered George Zimmerman to kill an unarmed teenager with the defense that he (the shooter) felt threatened. When the bright light of publicity was shone on ALEC, a number of corporate sponsors dropped out, including McDonald’s, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Mars, Wendy’s, Intuit, Kaplan, and PepsiCo. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said that it would not halt its current grant to ALEC, but pledged not to provide new funding. ALEC has some 300 corporate sponsors, including Walmart, the Koch Brothers, and AT&T, so there’s still quite a lot of corporate support for its free-market policies. ALEC claimed that it is the victim of a campaign of intimidation.
The campaign to privatize the schools and to dismantle the teaching profession is in full swing. Where is the leadership to oppose it?
Groups like Common Cause and colorofchange.org have been putting ALEC’s model legislation online and printing the names of its sponsors. They have also published sharp criticism of ALEC’s ideas. This is hardly intimidation. It’s the democratic process at work. A website called alecexposed.org has published ALEC’s policy agenda. Common Cause posted the agenda for the meeting of ALEC on May 11 in Charlotte, N.C. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has dropped out of ALEC and also withdrawn from the May 11 conference, where it was originally going to be a presenter.
A recent article in the Newark Star-Ledger showed how closely New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s “reform” legislation is modeled on ALEC’s work in education. Wherever you see states expanding vouchers, charters, and other forms of privatization, wherever you see states lowering standards for entry into the teaching profession, wherever you see states opening up new opportunities for profit-making entities, wherever you see the expansion of for-profit online charter schools, you are likely to find legislation that echoes the ALEC model.
ALEC has been leading the privatization movement for nearly 40 years, but the only thing new is the attention it is getting, and the fact that many of its ideas are now being enacted. Just last week, the Michigan House of Representatives expanded the number of cyber charters that may operate in the state, even though the academic results for such online schools are dismal.
Who is on the education task force of ALEC? The members of the task force as of July 2011 are here. Several members represent for-profit online companies, including the co-chair from Connections Academy; many members come from for-profit higher education corporations. There is someone from Jeb Bush’s foundation, as well as right-wing think tank people. There are charter school representatives, as well as Scantron. And the task force includes a long list of state legislators, from Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
Quite a lineup. Common Cause has asked why ALEC is considered a “charity” by the Internal Revenue Service and holds tax-exempt status, when it devotes so much time to lobbying for changes in state laws. Common Cause has filed a “whistleblower” complaint with the IRS about ALEC’s status.
The campaign to privatize the schools and to dismantle the teaching profession is in full swing. Where is the leadership to oppose it?
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Diane Ravitch is a historian of education at New York University. She is a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. She has written many books and articles about American education, including: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform, (Simon & Schuster, 2000); The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (Knopf, 2003); The English Reader: What Every Literate Person Needs to Know (Oxford, 2006), which she edited with her son Michael Ravitch.
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How to Destroy Education While Making a Trillion Dollars April 29, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Education.Tags: arne duncan, charter schools, education, privitazation, public education, robert freeman, roger hollander, teacher unions, teachers
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Published on Sunday, April 29, 2012 by Common Dreams
The Vietnam War produced more than its share of iconic idiocies. Perhaps the most revelatory was the psychotic assertion of an army major explaining the U.S. bombing of the provincial hamlet of Ben Tre: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” If only such self-extinguishing claims for intelligence were confined to military war.
The U.S is ratcheting up a societal-level war on public education. At issue is whether we are going to make it better — build it into something estimable, a social asset that undergirds a noble and prosperous society — or whether we’re going to tear it down so that private investors can get their hands on the almost $1 trillion we spend on it every year. The tear-it-down option is the civilian equivalent of Ben Tre, but on a vastly larger scale and with incomparably greater stakes: we must destroy public education in order to save it. It’s still early in the game, but right now the momentum is with the wreckers because that’s where the money is. Whether they succeed or not will be up to you.
Here’s a three-step recipe for how to destroy education. It maps perfectly to how to make a prodigious profit by privatizing it. It is the essential game plan of the big money boys.
First, lower the costs so you can jack up the profits. Since the overwhelming cost in education is the salaries of the teachers, this means firing the experienced teachers, for they are the most expensive. Replace them with “teachers” who are young, inexperienced, and inexpensive. Better yet, waive requirements that they have to have any training, that is to say, that they be credentialed. That way, you can get the absolute cheapest workers available. Roll them over frequently so they don’t develop any expectation that they’ll ever make a career out of it.
Second, make the curriculum as narrow, rote, and regimented as you can. This makes it possible for low-skilled “teachers” to “teach.” All they need do is maintain order while drilling students in mindless memorization and robotic repetition. By all means avoid messy things like context, nuance, values, complexity, reflection, depth, ambiguity—all the things that actually make for true intelligence. It’s too hard to teach those things and, besides, you need intelligent, experienced people to be able to do it. Stick with the model: Profitable equals simplistic and formulaic. Go with it.
Finally, rinse and repeat five thousand times. Proliferate franchised, chartered McSchools with each classroom in each McSchool teaching the same thing on the same day in exactly the same way. So, for the math lesson on the formula of a line, you only need develop it once. But you download it in Power Point on the assigned day so the room monitors, i.e., the “teachers,” know what bullets to read. Now repeat this for every lesson in every course in every school, every day. In biology, chemistry, geometry, history, English, Spanish, indeed, all of a K-12 curriculum. Develop the lesson literally once, but distribute and reuse it thousands of times with low-cost proctors doing the supervision. The cost is infinitesimal making the profit potential astronomical.
This is the essential charter school model and the money is all the rationale its promoters need. Think about it. There’s a trillion dollars a year spent on public education in the U.S. and enterprising investors want to get their meat hooks on it. Where else in the world can you find a $1 trillion opportunity that is essentially untouched? Not in automobiles. Not in health care. Not in weapons, computers, banking, telecommunications, agriculture, entertainment, retail, manufacturing, housing. Nowhere.
Oh, to be sure, you have to soften up the public with a decades-long PR campaign bashing teachers, vilifying their unions, trashing schools, and condemning public education in general, all the while promising the sun, moon, and stars for privatization, which is the ultimate charter goal. Voila! You’ve got your chance.
But to really make a killing, you need not just revenues, but profits. That’s why the low cost delivery and “build it once but resell it millions of times” model is so key. It was that very model that made Bill Gates the richest man in the world. It is what earned Microsoft 13 TIMES the rate of profit of the average Fortune 500 company in the 1990s and persuaded the Justice Department to declare it a “felony monopolist”. Gates recognizes the model very well, which is why his foundation is pouring tens of millions of dollars into charters. And you thought it was his altruism.
Of course, anybody who actually knows education, indeed, anybody who is simply intelligent, knows that intelligence does not come from rote repetition or parroting Power Point slides at the regimented direction of a room monitor, no matter how perky or well intended. It comes from an agonizingly complex, intricate, sustained set of challenges to the mind that are exquisitely choreographed over the better part of two decades, all intimately tailored to the specific needs of an individual, inquisitive, aspiring student.
That is what real teachers do. And it is precisely what a cookie-cutter, low-content, low-cost, high-turnover, high-profit money mill cannot do. Because it’s not intended to do that. It’s intended to produce profits. Real education, real intelligence, real character are agonizingly slow, dazzlingly complex, maddening difficult things to create. You can’t make a profit off of it, unless you destroy it in the process. That is why not one of the nations of the world that surpass the U.S. in education performance operate charter-based or privatized educational systems.
If America wants better education, it needs to fix the greatest force undermining education, which is poverty. The single most powerful predictor of student performance is the average income of the zip code in which they live. But one out of four American students now live in poverty, and the numbers are growing. One out of two will live in poverty sometime during their lives. Forty-seven million Americans are on food stamps. Is it any wonder American school performance is faltering?
But poverty is a hard and expensive problem to fix. We prefer easy, painless fixes, or even better, vapid clichés about the “magic of the market” and such. Why, look what we got from the deregulation of the banking system: the greatest economic collapse of the last 80 years and the greatest plunder of the public treasury in the history of the world.
This is the essential neo-liberal agenda which Obama enthusiastically supports: privatize and deregulate everything, especially public services, so that the money spent on them can be transferred to private hands. This is how Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education, earned his bureaucratic bonafides: he converted more than 100 of Chicago’s public schools to charters while the city’s school superintendent. It’s unbelievable how credulous we are but obviously, propaganda works. That’s why the likes of the Gates Foundation keep pouring money into the cause.
The problem with charter schools is that they simply don’t work, at least not for delivering high quality education. Of course, given their formula, how could they? The most thorough research on charter schools, by Stanford University, shows that while charters do better than public schools in 17% of cases, they actually do worse in 37%, a more than 2-to-1 bad-to-good ratio!
If your doctor injured two patients for every one he cured, would you go to him? If your mechanic wrecked two cars for every one he fixed, would you go to him? Yet that is literally the proposition that charter school operators are peddling. And that 2-to-1 failure rate is after charters have skimmed off the better students and run what can only be called ethnically cleansed schools, counseling out poor performers, special needs cases, and “undesirable” minorities, leaving them for the public schools to deal with. For the data show they do that as well.
The irony of all this, indeed, the hypocrisy, is that America is at least nominally a capitalist county. You would think it would be ok to be honest about your intentions to make money by pillaging children’s futures while looting the public purse. God knows the weapons makers, the banks, the oil companies, the pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness and others aren’t bashful about it. But that doesn’t seem to be true here, in education.
Here, it’s all about “the children,” about “streamlining” education, boosting scores, uplifting minorities, making America competitive, and just about every other infantile fairy tale they can invoke to convince the country to hand over the loot. For that’s what it’s really about. The trillion dollars a year to be made by turning “the children” into intellectually impotent dullards but profit producing zombies? Well, that’s just a lavishly fortunate coincidence. Right?
Remember, you can’t save something by destroying it. Which isn’t to say that swashbuckling entrepreneurs aren’t willing to try. All they need is the liberating impetus of that essential American ethic: “I’m getting mine, screw you.” But the cost of this plunder will be incalculable, for it will ripple through the economy for decades. And the damage will be irreversible for, while public education is the most powerful democratizing institution in the world, it only works when the schools work. When they cease to work, it’s over.
So watch out. A destroyed educational system, a desiccated economy, and a debauched democracy are coming soon to a school district near you.
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Robert Freeman teaches history and economics at a public high school in northern California. He is the founder of One Dollar For Life, a national non-profit that helps American schools build schools in the developing world with donations of one dollar. He can be reached at robertfreeman10@yahoo.com.
Hand-Holding Can Lead to Sexy Sex and Other Ungodly Perversions in Tennessee April 21, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Education, Right Wing, Tennessee.Tags: abby zimet, creationism, education, right wing, roger hollander, sex education, Teen Pregnancy, tennessee, tennessee schools
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by Abby Zimet
Not content with pushing creationism in schools, the Tennessee Senate has seen fit to add “gateway sexual activities” like kissing and hand-holding to sins banned under an abstinence-based sex education curriculum that has to date succeeded in raising seeing their teen birth rate. And teachers can be sued for demonstrating hand-holding. Waytago Tennessee; you and Arizona are tied for first-place lunacy. Up next: bans on pre-gateway activities like eye contact and breathing.
School Closings Come To Atlanta This Week, To Your City Next Week: It’s Time To Dump Arne Duncan April 14, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Education, Race.Tags: arne duncan, atlanta schools, bruce a. dixon, charter schools, diane ravitch, katrina, roger hollander, school privatization, standardized testing
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by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
A national movement to save public education is coming to life, in the face of a decades-long bipartisan campaign to discredit, de-fund, destabilized and destroy public education. President Bush’s Education Secretary said teachers unions were terrorist organizations. Obama’s man Arne Duncan believes Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to education in New Orleans. Is it time yet to dump, and to dump on Arne Duncan?
School Closings Come To Atlanta This Week, To Your City Next Week: It’s Time To Dump Arne Duncan
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
In a pattern that has become typical across the nation, the Atlanta Public School Board voted early this morning to close 7 neighborhood schools, all in mainly black neighborhoods. Some of the proposed school closings were announced the Friday afternoon before spring break, only ten calendar days, and one business day before the meeting that would finalize their closure. Other proposed closings were announced only 3 calender days before the school board meeting. Obviously the authorities wanted to prevent neighborhood parents from mobilizing to protect their children and communities.
Like their counterparts in cities across the country, Atlanta parents, teachers and neighborhood residents pointed out that their school board seemed more devoted to the promotion of charter schools and privatization than it was to the children in public schools, and that it was doing all it could to push as many children as possible out of the public schools into charters. They reminded the board that by their own flawed standardized tests, charters performed no better than public schools, and when they did it was due to their ability to cream off the best students, rather than their willingness to teach everyone’s children.
Judging from last night’s meeting the gap between what hundreds of local parents and teachers know, believe and demand, and the picture of public education brought to us by corporate media is vast and astounding. News coverage of the meeting, and of opposition to the cuts was sparse and condescending, and grossly misrepresented the intents and motives of parents and teachers.
Like school boards across the country, Atlanta’s honchos turned a deaf ear to the children and communities they supposedly serve, even refusing to consider repurposing the empty school buildings as local community resources. In the rush to privatization, school buildings are valuable real estate prizes that can be awarded to well connected developers, and the only kind of economic development anybody has ever heard of is moving poorer people out of neighborhoods to attract richer ones in.
Atlanta is following the same script as Chicago and Philly and New York and Los Angeles and New Orleans. It’s a bipartisan agenda of standardized testing calculated not to teach children, but to furnish the grounds to brand teachers and schools as “underperforming” so that staff can be fired, schools closed, and their resources funneled to charter school operators.
It’s a local problem, but it’s national policy. Atlanta’s school superintendent is much like Obama Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in that he’s never taught an hour in any classroom. Duncan learned all he needed to know about education from his mother’s tutoring programs, he says, and his time as a pro basketballer, his time in the financial markets and on Mayor Daley’s staff. Atlanta’s Eroll Davis says he learned all he needed to know about running a school system from his time serving on the board of British Petroleum.
Atlanta’s school chief says he’s closing black schools to give them the same thing wealthy and mostly white neighborhoods have, an academic support system. His national counterpart Arne Duncan famously declared that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to education in New Orleans. Duncan’s predecessor as Chicago schools CEO was immediately dispatched to Louisiana where he closed more than 100 New Orleans public schools and fire the system’s entire teaching, administrative, maintenance and support staff.
While the place to fight for control of education is in your neighborhood, in your public school while you still have one, it’s a national fight as well. Public school closings, the de-professionalization of teachers and the push to charters have been national policy under the Bush and Obama administrations. So it’s entirely correct to call for the resignation of Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as well.
We wrote about how Duncan teamed up in 2009 with Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton to do a national tour promoting charter schools, privatization, teacher merit pay and other anti-education schemes. Since them the Obama administration’s Race To The Top has made these things pre-conditions without which no state, no school board receives much in the way of federal funding, and the states that fire the most teachers, close the most schools, and grant the most charters get most of the funding. It’s truly a race, and not to the top.
While it’s time to redouble our efforts to save, rebuild, democratize and re-imagine public education in our cities and neighborhoods around the country, it’s also time to come together nationally and demand an end to federal policies that force charters, standardized testing. Change comes from the bottom and from the top. It’s time to demand the resignation of Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Thousands of educators and students and ordinary citizens have already signed the petition at http://dumpduncan.org. You should too, and forward it to everyone you know.
Those of us on Facebook should click here to join the Dump Duncan group on Facebook, from which you will be able to connect with people concerned and active about saving public education around the country, and access a vast array of helpful resources. Duncan’s and Obama’s Race To The Top, as Diane Ravitch assures us, is really a race to the bottom.
Visit Dump Duncan on the web or on Facebook. Sign the petition, get connected locally and nationally. And get busy.
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the Georgia Green Party. He can be reached via this site’s contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.
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Good question, Diane. How could such a focused organization operate so long and so damn effectively.. without the complicity of Democrats, that is, corporate Democrats? And where was the Democrat Party whose platform and primary interests suggest populist causes? Shame on them. And where are the professional organizations known as unions that should be protecting the interests of Michigan teachers?
Bill Gates? Big of him. Obama? Race to the Bottom begun with Jennifer Granholm (D-MI) and carried forward as you point out by Gov. Slick Rick Snyder (Gateway to China). Persecution of the public working force (read females) and the public resources. Education means nothing to this new group- they are defunding and taxing while they can get away with it despite outcries. Sheer Disgust by the people.
And they don’t care.
Check out the R funded Mackinaw Center for PUBLIC Policy whose “plans” and ideas link to ALEC.
Nice article that goes only half way.
The democrats are firmly behind the privatization of the schools.
From Arne Duncan to Rahm the devils spahn – to The Oilybomber to Pelosi and Feinstein, etc
The democrats are firmly Bought Off.
If not they could easily stop this process.
http://blackagendareport.com/c…
‘why isn’t closing 40 Philadelphia public schools national news’
http://blackagendareport.com/c…
‘School closings come to atlanta this week – it’s time to dump Arne Duncan’
I don’t like ALEC’s agenda, but its gained ground because the popular perception of how most public institutions are run is very poor. People who are working 12 mos. a yr. for lousy wages with no benefits don’t understand why a teacher makes twice their wage and works 6 mos. and gets full health benefits and after 20 yrs. a nice cozy pension. Then they look at the people that run or “administer” these orgs. and they’re aghast. School admins. making 6 figs. is the norm everywhere. In NJ where property taxes are crushing the average homeowner all the above has alienated the average voter and sent them rightward. Is private charter schools the answer. NO, of course not , they just take the same public $$ and give it to a few investors and the kids get even worse educations. What’s the answer? It seems most of us are being crushed between the Public worker Unions and the Private Corps. Its a battle of the Dinos and all of us mice are being crushed by them as they fight.
Actually the reason people attack the teachers unions – besides of course the PR campaigns of the privatizers – is the fact that the teachers unions are Easy Targets.
It’s always easier to blame teachers or some non-existent welfare queen than the corporations actually doing the dirty work.
I’d also like to point out that the teaching profession used to be considered a low paying job and the private sector paid a much better wage and benefits.
Teachers had a union that got them cola’s on a yearly basis – over the last 40 years the good paying private sector jobs disappeared while the teaching jobs continued to get their colas.
We need to recognize that the true crime is the corporate killing of the private sector wages and benefits.
If the private sector jobs would have kept pace with inflation then no one would care what the teachers make because it would still be chicken scratch.
What the teacher pay issue should point out is the HUGE DROP in private sector wage growth to the point where the teachers have passed it up.
That’s not the teachers fault -
Blame the right people.
“People who are working 12 mos. a yr. for lousy wages with no benefits don’t understand why a teacher makes twice their wage and works 6 mos. and gets full health benefits and after 20 yrs. a nice cozy pension.”
Here in one sentence lies the only thing you need to know about why the workers in this country are doomed.
There is the crock of shit about teachers working only half a year (oh, of course — we all PERSONALLY know such a teacher don’t we, glennk; just like we know that firefighter who makes $200,000 a year and has a vacation home in Florida).
Then there are all those audacious benefits — stuff teachers bargained their wages away for and now are losing at disgraceful rates because people like glennk think since they’re taking it up the ass, so should the rest of the 99%.
Fighting over the crumbs — that’s why you always see the Koch brothers with a smile on their face.
You need to understand that the only way teachers’ working conditions (class size, job security, salary, benefits) improved over the years was through UNION action. No one suddenly just decided that it would be a nice thing to improve the conditons of teachers work. The poobahs at the School Board offices are bureaucrats who should NEVER be confused with teachers.
Just to clarify public school teachers work 10 months a year not 6.
There is a lot of truth to glennk’s description of how people perceive the education and teacher issues. The real problem is that everyone needs to have a decent living with health care, vacations, retirement, etc., etc. People who pay taxes are often people without those benefits. It is not fair. Teachers get caught in the middle of all of this. It certainly is not the fault of the teacher if they have a union or have decent pay and benefits. What I really hate is how government and politics permeates education and I believe they try to stifle all teacher creativity. Their model is for teachers and the students to be human drones. Instead of working towards greatness we as a nation are rushing quickly to divided groups mired in inequality.
This problem–along with many others–will disappear in a few decades. As Bill Henderson points out in two recent postings on the www.bravenewworld.in web site, it’s likely that the world’s population will be reduced to about 10% of what it is now within 50 years because of global warming. This means that our society–along with all others, of course–will be disintegrating within a matter of decades, and today’s social problems will be a thing of the past. Those who do manage to survive will have only one problem: How do I continue to survive?
Great article. I remember the education system took a real dive in the 70′s. I had move from New England to California where the educational system was so poor. Most of the public schools I attended were very substandard. I ended up taking the GED to get out of the toxic brainwashing and dumb down experiment called for by Caspar Weinberger who was appointed as Sec of Health, Education and Welfare by Ronny Reagan (Mr. War on Drugs), and later became Secretary of Defense. It was pure poison. I noticed that drugs started flowing into the schools at this time too.
If I had children, I would home school them. The system is designed to prepare the young for collectivism. It discourages the individual and creates the slave mentality needed to train us as adults to not question authority, get a job and pay your dues.
Instead of APEC, their acronym should be GPES of Globalist Psychopathic Eugenicists Society. Everyone of these corporations are demonic, and should be boycotted.
The problem the teachers face is that for many years they were the white hats. Good public relations, a laudable goal in educating America’s youth, standing up for literacy, the power to make the best of American opportunity.
Juxtapose against that the conduct of the teachers’ unions, who are now perceived as selfish, grasping, unprincipled. The pension obligations that face many states (e.g., California, Illinois, New York, Ohio and others) are not the fault of the average Joe. They are now being perceived as the result of years and years of behind the scenes lobbying by the public “servants”, principally including the teachers. Is it any wonder Michelle Rhee’s logic captured so much attention and adulation and the UFT and the NEA so much opprobrium?
FDR, often thought to be Labor’s champion, even its patron saint, had this to say about unions representing governmental employees:
“Meticulous attention should be paid to the special relationships and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the government. All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations … The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for … officials … to bind the employer … The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives …
“Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of government employees. Upon employees in the federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people … This obligation is paramount … A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent … to prevent or obstruct … Government … Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government … is unthinkable and intolerable.”
Which vision will carry the day? As cities begin to go bankrupt and states totter on the brink of insolvency, we will see.
Siouxlou, Consider for a minute the possibility that ALEC and its backers are not so much interested in driving down teacher benefits, pensions etc as creating a more compliant teacher work force that will better assist in the pacification of each new generation. As I say, at some length, elsewhere in this threat, all this “reform” manifests itself on the kid level as simply all multiple choice all the time. And there are essay and oral answer grading programs on the horizon that will serve the same function, i.e. teaching the young that authority has all the answers, punishments and rewards.
If you have the stamina to look through the excellent links Diane Ravitch provides, you can sort through a mass of ALEC-designed “educational reform” bills and significantly one is designed to downgrade teacher certification requirements. (This fits in well with a spate of recent articles attacking the admittedly poor quality education programs in many universities) The goal is, I think, not so much to get cheaper teachers but to get teachers who will simply hand out and collect test and test prep materials that will then be fed into automated grading systems made by Scantron, Inc. and othe ALEC backers. Not only would highly educated teachers want more money – they also might make problems by questioning the kind of mindless “teaching” designed to even further dumb down the populace. ALEC and its backers want teachers who will function much the same as McDonald employees, purveying a readymade product.
You may well question why ALEC and its backer need an even more dumbed down populace, since this is the same American electorate who can be convinced of almost anything, even the need to send its sons and daughters off to wars generation after generation. Well. Siouxlou, the wealthy and powerful never think they have enough control over the hooples, any more than they ever think they have enough money.
LINK to ALEC model bill designed to lower teacher certification standards:
http://alecexposed.org/w/image…
Mike-
I wouldn’t underestimate the desire of these organizations
to use Charter Schools as way of driving down teacher’s wages. Most regular
public school jobs in California start at the entry level in the 40K range. Many
charter schools start at the entry level around 35K. Furthermore,
regular public schools have a pay scale that is based on years of teaching
experience and education attainment.
While most charter schools list pay as “commensurate with experience,”
which essentially they will pay you what ever they want, or as little as possible.
Furthermore, charter schools usually require much more after
schoolwork, or a longer teaching day. Many make this clear in their job
postings. This equals more work time for less pay. Whatever side you stand on
this issue this undoubtedly drives down wages. Finally, on the benefits side I’ve
actually seen charter in their job postings advertise, “Social Security only,
no pension benefits.”
Sorry about the formatting… Don’t know what caused that??
Interesting that the oldtime multiple choice test company, Scantron, Inc. is on the ALEC taskforce. For all the big talk about learning and accountability, the current so-called educational reform means one thing on the level of kids’ experience: multiple choice tests every day. The vaunted standardized tests are always multiple choice and the prep for such tests consists of model tests,. i.e. multiple choice practice tests. And what classroom instruction occurs consists of going over questions on such model tests. Hence, every day becomes a multiple choice day.
And the dirty little secret of all this multiple choice is that it teaches kids a very simple lesson, no matter what the subject: Those in authority have all the answers – and your job is only to figure out what they want you to say.
So-called experts can quibble about test construction, eliminating cultural biases from tests, core curriculum etc but for kids it all amounts to bowing down to authority that gives you the grades that guarantee everything from keeping your mom off your back to getting into Harvard. Immersion in the multiple choice universe means that your opinion, as expressed in a classroom discussion, an essay or a research paper, has no value.
It’s bad now but will get worse unless stopped, and I think I’ve seen exactly what the model school of the future will look like.
I recently was asked by a former student to consult at a private school that he and his parents had set up a couple years ago: a weekend and evening cram school run by and targeted at one particular Asian immigrant group.
“Reformers” would love this place: It was all multiple choice, all the time, even more than I had imagined possible. Teachers did no more than hand out and collect scantron sheets. Video cameras in each classroom allowed constant monitoring from the office. Teachers were well paid but could be fired without notice if they did not follow prescribed multiple choice scripts.(They wanted me to advise them how student writing could be improved – I told them it was not possible in such an environment)
And this school is, according to my former student, very successful in terms of pushing its students into top high schools and ivy league colleges. The only moment of doubt the owners or parent/clients have experienced is that the school’s grads find it very hard to express any opinion in either speech or writing. But I suppose that won’t matter once even the best colleges switch over to all multiple choice all the time.
Having ranted on about multiple choice, I then came across an article in Education Week referencing a study on automated essay grading programs which may be a new cost-efficient way to replace teachers in that form of assesssment as well. And if text can be graded, so can oral answers or discussion. But the end result is the same: Kids will be taught that authority has the answers, whether you bubble them in on scan sheets, say them aloud or write them in a sentence or paragraph.
Link to the study:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/444162…