Have you ever been so disgusted?

The lawyers of the Los Angeles School district are cross examining teacher librarians in an effort to fire all 87 of them. They actually said to the judge "We would like to prosecute them all."

 Treating teachers like criminals. 

And I’ll bet the money they’re spending on lawyers and renting the hall and furniture would pay the salaries of the librarians they’re trying to fire.

Is this what we’ve come to? In an effort to get by on the cheap, all sorts of heinous legal loopholes are being dusted off and trotted out to try to bypass the authority of the state of California. The state of California issues teaching credentials and the state alone has the authority to say who does and does not qualify for that credential. When it’s issued you can legally teach the subjects pertaining to that credential. It expires on 7 years unless it is renewed. 

Now the Governor just announced there is $6 BILLION more dollars in the budget than expected. It’s going to schools. Some this year and some next. I’ll bet LAUSD is getting something in the neighborhood of $50 MILLION DOLLARS. They could stop these hearings right now. 

But they won’t. 

Probably because the politicians have taken over the schools and they have an agenda. 

Break the unions. 

Destroy just cause and make all teachers at will employees. 

Hand over education to charters and for profits.

Of course, using this business model will result in lower test scores and poor quality teachers because only the most incompetent will bother to apply to teach, probably because they’ve failed at everything else and think it’s babysitting with a lot of time off. They’ll quit in a year or two and the process will start over again. There *will* be a teacher shortage but salaries will not be raised to attract applicants. No pensions. No healthcare. (Because you’re part time.) 

Your politicians won’t care because their kids are in private schools. Likewise the über wealthy won’t care because their kids are in private schools. The Republicans want a population that is illiterate and easy to manipulate and suppress. They want to replace illegals with U.S. citizens that will take any job for any pay. That is where this is all going.

After a decade of the for profit education failure. BILLIONS will be spent trying to restore and rebuild a public education system that was NOT failing to begin with. It will take 20-30 years to try to rebuild public education. Maybe this time the public, politicians and the media will respect teachers as a profession. Maybe this time the public and politicians will listen to the experts: TEACHERS!

But I doubt it.

The Shameful attack on Public Employees

The Shameful attack on Public Employees
by
Robert Reich, Fmr. Secretary of Labor; Professor at Berkeley; Author, Aftershock: ‘The Next Economy and America’s Future’

In 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life. Eventually Memphis heard the grievances of its sanitation workers. And in subsequent years millions of public employees across the nation have benefited from the job protections they’ve earned.

But now the right is going after public employees.

Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don’t want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they’d like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.

It’s far more convenient to go after people who are doing the public’s work — sanitation workers, police officers, fire fighters, teachers, social workers, federal employees — to call them “faceless bureaucrats” and portray them as hooligans who are making off with your money and crippling federal and state budgets. The story fits better with the Republican’s Big Lie that our problems are due to a government that’s too big.

Above all, Republicans don’t want to have to justify continued tax cuts for the rich. As quietly as possible, they want to make them permanent.

But the right’s argument is shot-through with bad data, twisted evidence, and unsupported assertions.

They say public employees earn far more than private-sector workers. That’s untrue when you take account of level of education. Matched by education, public sector workers actually earn less than their private-sector counterparts.

The Republican trick is to compare apples with oranges — the average wage of public employees with the average wage of all private-sector employees. But only 23 percent of private-sector employees have college degrees; 48 percent of government workers do. Teachers, social workers, public lawyers who bring companies to justice, government accountants who try to make sure money is spent as it should be — all need at least four years of college.

Compare apples to apples and and you’d see that over the last fifteen years the pay of public sector workers has dropped relative to private-sector employees with the same level of education. Public sector workers now earn 11 percent less than comparable workers in the private sector, and local workers 12 percent less. (Even if you include health and retirement benefits, government employees still earn less than their private-sector counterparts with similar educations.)

You can read more HERE.