I was pleased to encounter as I walked down Broadway today toward Union Square a procession of teachers marching uptown in support of their striking Chicago brethren.
Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel is among the Democratic politicians who are now pushing the same scam as the Republicans. Public institutions are torpedoed, defunded and undermined; then the public is then told by the politicians responsible for the sabotage that there is something intrinsically inferior about institutions that are public, and that they must be replaced by corporate-controlled private entites.
Emanuel has guaranteed that poor neighborhoods in Chicago receive less school funding than wealthier ones, while radically expanding the infiltration of charter schools throughout the city. He is continuing to scapegoat teachers who must do the hard work of educating students in a straitened environment, trying to paint their union as the big bad woolf, as Jeb Bush tried to do at the Republican convention.
Does the US really need a more rigidly standardized, test-dominated, education system? Is this how critical and creative thinking is fostered?
And is this really what the Democratic party wants to encourage? How long can this party continue to foster people like Emannuel and retain its own principles and identity?