Teachers at Cesar Chavez Prep will be the first teachers at a charter school in the District to unionize.
Teachers at the Paul Public Charter School in Washington DC are attempting to organize a union. If successful, they’d be the first unionized charter employees in the nation’s capital. Across the country, charter administrators and board members have generally fought union efforts.
While it is doubtful that US President-elect Donald Trump ever read George Orwell's 1984, Trump's cabinet choices appear to come right out of the doublethink that ruled Orwell's dystopian society. In Orwell's book, the Ministry of Plenty rationed essentials while the Ministry of Truth manufactured falsehoods. Trump's choice for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is perhaps the most extreme of Trump's cabinet nominees.
Betsy and Dick DeVos come from a family with a $5.1 billion net worth. Mother Jones called the DeVos clan "the new Kochs."
The No on 2 victory offers a ray of hope to union members and public education activists, even as they grapple with the news of Trump’s presidential win. Building power locally will help not just on the statewide education fights, Madeloni points out, but also in the big picture.
Senator Elizabeth Warren and Mayor Martin Walsh of Boston have correctly noted that charter schools are draining off enormous sums of money from already-underfunded public schools. But an even greater loss may be the draining-off of parents who no longer have a stake in advocating for the schools from which they’ve chosen to depart. Who will stand up for the children at the schools they've left behind?
“They have targeted Massachusetts with the idea that if they can win here, it makes the road to privatization across the country easier,” Massachusetts Teachers Association President Barbara Madeloni says. “Blowing this up would really be a feather in their cap.”
With a statewide referendum looming in November, Massachusetts voters will have to decide just how much school privatization they're willing to bear.
Public schools in recent years have sustained assaults from believers in the privatization of the public education system. The powers that be plan a data-based reinvention of teacher education that will require the closing, or reinvention of colleges of teacher education. If these plans go through, a majority of the nation's teachers and teacher educators could lose their jobs in the next 10 years, replaced by people who will largely be temp workers-making minimum wages
Success Academy, New York City’s largest charter school network, loses more than 10% of its enrolled student population each year once testing starts, compared to 2.7% at nearby schools
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