An appeals court has decided that the School Board wrongly terminated more than 7,000 teachers after Hurricane Katrina. Those teachers were not given due process, and many teachers had the right to be rehired as jobs opened up in the first years after the storm, the court said in a unanimous opinion.
Public sector workers have been scapegoated as a cause of our poor economy, and neoliberal reforms have targeted public sector unions. But public sector workers are fighting back. Teachers in Lee, Massachusetts rejected merit pay as a protest against education reforms; other unions have begun to flip the script, putting the blame on the 1% and calling for taxing the rich.
From Silicon Valley, the Rocketship chain of charter schools is hoping to expand across the country. It’s backed by some of the biggest names in the tech world and claims high test scores. But what are these schools preparing kids for? And what are the real costs of Rocketship's low-cost model?
Teachers unions are facing tumultuous times, grappling with financial, legal and public-relations challenges as they fight to retain their clout and build alliances, and deal with declines in membership.
Will Rahm Emanuel's effort to establish a privatized neoliberal outpost in Chicago succeed? Not if the ongoing uprising brushfires turn from kindling wood into a contemporary Chicago fire of political resistance. Kari Lydersen, author of "Mayor 1%," tells Truthout Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is representative of the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party, and he's getting significant pushback in his efforts to expand privatization and limit protests.
This is a movement, not a moment...Moral Mondays have really caught fire. It took several months last spring and early summer for the Moral Monday protests to reach a crescendo. While early statehouse rallies in North Carolina started by attracting about 50 protesters, by July thousands of people from around the state were swarming the state capitol. After three consecutive months of action, there had been around 920 arrests for civil disobedience at the weekly rallies.
Strikes, demonstrations and protests are at a record pace in Colombia this year as workers seek a bigger share of wealth generated by the country’s expanding economy. After 50 years of guerrilla warfare, the government’s success in weakening illegal armed groups has drawn investment and rewarded businessmen, while the gap between rich and poor remains considerable, according to the World Bank’s Gini index of income distribution.
The total jobs gap in local public education as a result of the Great Recession and its aftermath is around 389,000 jobs
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