ACCOUNTABILITY IN OUR EDUCATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE IS NEEDED... BUT NOT IN OUR CLASSROOMS!! It is a national disgrace. From the Federal level (Department of Education, including its meddling Secretary) to the State levels (Education Boards and other State meddling contraptions) to the local (supposedly Independent but not really) School Districts, the SYSTEM has a powerful WASTING organization, which stops before entering the classrooms with the real students and teachers. Backroom deals with contractors, suppliers, developers, and publishers, plus a overinflated bureaucracy built to police itself, the waste is unimaginable... BUT, we want accountability laid on our students and teachers... Really? Lets look at our history... back in 1863, yes, our Civil War period, in response to a call from the California Superintendent of Public Instruction, John Swett, for a teachers institute, about one hundred teachers gathered in San Francisco, resulting in the formation of the California Educational Society. In 1875, the organization changed its name to the California Teachers Association. It was the first professional association of teachers in our country. It was not a union, actually they didnt get the right to act as a union until California K-14 educators obtained the right to bargain collectively in 1975 when the CTA-sponsored Educational Employment Relations Act, also known as the Rodda Act, was signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown. But long before that the teachers had won, in 1866, a law providing free public schools to California children. A year later, public funding was secured for schools that educated nonwhite students. More early victories established bans on using public school funding for sectarian religious purposes (1878-79); free textbooks for all students in grades 1-8 (1911); the first teacher tenure and due process law (1912); and a statewide pension, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (1913). Two years later (1915) the teachers were essential to the efforts to outlaw child labor in the state and enact other protections for children. Later they labored to strengthen the teacher due process law (1921). While the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 made collective bargaining a lawful, protected activity in the private sector, it did not include public workers or teachers. Teachers had to wait until Wisconsin passed the nations first public employee bargaining law (1959). The victory in California was short lived, as Ronald Reagan marched into the White House, the Teachers become the target of the anti-union efforts plus the school voucher programs championed by the privatization movement counting with the complicity of GHWB. Meanwhile, between the Civil War and Ronald Reagan, our Public Schools churned educated citizens who built our great economy and made the USA the most powerful superpower on Earth. The undermining of the system began under Ike Eisenhower as a consequence of the drive of integration, to become an economic battleground when the teachers rose against the War in Vietnam and the resurrection of Fascism under Nixon. The GOP response was to straighten the power of the educational bureaucracy over the students and teachers. Which in no time led to an environment of corruption and warring feudal clientages... thus feeding the excuses for those who were opposed to a universal public school predicated on an effective separation of state and church. The teachers had no idea what forces were working against them and were slow to react. Then the evil of accountability got introduced by the Bush dynasty, and we are now witnessing how the game got stacked up against our children... We are waking up. And we will fight back.
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 18:54:04 +0000
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