Fix School Discipline

Your Child’s Right to Stay In School:  What You Need to Know About School Discipline Students who are suspended or expelled are as much as 5 times more likely to dropout and 3 times more likely to have contact with the juvenile justice system. What rights do you have to help your child stay in school and on a path to success? Join Statewide Education Rights Director Laura Faer and former teacher Elena Fresquez on Thursday, July 16 at 4:30 pm for an interactive webinar for parents, youth, and those who support them about students’ rights in school discipline.  Learn about the legal protections for students, including those with special needs, and how to advocate for yourself or your child.  Find out more about strong alternatives to class and school removal that hold students accountable while also helping improve school success. Join Public Counsel to learn how to protect a young person’s ability to stay in school and advocate for better solutions for youth who are struggling with behavior issues in class and on the playground.

July 16, 2015 Thursday 4:30 PM

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ESEA Reauthorization passes Senate

TODAY, the Senate passed the Every Child Achieves Act. I am so immensely proud of what we achieved together in this legislation.

The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act has been over a decade coming. So I simply wanted to say, "thank you."

I recorded a video message in gratitude for the hard work you just put in for our students: 

Watch it now. Thanks again brothers and sisters for getting us one step closer to a final law. We will be in touch in the fall to get this on the President's desk, but until then, have a restful summer. See you on Twitter! 

- Lily

Lily Eskelsen García
President, National Education Association

Scott Walker's Real record in Wisconsin

Educate for Democracy: Walker’s Budget Undermines Public Education, with ...: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is expected to do two things in the next few days: Formally announce his candidacy for President and sign W...

When we abandon our public schools, we not only abandon democracy, we abandon our children's future.

Gov. Walker has the most far-reaching budget veto powers of any governor, and can literally change the budget line by line. How he uses that veto pen will foretell his national plans as he enters the Republican presidential primary.

In Wisconsin, where we have four years of experience with Walker, we expect him to continue his policies of abandoning public institutions and undermining the middle class. Hopefully, national observers will see through Walker's rhetoric and analyze the realities of his state budget.

[Bob Peterson is a founder of Rethinking Schools magazine and former president of the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association.]

Krugman; This is a Coup. -- Greece

Paul Krugman

Suppose you consider Tsipras an incompetent twerp. Suppose you dearly want to see Syriza out of power. Suppose, even, that you welcome the prospect of pushing those annoying Greeks out of the euro.

Even if all of that is true, this Eurogroup list of demands is madness. The trending hashtag ThisIsACoup is exactly right. This goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief. It is, presumably, meant to be an offer Greece can’t accept; but even so, it’s a grotesque betrayal of everything the European project was supposed to stand for. 

Economist Richard Wolff on Roots of Greek Crisis, Debt Relief & Rise of ...

A Socialist Surge in the U.S.? Bernie Sanders Draws Record Crowds, Praises Greek Anti-Austerity Vote - NationofChange

A Socialist Surge in the U.S.? Bernie Sanders Draws Record Crowds, Praises Greek Anti-Austerity Vote - NationofChange

Socialism and the Sanders Campaign

Forum.  July 24, 2015.    7 PM.
The Sol Collective. Sacramento
Sponsored by Sacramento DSA, the Sacramento Progressive Alliance  and more.

Educate for Democracy: Walker’s Budget Undermines Public Education, with ...

Educate for Democracy: Walker’s Budget Undermines Public Education, with ...: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is expected to do two things in the next few days: Formally announce his candidacy for President and sign W...

When we abandon our public schools, we not only abandon democracy, we abandon our children's future.

Gov. Walker has the most far-reaching budget veto powers of any governor, and can literally change the budget line by line. How he uses that veto pen will foretell his national plans as he enters the Republican presidential primary.

In Wisconsin, where we have four years of experience with Walker, we expect him to continue his policies of abandoning public institutions and undermining the middle class. Hopefully, national observers will see through Walker's rhetoric and analyze the realities of his state budget.

[Bob Peterson is a founder of Rethinking Schools magazine and former president of the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association.]

Bankers Win. Greek People Starved Into Submission

Lacking food, medicines, jobs, Greek government gives in. For Now.

www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/world/europe/greek-debt-talks.html?    

Why the GOP is Hesitant to Denounce Trump's Bigotr...

antiracismdsa: Why the GOP is Hesitant to Denounce Trump's Bigotr...: Why the GOP is Hesitant to Denounce Trump’s Bigotry Posted on July 5, 2015 by Jimmy Franco Sr. Trump has defended his racist atta...

Bankers lose. Greek people win.

Greeks Reject Bailout Terms in Rebuff to European Leaders

The Eurozone is Anti Democratic- Vote No

antiracismdsa: The Eurozone is Anti Democratic- Vote No: Why We Recommend a NO in the Referendum - In 6 Short Bullet Points By Yanis Varoufakis July 1, 2015 Yanis Varoufakis Negotiations have sta...

The Next Effort to Break Teachers' Unions

Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association 

Randi Weingarten

The anti-worker forces that are trying to break our union just got a big break from the United States Supreme Court. This morning, the court agreed to hear the case Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association during its next term.

Make no mistake: This case is not about individual liberty or the First Amendment. It is an outright attack against unions to prevent us from representing our members and using our voices to fight for our families, our schools, our colleges, our healthcare facilities and our communities.

We’re preparing a national campaign to mobilize our members and communities across the country to fight for an America where everyone’s voice matters. Sign up to join when we launch later this summer.

This case would undermine our unions and challenge nearly 40 years of precedent—and the court agreed to hear it barely a year after it dealt a blow to workers with its decision in Harris v. Quinn. In fact, the conservative justices on the court used the Harris v.Quinn ruling to invite cases like this one, showing just how political they really are.

Democracy and the Economic Crisis in Greece

Joseph Stiglitz,
The rising crescendo of bickering and acrimony within Europe might seem to outsiders to be the inevitable result of the bitter endgame playing out between Greece and its creditors. In fact, European leaders are finally beginning to reveal the true nature of the ongoing debt dispute, and the answer is not pleasant: it is about power and democracy much more than money and economics.

Of course, the economics behind the programme that the “troika” (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) foisted on Greece five years ago has been abysmal, resulting in a 25% decline in the country’s GDP. I can think of no depression, ever, that has been so deliberate and had such catastrophic consequences: Greece’s rate of youth unemployment, for example, now exceeds 60%.

It is startling that the troika has refused to accept responsibility for any of this or admit how bad its forecasts and models have been. But what is even more surprising is that Europe’s leaders have not even learned. The troika is still demanding that Greece achieve a primary budget surplus (excluding interest payments) of 3.5% of GDP by 2018.

Walton Family - Walmart- Pushes to privatize public schools

Advocates of education privatization—whether through voucher programs that send tax dollars to private schools or through charter schools—like to market their ideas as "choice" or even as a civil rights struggle. But as soon as you start to follow the money, you see the reality. When you have a new system of education that's being funded by billionaires at the expense of a truly public education system that serves all kids, it's not about choice or civil rights. And when the Walton family, the Walmart heirs who make up four of the 10 richest Americans, is one of the biggest voucher and charter funders out there, it tells you a lot.

The Waltons have been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into remaking American education for decades now, and a new report from In the Public Interest and the American Federation of Teachers connects the dots. On more than one occasion, the staff of Walton-funded advocacy organizations have made the agenda clear: weakening public schools to the point of collapse. That's the project the Walton Family Foundation is pushing with hundreds of millions of dollars, putting its stamp on charter schools and corporate education reform as much as Walmart has put its stamp on big box retail:

antiracismdsa: Greece- This Is What Class War Looks Like

 Greece- This Is What Class War Looks Like: Greek People to Vote July 5 on “Blackmailing Ultimatum” Anastasios Papapostolou  June 26, 2015 Greek Reporter Late Friday night Greek Prim...

The Big Picture: Reinvent Education

SF Teachers’ Union Elects New Leadership

SF Teachers’ Union Elects New Leadership

Our Kids : The American Dream in Crisis

Our Kids: The American Dream In Crisis (2015)

Robert Putnam

A  Preliminary Review by Duane Campbell

This new book is an insightful and well researched analysis  of on the achievement gap, which Robert Putnam  correctly calls an opportunity gap for the current generation of young people.  I was drawn to the book by respect for his prior writing,  Bowling Alone . This new work  is of equal value in synthesizing social science research.  Perhaps it is of more value since we have major institutions-schools- in positions , that could contribute to the rebirth of equal, democratic opportunity.

In Our Kids, Putnam   describes major developments in our schools and our communities - the growing inequality of opportunity for the working class and the poor.

Educational writers have long chronicled several of the key concepts, the role of tracking, of concentrations of poverty and of race. This work excels because it is a very well informed outsiders sociological viewpoint of these issues.  Putnam and research associate Jen Sliva bring together extensive social science data and research to support the  many interpretive suggestions.

This is not the over simplification of many general and popular books, nor the ideological tracts of education’s many critics and neoliberal "reform" advocates. Putnam provides vivid and useful examples combined with a well informed data bases  of social science research  of the most important issues. He builds his arguments upon both individual interviews and the synthesis of an enormous amount of social science research thus combining big and important  ideas with the research to support them.  

President Obama Delivers a Statement on the Shooting in South Carolina

The Charleston Massacre:

antiracismdsa: The Charleston Massacre:: We Must Respond to the Right-wing Attempt to Reframe the Charleston Massacre By Bill Fletcher, Jr. June 18, 2015 BillFletcherJr.com  ...

Public schools and the Public Square

And yet the public square is under attack.

Remarks by Randi Weingarten

Leo talked about the public square as a metaphor for political voice, for robust civil and political life, and for public institutions that create the infrastructure to ultimately grow a shared and fair economy. All are critical to our democracy. All are under assault.

The idea of the public square – like a perfect Norman Rockwell painting or a speakers’ box in a public courtyard where anyone—black, white, rich, or poor—can speak about anything—doesn’t exist anymore.

There is a growing and harmful effort across America to make the public square smaller and smaller and to silence working people and stifle their economic aspirations.

Even the term “public,” once celebrated as a part of our national identity, is under relentless attack from governors like Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, and even Andrew Cuomo. Public services are being privatized and public employees are demonized, laid off and muted. Who would have thought that a Democratic governor with the last name “Cuomo” would say the public education system is a “monopoly” that must be broken up?

Tectonic plates. We are dealing with the equivalent of tectonic plates across America. On one side, we have the deck stacked against working families, attacks on the rights of workers, tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy few. On the other side, we have working families whose wages have been stagnant for decades, who don’t just want to get by; they want to get ahead. They are clamoring for change.

The gap between rich and poor is growing. The American Dream has been eroded and out of reach for too many Americans who are playing by the rules and aspire for a better life. The middle class has been squeezed. People’s lives have been upended by stagnant wages, lingering effects of the greatest recession since the Great Depression, rising household and college costs.

Today, inequality in America has reached historic heights and economic polarization is more extreme than it was during the Gilded Age of the robber barons. Today, the wealthiest 10 percent have reaped the benefits of income gains, while the rest are dealing with stagnant wages. From the mid-1990s to today, income grew 62 percent for the top 1 percent, but just 7 percent for the bottom 99 percent.

Let me try to make this a little more clear:

American CEOs in 2013 earned an average of $11.7 million—331 times the average worker’s salary of $35,293. In 2012, 3.6 million workers earned salaries at or below the federal minimum wage. Corporate executives can legally pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries. And workers across the country have to fight for something very humane—paid sick leave.

The False Dichotomy Between Movement Building and Electoral Politics

By Tom Gallagher

Most people we might think of as being on the American left don’t generally embrace the idea of “American exceptionalism.” There is one apparent exception to this unexceptional point of view, however, at least in some corners of the American left. That is the notion that in the U.S. – unlike any other country with a reasonably democratic system – electoral politics are somehow only an optional part of a serious political movement. The latest expression of this “only in America” point of view comes in response to Senator Bernie Sanders’s declaration of his intention to run in next year’s Democratic Party presidential primaries.

The objections to his candidacy come in at least two variants – “not now” and “never.” The “never” perspective is articulated by David Swanson in hisCounterPunch article, “Invest in Activism, Not Bernie Sanders.” It’s not that Swanson doesn’t like Sanders. On the contrary, although he allows that he has some disagreements with him – which he characterizes as “imperfections” on Sanders’s part – Swanson considers “the contrast with Clinton ... like day to night.” Nevertheless, he pleads, “please do not give him or Hillary or the wonderful Jill Stein or any other candidate a dime or a moment of your life. Instead, join the movement,” referring to people seeking justice on the streets of Baltimore, trying to abolish nuclear weapons in the halls of the United Nations, and doing any number of other valuable things.

This movement, he reminds us, “has always been the driving force for change.” For instance it “gave women the right to vote” and we should support the efforts of those now “struggling to create fair elections through steps like automatic registration in Oregon, and pushing legislation to provide free media, match small donors, give each voter a tax credit to contribute.”

These Students Want an Education

 Children and young adults need to see themselves in the curriculum.  Students, particularly students of color, have low levels of attachment to our communities, to  California and U.S.  civics messages in significant part because the government institution they encounter the most- the schools- ignore the students own history, cultures and experiences. This is not an accident- it was a choice. 

The 1987 California History Social Science  Framework still in use today to guide the selection of  California textbooks   expanded African American, Native American, and women’s history coverage but remains totally inadequate in the coverage of Latinos and Asians. The only significant change between the 1985 and the 2005 adopted Framework was the addition of a new cover, a cover letter, and a photo of Cesar Chavez.

You can help us change this situation.  See here

http://antiracismdsa.blogspot.com/2015/05/steps-toward-inclusive-history-of.html

What are they missing? The history of the Chicano movement.

For example:

The Chicano Movement began in 1965 in Delano, California when Dolores Huerta and Cesar E. Chávez, founders of the National Farm Workers Association (later it became the United Farm Workers union), led a national boycott against table grape growers in the region because they failed to recognize their collective bargaining rights. Chávez, the president of the farm workers union, and the farm worker struggle, became the face of Chicano protest and struggles. While the United Farm Workers union brought national and even international recognition to the plight of Chicanos for labor rights, it had overarching consequences. Many young Chicanas and Chicanos felt connected to the farm worker struggle even though the majority resided in urban areas and had never themselves worked in the California agricultural industry.

The Big Picture: Reinvent Eduction

California Schools get Significant New Funding

California is expected to get $6.7 billion more in revenue than originally anticipated in the January budget, bringing the total budget for K-12 in 2015-16 to $83 billion from all sources, according to Gov. Jerry Brown’s revised budget proposal. Based on how Proposition 98 works, $6.1 billion of that extra state revenue is earmarked for K-12 schools and community colleges – a big win for education.

Check it out here.

Local Control Funding Formula boost

The ​L​ocal ​C​ontrol ​F​unding ​F​ormula will get an additional investment of $2.1 billion, raising the total amount of cash for ​the state’s school finance system to $6.1 billion. That means a $1,000 increase per student on average.

See prior posts on Local Control Funding in Sacramento City Unified.

From www.edsource.org

None of these "reforms" work - they make this stuff up

We've suffered under the factory model of school reform for the past dozen years under No Child Left Untested. The pillars are simple enough. Privatize (vouchers, franchise charters); De-professionalize (fast-track teacher prep, short-term, disposable labor designed to churn in and out with paychecks low and no pension to worry about); Standardize (scripted texts, homogenized lessons, pacing guides to require each teacher to be on the same page on the same day); and above all else: Hit your number. Motivate staff, students, and systems with carrots and sticks, with the goal wrapped around a quota of kids hitting a cut score. Standardized tests are the measure of basic progress. Standardized tests decide if a child is succeeding. Standardized tests decide if a teacher is effective. Standardized tests decide if a school should be closed down. It is a classic industrial model.

There is no science that says this works with children. There is no evidence that elite private or high-performing public schools are elite or high-performing because they use this model. There's no evidence that parents are demanding it. None of those countries described as our "global competition" that out-perform us on international tests use this model. The corporate school model is not driven by science. It is strictly out of the pages of the New England Journal of We Make This Stuff Up.

But numbers are impressive, and too many people think numbers must mean what someone says they mean. Schools compete against each other by test score rankings that declare which ones are making more "adequate yearly progress" than the others. Teachers compete with each other by test score rankings that declare who is more "effective." Students are expected to perform to specifications each spring so we know which will advance and which will repeat third grade. Teacher are incentivized with prizes or threatened with punishments depending on their students' test scores, just as factory workers are incentivized with bonuses or threatened with losing their jobs depending on who is more efficient at moving the product down the line.

Peg with Pen: A Quick Guide to Resisting from Within for Educato...

Peg with Pen: A Quick Guide to Resisting from Within for Educato...: I get asked a lot about what it’s like to teach in the public schools while knowing the truths about corporate education reform. Obvious...



An excellent guide for educators working for justice.

Writer Off Track in Assault on Teachers' Unions

by Duane Campbell

Bill Whalen of the Hoover Institute recounts the difficult issues of riots in our cities and then blames Democrats and public school teachers for the problems. “Officials can no longer ignore Oakland riots.” ( Sac Bee Viewpoints, May 8)

What Whalen  doesn’t say is that the  continuing economic crisis and joblessness among working people- particularly the young, along with mass incarceration  and the school to prison pipeline has left many urban areas- including Oakland-  islands of despair, with  a drug economy, gangs  and nihilism.  Add in cases of police assault  these islands may explode.




Readers should know that the Hoover Institute is one of several conservative “think tanks”.  They fund advocates, often posing as scholars, to write advocacy pieces and semi news items to advance their political positions. They also provide staff and public relations advocates to get their pieces placed in news papers and television.

The problem  of  urban riots is not only the police- although they have a role. The police are the enforcement arm of a brutal and oppressive system.  It is understandable that police get blamed, and they should be held accountable when they use oppressive  police tactics.  However, we should recognize that the police are only the enforcement arm of  exploitive crony capitalism.  The police  are enforcing the rules.


Instead of dealing with the causes of the violence, Whalen uses the crisis to promote one of his favorite subjects – blaming teachers and their unions.  

Opting out of testing mania

Network for Public Education

Today, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights led 11 civil rights groups into a national disagreement with students who have exercised their constitutional political free speech rights and chosen to opt-out of high-stakes testing.

The Network for Public Education supports those who choose to opt out, because we believe these tests are now causing harm to students, and to the cause of educational equity. Seattle teacher Jesse Hagopian has written a response to The Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights’ statement, which the Network for Public Education shares here. He states, “High-stakes standardized tests, rather than reducing the opportunity gap, have been used to rank, sort, label, and punish students of color.”

We support opting out of high stakes tests because:

• There is no evidence that these tests contribute to the quality of education, have led to improved educational equity in funding or programs, or have helped close the “achievement gap”.
• These tests, particularly those associated with the Common Core, have become intrusive in our schools, consuming huge amounts of time and resources, and narrowing instruction to focus on test preparation.
• These tests have never been independently validated or shown to be reliable and/or free from racial and ethnic bias.
• Instead the Common Core exams are being used as a political weapon to claim huge numbers of students are failing, to close neighborhood public schools, and fire teachers, all in the effort to disrupt and privatize the public education system.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Standardized Testing (HBO)

Students First sue California Teachers' Unions

The latest legal assault on the right of the state’s public-sector unions to collect dues was filed in Los Angeles earlier this month by StudentsFirst, the Sacramento-based, national school-privatization organization.

The federal suit, Bain v. California Teachers Association, was brought on behalf of four California public school teacher union members who claim that the state’s current “fair share” rules infringe on their rights by forcing them to choose between paying for union-supported political causes with which they disagree or quitting the union. It seeks to bar unions from collecting dues money earmarked for political purposes as a condition of membership.

At stake are an estimated tens of millions of dollars — and a corresponding political clout — that unions stand to lose if the suit succeeds in making voluntary the 30 percent to 40 percent of dues that members currently pay for political activities.

In addition to California Teachers Association and its parent organization, the National Education Association, the suit names as defendants the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) and its parent, the American Federation of Teachers, as well as United Teachers Los Angeles. (Disclosure: The CTA and CFT are financial supporters of Capital & Main.)

Also being sued are the union locals where three of the teachers work along with the superintendents of Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD), West Contra Costa Unified and Arcadia Unified school districts.

CFT’s Pechthalt

“These folks essentially want to have their cake and eat it too,” CFT president Joshua Pechthalt told Capital & Main. “They disagree, I guess, with all of the union’s political stances, and so they want to be able to opt out of that portion. … It seems pretty clear to me that part of the intent of this suit is to weaken public sector unions.”

Not so, insists StudentsFirst spokesperson Kellen Arno. “I think that all the plaintiffs involved in this case are ardent supporters of the union. They want to be a part of the union. They appreciate all the representation that the union provides. I think they just don’t want to be coerced into also supporting a political agenda.”

The plaintiffs include StudentsFirst activists April Bain, a math teacher with LAUSD, and Bhavini Bhakta, an Arcadia Unified teacher who has testified on behalf of StudentsFirst in the past on proposed state education legislation, and testifed for plaintiffs in last year’s Vergara trial, which successfully challenged the state’s teacher tenure laws.

The high-powered corporate law firm that brought that suit, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, is also behind Bain.

Also named as plaintiffs are LAUSD teacher Kiechelle Russell, a member of Educators 4 Excellence (a Gates Foundation-funded anti-teachers union group), and Clare Sobetski, a Teach for America high school teacher with the West Contra Costa Unified School District.

California law requires that a union represent all workers at a so-called agency shop in matters of collective bargaining and workplace grievances, regardless of membership status. In return, the union can charge nonmembers a fair share of costs incurred under its statutory obligation to represent them in collective bargaining.

The Bain lawsuit, however, contends that by forcing dissenting teachers to forego union membership and the additional benefits provided by unions for its members, the law represents an unconstitutional First Amendment burden.

“There’s something like 40 years of legal precedent establishing our right to determine the qualifications for membership,” Pechthalt said. “And to that extent, from our perspective, I wouldn’t call this a frivolous lawsuit, but it doesn’t have merit.”

StudentFirst’s Blew

Bain signals the first major attack against teachers unions by StudentsFirst since its founder, former Washington D.C. school superintendent Michelle Rhee, resigned under a cloud last August. She was replaced as the group’s president by Jim Blew, who has worked as an advisor to the Walton family, the owners of Walmart.

The group’s funders represent a who’s who of billionaires and right-wing education reform foundations that include the Walton Family Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, hedge-fund managers David Tepper and Alan Fournier, the for-profit charter school management company Charter Schools USA, and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

Bain also follows on the heels of a barrage of lawsuits brought against unions in the wake of Supreme Court decisions in 2012’s Knox v. Service Employees International Union, Local 1000 and last year’s Harris v. Quinn, in which a conservative majority, led by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., used First Amendment arguments to chip away at state laws requiring public-sector workers to pay union dues.

Those decisions signaled the high court’s willingness to hear test cases aimed at overturning 1977’s landmark Abood v. Detroit Board of Education decision that allowed states to require all public employees represented by unions to pay union dues.

Chief among those cases is Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a suit similar to Bain that was filed in 2013 by the ideologically conservative law firm Center for Individual Rights. The suit was submitted on behalf a group of 10 nonunion teachers challenging Calfornia’s law that authorizes teachers’ unions to charge agency fees to nonmembers. That lawsuit is now on appeal to the Supreme Court.

“Friedrichs is sort of attacking [Abood] head-on,” labor attorney and Century Foundation fellow Moshe Marvit told Capital & Main, “saying that it should be overturned, that the whole agency fee or fair share provision model that Abood sort of formalized in the public sector should be deemed unconstitutional. Bain is not attacking Abood in the same way. It’s saying that a fair share balance should be struck, not necessarily in favor of a right to work, but more in favor of the idea that nonmembers should get all the benefits of membership.”

Marvit: Not optimistic about SCOTUS

The common denominator, Marvit added, is an argument conservatives have been making for a long time — that people shouldn’t have to join a union, and even if the majority votes for it, they shouldn’t have to pay for political activities. That doesn’t mean the logic employed by Bainisn’t convoluted.

“They’re saying it’s your First Amendment right to not be a member,” Marvit noted, “and also a violation of your First Amendment rights not to be a member. You know, that you should still have the right to vote in an organization that you don’t want to be a part of, which is very bizarre. I’m not saying it won’t go anywhere in the courts, but it is a strange First Amendment argument to make.”

For California teachers unions, bearing the brunt of the suits has forced them to reallocate resources away from initiatives aimed at benefiting public schools. But, Joshua Pechthalt adds, it also highlights the competing, market-driven vision for education of the corporate reformers.

“It’s about testing kids to death,” the CFT president declared. “It’s about frankly creating greater disparity between kids from well-to-do families … and the growing number of middle- and working-class kids who are both finding higher education out of reach while attending schools that have, over the last 10 to 15 years, deadened learning.”

With Friedrichs a strong possiblity to land on the Supreme Court’s calendar, Marvit isn’t optimistic about the future of Abood.

“It seems like in Alito’s decisions,” observed the attorney, “he’s very much kind of laying the groundwork for destroying Abood and inviting a case that attacks it head-on. I think that’s what Friedrichs was made for, and I can’t imagine they won’t accept it. And if they do, if they don’t use it to kill Abood, I think they’ll just take one more kind of furious swipe at it. But I think over the next few years, it’ll probably be overturned.”

Reposted from Capital and MainP

California Children in Poverty