Bold Progressives details the Chicago’s broken promises and their push to privatize and dumb down education. The teachers are fighting back. The Chicago teachers strike is justified and important and highlights huge and growing fissures in the Democratic Party between the rank and file, who mostly support unions, and the overlords at the top, who abandoned unions decades ago.
- Powerful outside interests worked with Rahm to cripple CTU’s ability to strike (they failed)
- Rahm refuses to pay teachers what they were promised
- The city won’t agree to limit the number of kids in classrooms in the contract
- Rahm is intent on shifting funds to untested and unproven charter schools
Naturally, those fighting Democrats at the top, like Obama and Rahm, are doing whatever they can to to minimize the power of unions and to make education controlled by corporations. This from a party that used to pride itself in supporting unions.
The program fits perfectly with the corporate reform agenda of destroying job security for teachers, privatizing public schools, testing everything, and turning whatever can be quantified into a statistic, no matter how disconnected from the realities of teaching children.
Does anyone actually think such a plan will create better educated students?