This song has nothing to do with the post below.
It’s a bluesy little evening here in Philadelphia, where it looks like a royal shit storm has broken over public education as the School Reform Commission just unilaterally tore up the teachers’ contract, and did away entirely with health benefits for retired teachers, all in a seventeen minute secret meeting that deliberately excluded parents. And then, OF COURSE, these Shining Examples of Concern for The Children held a press conference that excluded both the press and the parents. Oh and by the way:
The contract stalemate between the SRC and the PFT has been going on for 21 months, so why take this vote in such a rash and arrogant fashion on this particular morning, October 6, 2014? Could it be because it’s exactly 29 days before Pennsylvania votes on whether to keep Gov. Corbett — who appointed the majority on the five-member SRC — or ditch him for Democrat Tom Wolf.
Do you remember that it was just last year that a Republican firm took a secret poll and used the report to urge Gov. Corbett that there was only one way that the foundering, unpopular governor could restore his image on education issues: To confront the Philadelphia teachers union. Now, with Corbett in the political fight of his life and losing badly, the school commission led by the governor’s appointees is starting a fight with the Philadelphia teachers’ union.
What a remarkable coincidence!
You guys who have been wanting to see some anger out of me, it looks like you might get it after all. Philadelphia, along with Chicago and New Orleans, has been one of the major battlegrounds between the teachers unions and the bullshit “reform” movement, which has lined the pockets of duplicitous, lying kitchen scum like Michele Rhee and her ilk for decades.
Philadelphia’s schools have had funding problems for years, because the state is one of the very few that does not have a fair funding formula for public education. We ALMOST had one when Governor Ed Rendell left office. But because the clowns at the state Democratic Party -a diseased brain trust of goons, simpletons, and thick-skulled fuckknuckles if I have ever seen one- ran a boring unknown candidate with the charisma of dead manatee, we ended up with Tom Corbett, who promptly threw the formula out the window, and cut public education spending.
The state-controlled SRC, which has run Philadelphia’s district for a decade and has hardly made a secret of it’s hostility to public education and in particular the teachers union, has screwed the pooch even worse than when the city ran the schools. Instead of reflecting on their own failures, they decided to publicly blame the parents and children. Or, as noted Philadelphia school reform grifter Mark Gleason once put it “Dump the losers.”
Here are the faces of the child-hating toadies of the school reform movement. These are the people who closed more than 80 public schools, primarily impacting low-income minority youth; laid off thousands of staff, including nurses and counselors, and quite possibly leading to the death of a young girl from asthma; and has now decided, like the brain-dead golem it is, to try to crush the union. One of them, Bill Green, thinks he’s going to be mayor someday: this is never going to happen. Not now.
I could go on and on -just google charter school corruption Philadelphia and enjoy the results.
These are the worst people in the world. They are lower than pig vomit. And if you think I sound angry, watch as this snowballs through the week. This one’s gonna get ugly.
