And this man wants to be President? Seriously? Now he’s deliberately using a false claim about a young teacher who was laid off after he became governor in order to bash Wisconsin’s teachers and its public education system. Here are the details:
Scott Walker blatantly lied when he claimed a young teacher he descibed as Wisconsin’s 2010 Teacher of the year (she did did not win the award Walker attributed to her) was laid off because of Wisconsin’s rules regarding seniority. Walker used this young teacher’s layoff as an excuse to bash Wisconsin’s public education system.
Claudia Klein Felske, one of the Wisconsin teachers of the Year for 2010-2011, wrote an open letter calling Scott Walker out for his blatant lies.
Ms. Felske’s response lays bare the mendacity of Scott Walker, and the real culprit behind the deterioration of Wisconsin’s public education system -Scott Walker, in case you had any doubt:
I was both surprised and bewildered last week when I saw a news clip of you stumping in Iowa about Megan Sampson, whom you called “The [2010] Outstanding Teacher of the Year in my State.” This was baffling to me since in 2010, I was named Wisconsin High School Teacher of the Year (Maureen Look-Ainsworth, Middle School Teacher of the Year; Peggy Wuenstel, Special Services Teacher of the Year; and Michael Brinnen, Elementary Teacher of the Year). In a most humbling ceremony, we were each surprised at our respective schools by State Superintendent Tony Evers and later honored at the State Capital as the Wisconsin Teachers of the Year. […]
Verified by multiple news sources, it turns out that Megan Sampson did win an award in 2010, but it was the Nancy Hoefs Memorial Award given by a relatively small organization of Wisconsin English teachers (WCTE) for “an outstanding first year teacher of language arts.” She was one of less than a dozen teachers across the state who self-nominated for this award.
You failed to mention these details as you used Sampson’s lay-off from her first year teaching position as an opportunity to bash Wisconsin schools on the national stage. You blamed the seniority system for Sampson’s lay-off when, in good conscience, you should have done some serious soul searching and placed the blame squarely on your systematic defunding of public education to the tune of $2.6 billion that you cut from school districts, state aid to localities, the UW-System and technical colleges.
Ms. Felske then lays out, point by horrific point, a few of the steps Walker and his Republican controlled legislature took to dismantle “the excellent public education Wisconsin has always been known for” and to vilify public school teachers, blaming them for all the ills that his own actions created. It is worth reading the entire letter, so please do.
Here’s is how Wisconsin’s Middle School Teacher of the Year for 2010-2011, Claudia Klein Felske ends her letter to Walker, the current flavor of the day in the GOP field running for President:
Your tenure as Governor has demonstrated nothing less than a systematic attempt to dismantle public education, the cornerstone of democracy and the ladder of social mobility for any society.
How our paths have diverged from that August afternoon in 1986. True story: it was freshman orientation just outside Memorial Union. We were two of a couple thousand new Marquette University freshman wistful about what our futures held. Four years later, I graduated from Marquette and later became Wisconsin High School Teacher of the Year. You never graduated, and you became the Governor of the State of Wisconsin bent on dismantling public education. Ironic, isn’t it? Situational irony at its best. I’d laugh if its ramifications weren’t so utterly destructive for the state of Wisconsin.
Sincerely,
Claudia Klein Felske
2010-2011 Wisconsin High School Teacher of the Year
Marquette University Class of 1990
The young teacher Walker lied about, Megan Sampson has also spoken out against Walker using her story to advance his agenda:
Megan Sampson wasn’t looking for attention.
But the English teacher at Wauwatosa East High School sure got some Thursday when she was singled out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece by Gov. Scott Walker, who used Sampson’s story to champion ending collective bargaining in Wisconsin. […]
Sampson said Thursday she felt uncomfortable with the governor using her experience to push an agenda.
“My opinions about the union have changed over the past eight months, and I am hurt that this story is being used to make me the poster child for this political agenda,” Sampson said. “Bottom line: I am trying to do my job and all this attention is interference and stress for me.”
Good for her.
By today’s standards Scott Walker should be suspended w/o pay for 6 months.
Lucky for him he doesn’t work for NBC.
WSJ Editor: “Fact check? Don’t bother. I’m sure it’s fine. When’s lunch?”
Well, yes, because the voters of Wisconsin twice failed to remove him, because he continues to get Koch money, and because he is acceptable to Wall Street.
Scott Walker is the most dangerous Republican candidate running for 2016. He suffers from Democrats and their consultants underestimating his and his advisors political skills and how far over the line the Koch media factory is willing to go to elect him.
He won in the one of the remaining union bastions in the US. He took apart the public sector unions (minus the police unions) with nary a whimper from Republican teachers. He has successfully dodged accountability for the corruption in his reign as Milwaukee County county executive. And he successfully shut down one of the largest early protests of 2011. A protest that extended for well over a year and gave the hint of the future repression of Occupy protests.
Nails, Head, Hitting dead on.
Scott Walker is the only Republican who could possibly win the White House.
Not to dismiss the Koch money that has flowed to Walker, but that has been in addition to a substantial amount of WI big money and almost 100% control of WI media (newspapers, radio, and TV) by WI big money.
THD, agree with your main point but I have a few quibbles:
Maybe more of a “former” bastion, or at least to be accurate one would have to note the relative nature of the word “bastion”. Wisconsin once was a significant manufacturing center but those days are gone and with them most of the private-sector unions. Those that remain are anemic, and growing moreso as older members age out (and are not replaced by younger members) and unionized shops close (or are replaced by non-union shops).
I would not go that far, and I spent a lot of time gathering signatures for the recall election in 2012. A lot of nominal Republicans, both teachers and others, signed those petitions.
He has been successful but his success owes a lot to the legal strategy of powerful and well-funded Koch allies who have his back. Their approach has been to go to war with the prosecutors who were investigating Walker and the regulatory agency which oversees the election. But in general you’re right, he has nothing to fear from the prosecutors.
He didn’t really “shut down” anything — once the Republicans figured out a legal way to ram the “budget repair” bill through the legislature without the requirement of a super-majority voting in favor, the relevance of the protests was lost. He won a tactical victory in the end but it cost him three precious weeks to do it.
Possibly true. Walker’s biggest strength is that he has figured out how to unite de-classed and downwardly-mobile white workers with the nouveau-riche strivers and far-right zealots that make up the backbone of the Republican party. In the main, he does this by appeals to white privilege as opposed to the culture-war agenda of politicians such as Santorum and Huckabee. It’s a political program that has not gotten much traction outside of the South historically but if it works there, there’s no reason it can’t work elsewhere and for this reason alone Walker is indeed a politician to watch. He could be a formidable candidate.
It also has to be said that the Republicans have gained a lot in Wisconsin due to the miserable and pathetic condition of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Walker has the Democrats in a box: if the Democrats were to try to make inroads against the united front of white workers and right-wingers that he has put together, they would have to come up with a program that would appeal to working-class people as working-class people. But the Democrats here have little or no sense of what such a program would look like, nor much desire to figure one out. In that way, they are not much different from the Democrats nationally, and Walker is positioned to exploit what amounts to an ideological power vacuum.
By contrast, Walker’s biggest weakness is the combination of his naivete and his arrogance. While he’s slick and he’s clever, he is by no means very smart so he has surrounded himself with people who make him look good and who tell him what he wants to hear. He hasn’t done much with his life other than to figure out how to increase his own personal power, by means of screwing people less fortunate than himself. That’s never the path to wisdom, but to success? Well, he hasn’t done bad for himself so far…