Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Happy May Day, Especially for K-12 Teachers


May Day is an ancient holiday commemorating spring that was appropriated by American workers in the nineteenth century as their International Workers' Day.

Today on May 1 I would like to acknowledge and honor all those workers, especially teachers, demonstrating for fair pay and working conditions in an environment of declining living standards for the vast majority of the workers in industrialized nations.

Teachers everywhere who strive to enlighten and support their students deserve recognition and honor, but in the US we compensate our teachers less on average than just about every other profession. We demand teachers' selfless devotion to our children and then marginalize their needs and educational concerns.

I cannot think of another job that demands so much and pays so little in return.

There are complex reasons for the lack of affirmation of teachers, ranging from our general societal de-valuation of children to the gender of the majority of K-12 teachers.

Our unwillingness to value the future is encoded in our willingness to demand teachers work for sub-standard wages under increasingly stressful and dangerous conditions.

If we truly loved our kids and were truly committed to a better future for them we would pay our teachers more and support education more generally.

Demonstrating civilly, in the name of the future and for the love of our children, is among the most visible ways of promoting change:





6 comments:

  1. No child left behind from shrub, has destroyed education in america. Many of those programs are still in place.The test based metrics of most k12 schools, have turned many americam schools, into hostile work-environments. Teachers require masters degrees and yet, many times now, their contracts are renewed on ayear to year basis. Teachers who have moved close to a school or to a rural area,may have no idea where they will be next year. The ultimate neo-feudalism. Teachers have more students now in each class, than ever before. More workload. More stress, more kids and parents to deal with. Many are not paid better for it.
    Teachers have more students that are not fluent in english. Students, that have to be brought up to speed or, a good teacher is canned based, on the depressed testing metrics of that teachers class.
    The pressure is hard to imagine.

    Many teachers have to buy their own teaching supplies. They buy supplies for students as well.
    The republicans have been trying to ruin the public education system in america since reagan. A couple of the recent mass killers, went to so called christian schools.
    A relative got a job as a math teacher and, basketball coach, at a publicly financed charter junior high school. The school is o owned by a saudi arabian. It had little or no supplies and, no yext books.
    The school has no gym. The basketball team practices in the teachers parking lot.
    That is the republican and betsy devos's vision for public education in America and, it is getting worse. What a sad state america is in. When they privatise and ruin the postal service, close all the va hospitals, make all seniors and disabled homeless, steal social security, destroy what is left of crappy medicare, will the republicans and billionairs be happy? Probably not

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  2. Bush made the marcos of the philipines, the stalin purges, the murderous ex-dictator of romania, idi amin all look good.

    He, and his cabal, are the most brutal, evil, blood-thirsty genocidal, bunch in history.

    6000 years of antiquities destroyed in iraq, while i listened to the radio, during the iraq invasion. That evil fuk was bragging about it. Fallujah, ruined forever, by radioactive poison.
    10 generations, or more with hideous birth defects.
    1 million murdered. The rest in iraq butchered, tortured, terrorized.

    Most people in murica, were totally fucked over emotionally, financially, physically, when the bush monsters were in office. Lied to, ripped off, spied on, emotionally and physically ruined!

    Fuko the clown is working on a close second. The degenrate bastard bush, and his minions threw america to a bunch of greedy, blood crazed dogs and sharks. Now fuko is doing the same thing, as if obamy,the cia spook, was not bad enough

    Many of the same devils are back w fuko. The abomination scooter libby pardoned. The degenerate devil netanyahu never goes away, or gives up. The evil fuk trump, is rubbing our noses in the demon bush's abominations. He is doing it a million times worse, than the cia fuker, obama ,and hillcrats were. It is like a never ending, ever worsening-nightmare.


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  3.  Fuko the clown is a continuation of bush.. Be careful of being sucked into cults, cults of personalities, wats not on tv, mind- warping mind fuks, wats on tv, Human monkeys are pack animals, like dogs. Most pay too much attention, to what they percieve, as the alpha monkeys. The talking head monkeys on tv, who spit out the same shit in different ways and are considered ideological opposites. The preacher who tells ya the way it is, cause the bible says so. The nucular physics monkey who says radioactive shit is ok, and u believe him cause he passed calculus.




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  4. Why do repuklikans base their politics and morality on tearing people down. Blacks, millenials, women. Just evil goddamned devils

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  5. https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/02/privatization-is-killing-us-dispatches-from-the-capitalist-war-on-society/



    This is what the neoliberal, hillcrat rahm emmanuel has done in privatizing public school systems in Chicago. 
    Total privatization at the taxpayers expense is what republicans want to do and worse, everywhere.

    "Children, teachers, and rat feces

    Let’s start with Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago, jewel of neoliberalism. In February 2014, the Chicago Public Schools decided to outsource management of custodians to Aramark and SodexoMAGIC. The rationale for privatization is supposed to be that it cuts costs and improves “efficiency” or effectiveness. Left unsaid is the means by which costs are cut: primarily from the fact that private companies have a freer hand than government in treating employees viciously. It’s



    Tim Cawley, the chief administrative officer behind CPS’s decision to outsource custodial management,claimed it would indirectly improve “family and community engagement”—which in a sense it did, since parents have felt compelled to volunteer to clean up bathrooms and classrooms. Because of cutbacks in the number (and the pay) of janitors, it has been left to parents and teachers to clean up pools of urine in bathrooms, feces smeared on walls (in preschools), clogged toilet bowls, enormous amounts of trash, rat droppings, and the like. Toilet paper and soap supplies have repeatedly run out in many schools, forcing teachers to buy supplies themselves. (In some schools, students have been asked to bring in their own toilet paper, tissues, soap, and paper towels.) Leaky ceilings, cockroach infestations, rotting floors, outbreaks of bed bugs, exposed asbestos, the presence of dust and grime aggravating respiratory illnesses, and rotting garbage do not exactly “result in an enhanced learning environment,” despite assurances"

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  6. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/05/01/dcccs-mind-games-and-ballad-roy-moore?


     The tactics of the repuklicans and hillcrat corporatists that have ruined our country. They are the 20 or 35 % of americans that are the richest, gulp the most resources, and have the most power.they despise us. They conider us exploitable and disposable yet, we are the many

    Change Is Dangerous. This is a manipulative vulnerability mind game, used by status quo-defenders whenever they want to obstruct initiatives that could interfere with their ambitions and the established order that serves them so well. It’s a prominent appeal whether we’re talking about tax increases for the wealthy (new investments stifled!), minimum wage hikes (forced layoffs!), new regulations to address climate change (U.S. businesses unable to compete!), reductions in mass incarceration (crime waves!), or gun control measures (defenseless citizens!). For the DCCC, their own evidence-free claims are similar: Support for progressive candidates in our primaries will catastrophically backfire and leave everyone worse off when the GOP wins the general election.
    They’re Misguided and Misinformed. With this distrust mind game, political elites depict their opponents as naively wrongheaded, arguing that they lack an adequate appreciation of complex issues. So, we’re told that reformers don’t understand the real causes of the problems they seek to fix, and that their proposed remedies will only make matters worse. When these negative characterizations stick, the public becomes less likely to mobilize in support of change agents because we doubt their credibility. This ploy became standard operating procedure in the 1%’s campaign to discredit Occupy Wall Street, and it remains a familiar tactic aimed at marginalizing opposition to overreaching government policies. In a similarly disingenuous manner, DCCC leaders portray themselves as the pragmatic experts and progressive hopefuls as the unsophisticated novices who don’t merit the party’s support.

    Resistance Is Futile. When it’s successful, this helplessness mind game squelches the political mobilization necessary to challenge an unjust status quo. Psychologically, if we feel our actions are futile, that to persevere is a waste of time and energy, sooner or later we stop trying. Without perceiving some reasonable likelihood of success, the natural response is to abandon the fight. In the broader context, we see this appeal used by one-percenters to perpetuate racial inequities in education and incarceration, to exploit low-wage workers, and to exercise control over our electoral politics. For the DCCC, this same appeal is used to demoralize, ostracize, and ultimately sideline progressive candidates who dare to disobey the leadership’s rules about who’s allowed to run and who isn’t.

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