Tornado Alley (PROG)

[arizona1]

Well said, Steph. And once again little rooster runs away.

Obama Is Going After Teachers' Unions

by Karen Hedwig Backman
Mon Dec 27, 2010 at 01:23:54 PM PST

His selection of Arne Duncan was, I now realize, an open declaration of war against American teachers and their unions.

One of the first salvos against teachers was fired on January 24, 2010, in Rhode Island:

All teachers fired at Rhode Island school
February 24, 2010|From Randi Kaye, CNN's AC360°
A school board in Rhode Island has voted to fire all teachers at a struggling high school, a dramatic move aimed at shoring up education in a poverty-ridden school district.

In a 5-2 vote Tuesday night, the board approved the plan by Frances Gallo, superintendent at Central Falls School District, to discharge the teachers, administrators and other personnel at Central Falls High School.

The firings, which will be effective at the end of this school year, came after the district said it failed to reach an agreement with the teachers' union on a plan for the teachers to spend more time with students to improve test scores.

http://articles.cnn.com/...

Obama and Duncan applauded this action. They were blind, probably by choice, to the real situation.

The primary problem of education at Central Falls High School was staring everyone right in the face but they chose to ignore it, in favor of Bush's No Child Left Behind:

POVERTY

Some salient Central Falls stats:

a community where median income is $22,000, census figures show....

sixty-five percent of the students are Hispanic, most of them use English as a second language...

half of the students are failing in every subject

Looking realistically at education and poverty:

The effects of poverty on school education
by Roger Crain
Poor children who don't eat a nourishing breakfast will not be able to pay attention in class and so they may become fidgety and may disrupt the class....

Children who grow up in a poor family often must contend with an environment that is unsafe and not conducive to learning. For these children, their lives are often on the line: They are bussed back into neighborhoods where drug dealers defend their "turfs" without the slightest respect for other inhabitants. Also, children must risk their young lives in scrambling to safety if a gunfight breaks out in their vicinity....

Furthermore, these children become the determiners of their fate: They see the bleakness around them and become hardened to that lifestyle. It is a type of indoctrination that they go through; consequently, girls turn to prostitution and boys become runners for the local drug dealers....

http://www.helium.com/...

Get with the program, Mr. President, and quit drinking that right wing Kool-Aid.

The first thing to show that you get the picture, stop with the teaching to tests, Bush's little gambit for enriching corporate entities and moving towards privatization of education.

Teaching to pass tests is not real education.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/12/27/931880/-Obama-Is-Going-After-Teachers-Unions