Teachers protest border fence.
From the Dallas Morning News:
Protesters against the Texas-Mexico border fence will launch a nine-day march at the Rio Grande today, starting at Roma, Texas, and ending in Brownsville.
The 115-mile march is organized in part by schoolteachers at U.S. border schools who say they don’t want to see a fence cleave through entwined communities.
“The wall represents the militarization of the border, and the border is my home,” said John Moore, an 8th-grade English teacher in Brownsville. “The border is a region, rather than a line and, culturally, there are more similarities between Brownsville and Matamoros, than Brownsville and Dallas.”
Tip of the hat to Brooklynjak.
Planned or coincidence? You make the call.
Andy Rotherham’s anti-union screed in the NY Times on Monday and Rich “Bag-O-Glass” Berman’s goofy anti-union full page ad in the NY Times on Tuesday. You think maybe these two guys meet for lunch?
“Bag-O-Glass” Berman goes after Columbus teachers.
I posted a few days ago about the Rick Berman, the creepy “Bag-O-Glass” salesman who is now organizing a smear campaign against teacher unions.
First up? The Columbus Education Association in Ohio.
The CEA responds:
The recent campaign launched by the Center For Union Facts (CUF) has wrongly placed the highly qualified and hard-working teachers of the Columbus Education Association in its crosshairs with the release of its anti-teacher smear campaign.
Rotherham Watch.
I can’t quit him. Rotherham’s Eduwonk has been boring. But he ruined my coffee this morning. There I was, trying to get ready to face my classes for the day. Reading the Times. And there, next to Krugman and (appropriately) Kristol, was an op-ed piece by Rotherham.
While laws like No Child Left Behind take the rhetorical punches for being a straitjacket on schools, it is actually union contracts that have the greatest effect over what teachers can and cannot do.
And then:
Reformers have long argued that this (the bargained agreement) is an impediment to effective schools. Now, increasingly, they are joined by a powerful ally: frustrated teachers.
Only someone who has never walked into a classroom would dare claim that the greatest effect over what teachers can and cannot do is the bargained agreement.
One of the great things about the internet is the hundreds of blogs with first person teacher accounts of their professional day. Read them. See what role the bargained agreement plays, compared to the external, bureaucratic, politically driven demands on their teaching life.
