Fred,
Perhaps more than anything else, Madeloni articulated the pure outrage that many of us in the trenches feel over the destruction and intentional starvation of the public education model being perpetrated by Government and Corporate America to facilitate the handover of our kid’s and democracy’s futures to for-profit entities who answer only to share holders.
The game is rigged by politicians and educational bureaucrats who dream of one day sitting at the board-room table. The accountability rules for these testing and school take-over companies are a joke, while the draconian accountability screws for public schools keep getting tightened to ensure failure, take over and privatization. The kids are stats on a spreadsheet, the families are invisible, the communities irrelevant, and the teachers are an annoying expense.
Voting for Madeloni was an act of defiance against the pathetic status quo of the MTA and the masses of my fellow-teachers who are too terrified to “poke the bear” and voice contempt for what is happening to our education system – especially urban schools and poor children. It surely is a declaration of war.
– Pawel Dzienkowski
Fred Klonsky 