Campaign kick-off poster for Tim Meegan.
In the previous post, right-wing columnist Walter Todd Huston attacks Chicago teacher Tim Meegan for giving “a speech rife with communist buzz words and (insisting) that a violent revolution ala the revolution that ushered communism into Russia in the last century was coming unless people adopted his left-wing ideas.”
Tim sends along a transcript of the speech Huston refers to.
– Tim Meegan is a Chicago Teacher and candidate for Chicago Alderman in the 33rd Ward.
Fred,
Here is the full text of my speech. Clearly I’m not calling for violent revolution:
My name is Timothy Meegan, I am a father of a CPS student and a teacher at Roosevelt High School.
The American Legislative Exchange Council is a group of corporate lobbyists and state legislators who meet away from the public eye to draft and implement laws that benefit the super-rich at the expense of workers, health care, education and the environment. Today I’d like to address their work in dismantling the public education system in Chicago.
ALEC is active in privatizing the public school system at the expense of the taxpayer and the student. “The Innovation Schools and School Districts Act” was approved by the ALEC Board of Directors on August 27, 2009. It creates a new classification of school district called “Districts of Innovation” that adopt new ways of allocating resources.
Many of the ideas of the venture philanthropy Broad Foundation and education privatization think tank CRPE can be found in the ALEC bill, and are now familiar to CPS parents as we are experiencing the roll out of these policies. For example:
• Modifying the length of the school day and school year
• New curriculum, assessments, and standards such as common core
• To encourage school districts…to create and manage a portfolio of schools, like an investment portfolio
• To encourage school districts and public schools to find new ways to allocate resources, including through implementation of specialized school budgets, like student based budgeting
• To encourage local school communities and principals to provide greater control over levels of staffing, personnel selection and evaluation, scheduling, and educational programming
• Interestingly, it also says…
• On and after the date on which the state board designates a school district as a district of innovation, any collective bargaining agreement shall include a term that allows…the school district to waive any provisions of the collective bargaining agreement identified in the innovation plan as needing to be waived to implement its identified innovations.
CPS is a member of the “League of Innovative schools”, a group of 32 school districts and technology and curriculum vendors looking to transform what they see as the “education market” valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars. According to their organizational charter “The market is highly disaggregated. The buyer in education is often the individual school district, which means there are more than 14,000 distinct buyers. Furthermore, each buyer has diverse curricula, learning standards, procurement idiosyncrasies and purchasing cycles.
These challenges make it difficult to develop and identify effective products and services and implement them at scale. The League aims to alleviate these barriers, by“…designing new ideas to improve the uptake of education technologies within districts. This will involve
identifying barriers to innovation and the procurement of new tools within and across districts, and working together to pilot new approaches to those barriers.”
Their sponsors stand to make billions of dollars and include Apple, CISCO, Carnegie Corporation, Discovery channel education, Follett corporation, Gates Foundation, Pearson, Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation, and the US Dept of Education. They are pushing an education system where the role, professional judgment, and the need of flesh and blood teachers is greatly reduced by delivering a standardized curriculum preloaded on tablet computers. Common core is a prerequisite for transforming school districts into a vast, new technology market.
We are witnessing the destruction of the public education system that made America the richest and most powerful country in the world. It is happening because super wealthy bankers and hedge fund operators have decided that cannibalizing public institutions is the fastest and safest way to enrich themselves without actually working for a living like the rest of us. The mechanism for that is charter school investment and the lever for radical change are organizations like ALEC.
The parking meters, the skyway, the Port of Chicago and now the public schools are being rapidly sold off against the best interests of the taxpayers. In each instance the taxpayer had to pay inflated prices for an equivalent or inferior service. It will be the same with the public schools if they succeed, because education is a social service, not a business, and the profit motive distorts outcomes for children.
The rich seem to think that the only purpose of government is to protect their right to accumulate wealth and to safeguard their property. But as wealth trickles up and accumulates in the hands of the few, government serves another purpose- to redistribute wealth, so that everyone who works hard has a shot at the American dream. Groups like ALEC subvert this function by hijacking the legislative process and by privatizing our public resources. Without that function, history has shown us that insurrection, often through violence, is inevitable.
Thirty years ago during the cold war we were led to believe that democracy and the free market were interdependent. That one could not exist without the other. In 2013 it is clear the free market is becoming an impediment to democracy, and groups like ALEC are showing us this is the case.
So I am here today to say “NO!” ALEC is not welcome in Chicago! Men like Jeb Bush are not going to make education policy decisions for our students in our city! Our children’s education is too important to be sold to the highest bidder! The promise of public education, the foundation of American democracy, one system for all students; rich, poor, of all religions, cultures, and colors, is too sacred to our national identity to be snuffed out for the profits of the 1%.
Thank you.
Fred Klonsky 