Teachers and activists: Keeping the ‘public’ in education

“Everything “public” has been blurred with “private” for some time. Just as public television and radio is largely funded by corporate sponsors and corporate matching funds at pledge time, a community college such as mine has various wings of its educational funding that serve as labs for specific corporations and industries. Public and private money gets blurred.”
— Danny Alexander, (Teacher in the Kansas City Metropolitan area.)
“Well you know about the charter school network . . . it was formed to give our children something new and innovative that public schools could not give them, but in Camden, NJ, what’s happening is that they are sucking up the resources, drying up the public school district. Now we know that those schools do not serve children with special needs . . . so now if you don’t service the whole community then you’re no good to us. [Charters are] failing all over the country and every city they are in are urban Black cities. They’re taking advantage of our people.”
—Vida Neil, public school advocate, Camden, NJ, transcribed from a video posted on Facebook
“Teachers are killing themselves. I shouldn’t be having to drive Uber at eight o’clock at night on a weekday. I just shut down from the mental toll: grading papers between rides, thinking of what I could be doing instead of driving—like creating a curriculum.”
—California history teacher Matt Barry, to writer Alissa Quart
“Conservatives and centrist Democrats all fear monger about the growing militancy of union teachers. Watch out, cause here we come! Read about the resolution the Chicago Teachers Union and allies passed [at the American Federation of Teachers convention] to champion a political agenda that will lift all boats with single payer, universal childcare, public college for all, paid for by taxing the wealthiest Americans!”
—Jackson Potter, Chicago Teachers Union, posted on Facebook

“We have seen enough to know that simply voting for Democrats won’t fix our problems. . . throughout their 82 years of legislative control, the Democratic Party never granted collective bargaining rights to public employees. Under Joe Manchin’s Democratic leadership, our state government lowered the corporate net income tax from 9 percent to 6.5 percent . . . rather than investing in our schools . . . Democrats chose to give millions of dollars in handouts to corporations.”
— Emily Comer, West Virginia teacher, quoted from “55 Strong, Inside the West Virginia School Strike.”
“It is a time of systematic attack on public education by corporate interests designing to privatize public dollars, deploy high stakes testing to shut down socially disadvantaged schools, and to expand the use of technology to cheapen education. These facts are well detailed in the recently published book The One Percent Solution by Gordon Lafer. Education is also under attack because it is dangerous to the ruling class. Science and knowledge have developed to a stage such that they now have the power to solve humanity’s most pressing problems, namely economic poverty and climate change.”
— Tom Hirschl, (Author, professor, Cornell University)