NPR Morning Edition aired a report this week that reeked of anti-union bias, and inadvertently promoted the Koch brothers’ agenda to reduce collective bargaining rights, which means smaller wages and benefits.
The report was rife with errors, missing facts, bollixed concepts, and a meaningless comparison used to impeach a union source.
Below I’ll detail the serious problems with reports by Lisa Autry of WKU Public Radio in Bowling Green, Kentucky, but first you should know why this matters to you no matter where you live.
A serious, very well-funded, and thoroughly documented movement to pay workers less and reduce their rights, while increasing the rights of employers, is gaining traction as more states pass laws that harm workers. A host of proposals in Congress would compound this if passed and signed into law.
News organizations help this anti-worker movement, even if they do not mean to, when they get facts wrong, lack balance, provide vagaries instead of telling details, and fail to apply time-tested reporting practices to separate fact from advocacy.
The advocates are sophisticated. They pose as “nonprofit research organizations,” but are better described as ideological marketing agencies.
There’s nothing wrong with marketing ideology, only with not being honest about what you are doing.
These tax-exempt outfits operate on the model of Madison Avenue; reinforcing instincts, hopes, and desire to stir demand for what may not be good for you or be of dubious effectiveness.
Carefully read, their reports are mostly assertions with a sprinkling of cherry-picked facts and projections, which I have found, reviewing them years later, turned out to be wrong.
Midwestern and southern states have been enacting anti-worker laws that take away collective bargaining rights, while forcing unions to represent people who do not share in the costs of collective bargaining and protecting workers in grievance proceedings. Other laws directly reduce compensation, especially pensions, although police and firefighters are generally shielded.
A key part of this strategy is creating the impression that unions are bad for workers. This goes to a problem that Presidents John Adams and James Madison feared would destroy the nation – the rise of a “business aristocracy” that would trick people whose only income was from wages into supporting policies that would be good for the business aristocrats, but bad for workers.
The NPR report was about Kentucky counties that are passing so-called “right to work” laws, a worthy topic for sure.
Early on, reporter Lisa Autry makes this untrue statement: “Democrats have rejected efforts to allow employees in unionized companies the freedom to choose whether to join a union.”
No law requires workers to join a union under a binding U.S. Supreme Court decision. Congress outlawed the “closed shop” in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, formally known as the Labor Management Relations Act.
Workers at firms with union contracts are only required to pay dues that cover the costs of representing them in negotiating contracts and grievance procedures.
Russell D. Lewis, the NPR Southern bureau chief who edited Autry’s report, told me he was only vaguely aware of the Taft-Hartley Act and did not recognize her error.
From an economic perspective, what so-called “right to work” laws do is allow workers to enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining and contract enforcement without sharing in the costs. This is a form of moral hazard that weakens unions and makes it likely that they will fail because of what economists call the free rider problem: Those who do not share in the costs of negotiating contracts and enforcing them enjoy the same benefits and protections as those who do.
Autry’s NPR report failed to mention a central fact – Kentucky’s highest court ruled in 1965 that cities and counties cannot adopt local collective bargaining laws. In a case that unions brought against Jesse Puckett, mayor of Shelbyville, Kentucky’s highest court ruled (emphasis added):
it is not reasonable to believe that Congress could have intended to [leave to local governments] the determination of policy in such a controversial area as that of union-security agreements. We believe Congress was willing to permit varying policies at the state level, but could not have intended to allow as many local policies as there are local political subdivisions in the nation. It is our conclusion that Congress has pre-empted from cities the field undertaken to be entered by the Shelbyville ordinance.
In reports for her local NPR station, Autry never cited this. She did, however, a report on a politician who told her that equal numbers of people believe a county-level ordinance would be legal or illegal. In another report, on whether counties have the legal authority to pass such laws, she said, “the answer depends on who you ask.”
It took me less than a minute using an Internet search engine to find the 1965 case. It was also cited in a nuanced and balanced January news report in the Louisville Courier-Journal. Even cub reporter Gina Clear of the News-Enterprise in Elizabethtown, KY provided coverage that was balanced and far better informed than Autry’s.
Did Autry fail to report the court decision because of laziness, poor judgment, or anti-union bias? I cannot give you a definitive answer because Autry and Kevin Willis, WKU’s news director, ignored my repeated requests for an interview, passing the buck to Lewis.
Strange, journalists who expect people to return their calls but do not hold themselves to that standard.
My review of several dozen Autry pieces suggests a bias against unions and workers.
Autry tends to quote anti-unionists at length, but paraphrase what union leaders say, though she did one report that explained union perspectives.
She frequently does one-sided reports using language that assumes only anti-union policies have merit, and quotes only anti-union sources. She also did a one-sided report against increasing the minimum wage.
Lewis, the NPR editor, noted that Autry quoted a United Auto Workers local official saying that Alabama and Mississippi, both with so-called “right to work” laws, have “some of the worst education, highest poverty. What happens is that as they reduce the union labor, less and less [sic] people are making a decent wage.”
But Autry followed that quote with a bizarre point to impeach the union official’s remarks: “Actually, since World War II, income and job growth have increased faster in right-to-work states.”
That might be relevant to a story about how Jim Crow laws kept, and still keep, blacks from many well-paying jobs. Or in a story about how taxpayer investments, especially in the Interstate Highways, canals, and electricity, opened the South to building factories after the war.
Autry cited no source. Lewis sent me a report by the Mackinac Center, another libertarian marketing agency. It is much more nuanced than Autry’s flat statement.
And actually, to invoke Autry’s word, what would be relevant would be current data on household incomes in states with and without laws requiring workers to pay for the benefits they get from any union that represents them.
In 2013 the median household income (half make more, half less) was $49,087 in so-called “right to work” states, but $56,746 in other states. That means in the states with diminished worker rights people have to work a full year plus eight weeks to get what their peers earn in a year.
Autry’s piece and Lewis’s editing seem to violate NPR’s ethics handbook, which says “good editors are also good prosecutors. They test, probe and challenge reporters, always with the goal of making NPR’s stories as good (and therefore as accurate) as possible.”
The handbook also says “attribute everything… When in doubt, err on the side of attributing — that is, make it very clear where we’ve gotten our information (or where the organization we give credit to has gotten its information). Every NPR reporter and editor should be able to immediately identify the source of any facts in our stories — and why we consider them credible. And every reader or listener should know where we got our information.”
In her NPR piece and a number of WKU reports, Autry quotes the Bluegrass Institute, which she describes as “a Kentucky-based think tank that advocates for smaller government.”
With just two employees, it doesn’t have much capacity to think.
What Autry neglected to report was that the Bluegrass Institute is an ad agency for Kochian ideas. It is also part of a network that is funded by corporate interests closely allied with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which poses as a nonpartisan advocate for smaller government and more federalism, but is funded by corporations opposed to unions, the Koch Brothers, and their confreres. While the network says its members are independent, behind closed doors it operates like an ideological Ikea selling libertarian ideas, The New Yorker magazine reported.
Editor Lewis told me he had no idea about the Bluegrass Institute’s connections.
Lewis also indicated he was not troubled by using the term “right to work,” which is both factually inaccurate and politically loaded. Based on the evidence I call them right-to-work-for-less laws. NPR surely should explain to listeners that an abundance of official data (and economic theory) show that union workers make more than their non-union counterparts.
Autry ended her NPR piece with another falsehood: “Meanwhile, several labor unions — including some from out of state — have filed a federal lawsuit to stop Kentucky’s local right-to-work movement.”
All of the unions represent workers in the county where the lawsuit was filed, a fact anyone who read the lawsuit should know. Irwin “Buddy” Cutler, the lawyer who filed the case, noted that to have standing – the right to sue – the union would have to represent workers in the county where the dispute exists.
Lewis said he did not know that, which explains his failure to ask what strikes me as an obvious question. Beyond that, what purpose did ending on this (false) point serve?
NPR owes listeners a corrective. It also needs to balance its reports and use relevant data. More importantly, all news organizations need to be wary of “think tanks” bearing easy information.
By: David Cay Johnston, The National Memo, March 21, 2015
March 23, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Journalism, Media, Right To Work Laws | ALEC, Anti-Union, Bluegrass Institute, Collective Bargaining, Koch Brothers, Nonprofit Research Organizations, Russell D. Lewis, Unions, Workers |
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Scott Walker is learning that when you want to play in the big leagues, things move pretty fast. And when you’re a governor without foreign policy experience, sometimes you can get a little tripped up trying to show how what you’ve done in your state prepares you for dealing with international challenges. So today Walker getting criticism for saying, in his speech to CPAC yesterday (it was actually in the Q&A session) that he can handle terrorists the same way he handled public sector unions in Wisconsin. Even some conservatives criticized him for it, but what’s alarming isn’t that he “compared” a bunch of Wisconsinites to ISIS, which of course he wasn’t trying to do. What’s alarming is that he thinks that you need the same skills and approach to dealing with unhappy constituents as you do with terrorists.
Here’s what he actually said:
“I want a commander-in-chief who will do everything in their power to ensure that the threat from radical Islamic terrorists do not wash up on American soil. We will have someone who leads and ultimately will send a message not only that we will protect American soil but do not take this upon freedom-loving people anywhere else in the world. We need a leader with that kind of confidence. If I can take on a 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.”
Then later he tried to walk it back:
“Let me be perfectly clear: I’m just pointing out the closest thing I have to handling this difficult situation is the 100,000 protesters I had to deal with,” Walker told reporters. Asked if he regretted the statement, he said, “No.”
“You all will misconstrue things the way you see fit,” he said. “That’s the closest thing I have in terms of handling a difficult situation, not that there’s any parallel between the two.”
I doubt there are many limits to Walker’s contempt for people who want to bargain collectively, but obviously he didn’t mean to say they’re like terrorists. What he did mean to say, I’m fairly certain, is that he can bring the same kind of uncompromising toughness to combatting ISIS that he brought to his successful attempt to crush the public sector unions. The unions were his enemy then; ISIS will be his enemy if he gets to be president.
And this is what we need to explore, not only with Walker but with all the Republican candidates. They’ll all be eager to tell you that on this problem, Barack Obama is weak and indecisive, whereas if you’re sufficiently tough, the problem can be solved. But you know who was tough, uncompromising, and brimming with the “confidence” Walker cites? George W. Bush. When it came to terrorists, you couldn’t get much tougher than that guy. Heck, not only did he invade two countries, he even started a program to torture prisoners. Super-tough, am I right?
But you may have noticed that when Bush left office, there were still terrorists. Al-Qaeda had been transformed from a centrally-run organization into a network of franchises, all of which are potentially dangerous. And then out of the ashes of the Iraq War grew ISIS. For some unfathomable reason, toughness wasn’t quite enough to solve the problem.
So that’s how I’d pose the question to these candidates if I had the chance: You talk a lot about being strong and tough and showing resolve, and “sending messages” of strength and toughness and resolve, but George W. Bush did all those things, and yet the problem remains. So what do we do now?
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, February 27, 2015
February 28, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Foreign Policy, ISIS, Scott Walker | Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, CPAC, George W. Bush, GOP Presidential Candidates, Iraq War, Unions, Wisconsin |
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Last week, Reihan Salam took a whack at America’s upper class in Slate. His charge? That the upper class uses its considerable political clout to protect itself from competition and keep its own incomes high, thus making life harder on everyone else further down the economic ladder. And he’s not wrong!
But Salam is also a conservative, with a conservative’s standard desire for low taxes, few regulations, and a skimpy social safety net. And what he conveniently leaves out of his screed is the fact that these preferences are themselves the ultimate expression of upper-class greed and self-dealing.
Let’s start with what Salam gets right. He points out that licensing and accreditation laws protect professions like dentists, lawyers, electricians, hairstylists, and the like from competition, which raises the costs of services they provide and prevents other workers from breaking into the market. The local land-use restrictions and zoning regulations that many in the upper class favor drive up housing prices, which makes it harder for the lower class to live in good neighborhoods with good schools, or to benefit from the economic development that comes with gentrification. The upper class seems implicitly content with an immigration status quo that maximizes competition in working-class jobs while minimizing it among high-skill professions. And of course there was the recent collapse of President Obama’s proposal to raise new tax revenue from 529 college savings accounts, a self-interested revolt of the upper class if ever there was one.
However, if you read between the lines, Salam isn’t really talking about the upper class writ large here. He’s talking about the liberal upper class. The issues he cites are mainly a big deal in cities, where liberals cluster. And conservative commentary in general these days has a tendency to talk about the American upper class as if it’s populated entirely by liberal yuppies who love yoga, organic food, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and abortions, and who think that guns are barbaric and that religion is backwards.
As it happens, however, the GOP relies on the upper class even more than Democrats. Median household income in the United States is $52,250, and if you look at the 2012 election, voters below that mark broke hard for Obama, with those above going for Mitt Romney by lesser margins. This trend of the Democrats getting way more votes below the median income level has roughly held for decades. These days, strong support for Republicans really doesn’t kick in until you get close to $75,000, or roughly the top third of the income ladder.
The difference between the parties is not that one relies on the wealthy and one doesn’t. Both parties lean heavily on those voters and divvy them up in various ways. (Mainly through cultural and social issues.) But the Democrats’ coalition also includes a fair portion that’s lower and working class, that’s still fighting for attention in the party, and that occasionally gets it. Conversely, lower- and working-class voters are mostly just absent from the GOP.
This matters because the upper class also has a pretty distinctive set of economic policy preferences. According to a recent study by Pew, the most financially secure Americans — roughly a fourth to a third of the population, by Pew’s definition — disproportionately say that government can’t afford to do more to help the needy, and that poor people “have it easy” thanks to government benefits. The less financially secure think the opposite. Large majorities of those making below $75,000 say the thing that bothers them the most about taxes is that the wealthy don’t pay their fair share. Large majorities of Americans oppose cuts to everything from Social Security and Medicare to aid for the poor. They support making union organizing easier and more federal spending on education.
Hell, 57 percent of the Republican or Republican-leaning voters who do make less than $30,000 think government doesn’t do enough to support poor people.
The reason the GOP can get away with being on the opposite side on all these matters is the fact that the voting population skews upper class: Even Democrats in the top third of the income distribution are noticeably more economically right-wing than poorer Democrats or Republicans, and Republicans in the top third are really economically right-wing.
There’s a pretty straightforward argument for why the upper class tilts in this direction. As Salam notes, the policy preferences of the upper class that really stick in his craw boil down to protecting their incomes and thus making the goods and services they provide more expensive for everyone else. But the flip side of that is making sure the goods and services everyone else provides — and thus their incomes — come cheap. That’s where the GOP comes in.
The essence of worker bargaining power is the ability to tell an employer “no.” That forces business owners to offer a better deal, driving up wages and benefits. A broad and generous welfare state gives workers leverage in that regard. It also helps boost aggregate demand, getting us closer to the full employment that really gives workers an edge. In short, the income of the working class is inversely proportional to its level of economic desperation. The effect of conservatives’ preferred economic policies — from slashing spending to imposing work requirements for aid — is to keep that desperation as high as possible. And of course, the upper class certainly doesn’t want to shoulder the taxes necessary to make such a system work.
The thing to remember is that, when it comes to what to do with the working class, the interests of the upper class and the super-rich cohere. Whether you’re a corporate CEO, a small-business owner, or just a well-heeled professional who consumes a lot of high-end goods and services, it benefits you to keep the labor of everyday Americans as cheap, compliant, and disposable as possible. It’s true, as Salam notes, that the truly rich aren’t quite as desperate to defend their interests as the upper class is; if you’ve got Mitt Romney’s dough, you can put up with more taxes, regulations, and workers demanding dignified pay and good benefits.
But that just bolsters the point that the fervent bastion of the economic right is the upper class. They’ve got the most to gain by slashing taxes, cutting regulations, scrapping government aid programs, and busting unions.
As Salam acknowledges, he doesn’t want high taxes on the wealthy, or for America to go down the road of the big European welfare states. His fellow reform conservatives and the Republican Party agree with him in this regard. Salam then says of the upper class: “I sensed that their gut political instincts were all about protecting what they had and scratching out the eyeballs of anyone who dared to suggest taking it away from them.”
But aren’t conservative economic policies the perfect expression of that exact impulse?
By: Jeff Spross, The Week, February 3, 2015
February 6, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Economic Inequality, GOP, Upper Class | 529 Accounts, Conservatives, Immigration, Liberals, Middle Class, Poor and Low Income, Reihan Salam, Taxes, Unions |
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The questions hanging over Labor Day 2014 are whether and when the United States gets a pay raise. Ever since the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the job market has been in a state of heartbreaking weakness. But the worst seems to be over. As Janet Yellen, chair of the Federal Reserve Board, recently noted, monthly increases in payroll jobs have averaged 230,000 this year, up from 190,000 in 2012 and 2013. The unemployment rate dropped to 6.2 percent in July from 7.3 percent a year earlier and a peak of 10 percent in October 2009.
Gains are also reflected in cheerier (or less gloomy) popular attitudes, says public opinion expert Karlyn Bowman of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. A year ago, Gallup found that 29 percent of workers feared being laid off; that’s now 19 percent. (Millennials are exceptions; their unemployment fears rose slightly.) In March 2010, 85 percent of Americans judged jobs “difficult to find,” a Pew survey reported. In July this year, the figure was 62 percent. Although confidence hasn’t returned to pre-recession levels, there’s been a genuine improvement in mood, says Bowman.
What’s missing are wage increases. Since late 2009, hourly earnings have risen at an annual rate of about 2 percent, but when corrected for inflation, “real” wage increases vanish, reports the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. The EPI says that median hourly wages were actually 0.4 percent lower in the first half of 2014 than in 2007. Using a different inflation adjustment (the “deflator” for personal consumption expenditures instead of the consumer price index) produces a 1.7 percent gain over the same period, says Scott Winship of the Manhattan Institute. Either way, wages are basically flat.
We should do better.
The Great Recession shifted bargaining power to employers. With jobs scarce, “workers just take what they can get,” says economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal think tank. Companies have controlled costs through layoffs, skimpy wage increases and greater reliance on independent contractors, jobs which often pay less and provide fewer fringe benefits. The unwritten post-World War II labor contract — in retreat since the late 1970s — finally expired. That contract presumed that large companies would provide workers with stable jobs and “real” annual increases in wages and fringe benefits.
Forget it. Wage increases aren’t guaranteed, and longtime workers are regularly dismissed. “There really is no security in the labor market,” says former Fed economist Stephen Oliner, now at AEI. On the labor market’s edges, firms like Uber (an on-call transportation company) and TaskRabbit (an online service that allows customers to solicit bids for specific jobs) have created digital markets for freelance workers. The temporary jobs provide cash and flexibility — but not much certainty or security.
Too many workers have chased too few jobs, weakening wages. But now the pendulum may be swinging in workers’ direction. Some economists contend that it already has. Two bits of information are routinely cited: the unexpectedly fast fall in unemployment; and the rise in reported job openings to 4.7 million in June, more than double the recession low and slightly higher than the pre-recession peak.
The worry is that the growing supply of openings and the shrinking pool of available workers might trigger an inflationary wage-price spiral. This concern seems premature. Other economists, including Yellen, have argued that there’s still substantial labor market “slack” (surplus workers wanting jobs), keeping a lid on wage gains. Their evidence seems stronger. Consider the U-6 jobless rate (U-6 includes the officially unemployed, discouraged workers and part-timers who want full-time jobs). In July, it was 12.2 percent, down from a monthly peak of 17.2 percent, though still higher than 2007’s 8.3 percent, before the recession.
But suppose we are nearing an inflection point, where worker supply and demand are in closer balance. That certainly wouldn’t be bad. Workers’ bargaining power would improve with tighter markets: markets where businesses have to pay a bit more to keep employees; where younger workers might have competing job offers; and where someone could quit with a reasonable expectation of finding another job. (Note that unions aren’t a plausible alternative to markets because they represent only 7 percent of private workers. The minimum wage suffers from a similar scale problem.)
A wage explosion seems unlikely; companies were too traumatized by the Great Recession to let costs get out of hand. Even in 2007, wage increases — unadjusted for inflation — were running only at about a 3.5 percent annual rate.
What’s ultimately at stake is the Great Recession’s lasting effect on labor markets. Are they in the process of reverting to their modern role, promoting steadier employment and higher living standards? Or has there been a major break from the past, ushering in a harsher, more arbitrary system whose outlines are still faint? On this Labor Day, the verdict is unclear.
By: Robert Samuelson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 31, 2014
September 1, 2014
Posted by raemd95 |
Great Recession, Labor Day, Wages | Collective Bargaining, Employers, Janet Yellen, Jobs, Minimum Wage, Unemployment, Unions |
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I know this sounds absurd—it is absurd—but for some odd reason Labor Day reminds me of my mother. She was a school teacher, and I think she would have a good laugh to learn that so-called “education reformers” are accusing school teachers of being too powerful and protected. My father, who was himself a long-time member of our local school board, would probably snort at the ignorance of highly educated experts.
Together, they could set the record straight on education from the facts of their own lives. They fell in love when they were young and optimistic and talented. This was the 1920s when women had just won the right to vote, and both were newly graduated from four-year colleges—the very first in my mother’s family. My father completed graduate work in chemistry and was hired as a researcher by a Philadelphia manufacturer where he later invented useful products.
They faced one obstacle in their promising lives. My mother had to sign a teaching contract with a local school district in western Pennsylvania that would prohibit her from getting married. This crude violation of a young woman’s civil rights was commonly enforced around the country. Years later, I learned that my wife’s mother had to do the same thing to get a teaching job in Iowa. Recently, I reread the steamy love letters my parents wrote to one another during that school year of frustrated desire. I blushed for them.
At the Thanksgiving break, they abandoned abstinence and broke the school contract. But secretly. On the long holiday, they eloped to West Virginia and got married there. They told no one. My parents, I should add, were no-nonsense conservative Republicans, not given to reckless adventure or inflammatory political statements. I did think of my mother as an assertive proto-feminist. In retirement, both became Democrats because they thought Goldwater was a dangerous crackpot. In 1972, my dad declared early for George McGovern, while Mom held out for Shirley Chisholm.
Keeping the secret of their marriage may have been done to protect her eligibility for many more years as a teacher. It worked. Toward the end of her long life (she died three days short of 100) my mother got a letter each year from Ohio governors, congratulating her on being the oldest living recipient in Ohio’s teacher retirement system.
I tell this intimate story to make a point that the latter-day reformers do not seem to grasp. They have left out the human dimensions of a harsh labor market where women were regularly punished for not being men. School teachers from the beginnings of America’s public schools have been vulnerable to blatant exploitation—lower wages and harsher terms—and they have been exploited. The jobs could be filled by an abundance of educated single young women in need of incomes. Married women might have babies in the middle of the school year—an inconvenience to school administrators—so married women were banned. Similar gender biases affected nursing and other caring occupations, and to some degree still do.
The fundamental power shift for school teachers did not occur until the 1960s, when frustrated teachers rebelled against traditional school systems run top-down by superintendents and principals. As a young reporter in Louisville, Kentucky, I witnessed one of the early skirmishes in 1962.
One day I got a phone call from an organizer for the American Federation of Teachers who blithely announced that AFT intended to shut down the Louisville schools the following week with a citywide strike. I thought he was joking. AFT was based in East Coast big cities and had no more than fifty members among Louisville’s 2,000 teachers. The National Education Association (NEA) dominated most states those days, and it was run by and for the administrators, not rank-and-file teachers.
The AFT’s strike in Louisville was like a thunderclap—teachers did walk off and virtually shut down the system. Teachers were fed up. They were demanding a stronger voice and power in school affairs and school politics. In rural states like Kentucky, the poorest counties were frequently dominated by matriarchal political machines—women superintendents who controlled more jobs in their county than the men in county offices. The NEA got the message and swiftly adjusted. It became a full-fledged labor union like AFT. Instead of fronting for old-style political bosses, both organizations now try to speak for the interests of teachers and to defend them against political intrusions and other abuses.
These are the relevant facts that self-appointed billionaire reformers skip past. By demonizing the teachers unions and denouncing the tenure laws that protect teachers from arbitrary political reprisals, the do-good foundations have unwittingly cast themselves as a malevolent Daddy Warbucks ready to bury their opposition with tons of money.The Gates Foundation and some others do seem to be belatedly backing away from obvious mistakes, but the reform engine still threatens to undermine the common public school in favor of a deeply fractured system of sectarian and secular private sponsors claiming public money.
Impatient hedge-fund billionaires do not attempt to conceal their contempt for the rest of us. They are used to making money—fast—with no excuses for dawdlers. Witness what they have done to large segments of the overall economy. Education does not thrive in those conditions, because there is no standard of perfection in any schoolhouse that can survive brutal suppression of uniformity imposed by clumsy testing. A successful school not only makes room for dissent. It constantly nourishes it.
Of course, I am biased. But I think that was my mother’s teaching style. She taught first grade in an “inner city” neighborhood of Cincinnati where the students were not poor black kids but white kids from the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. They shared many of the same handicaps. Mom developed her own theories on how to teach reading to such children. It involved hand-eye coordination and other elements I could not follow. I have no proof that she succeeded, but I have a hunch she drove the principal nuts.
By: Wiliam Greider, The Nation, August 30, 2014
September 1, 2014
Posted by raemd95 |
Labor Day, Teachers, Women | American Federation of Teachers, Civil Rights, Education, Gender Discrimination, NEA, Unions, Workers |
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