Monday, October 17, 2011

Reponse to "Teachers to join Occupy L.A. protesters"

Marcy Winograd, three-time loser Congressional Candidate, is jumping into another losing venture on the streets of Los Angeles, joining the Occupy LA hordes with her own offshoot -- Occupy LAUSD.

According to reports, Winograd and her ilk of unemployed teachers are rallying against "Budget cuts, closed school libraries, lost teaching jobs and the district's initiative to let charter organizations run LAUSD campuses."

The first three grievances affect everyone. Unlike the Occupy Wall Street movements taking up space all over the country, the TEA Party movement has been rallying against the causes of these outrageous budget cuts and lost personnel: taxation exclusively on the rich, who have fled the state in droves; wasting the revenue on unfunded liabilities and unaccountable programs; and governments' caving in to public unions with huge pensions and unsustainable benefits.

One effective response to the immoral government monopoly on education has been the charter school movement. This last reason in Winograd's litany of rallying teachers is hardly grounds for complaint. In fact, the charter movement is a solid attempt to deal with the waste and fraud which characterizes many school districts, whose largesse from the state permitted Charter school teachers do not organize, and that has been a boon for teachers, students, administrative staff, and parents.

Why is Winograd storming the White Bastille of 333 South Beaudry? Her flailing in Downtown is a last-ditch effort to save the marginalized teacher's union from inexorable oblivion.

"There is a natural linkage. The Occupy Wall Street movement is challenging corporatization of America, privatization of the public sphere, and that's exactly what we're seeing in our district," said LAUSD teacher Marcy Winograd."

Charter schools are public-private partnerships, not an outright privatization. Granted, they have private and local organizations stepping in to lead, if one defines non-union and non-school district bureaucracy as private. Also, charter schools receive public money, streamlining their output to spend what little they receive on education and less bureaucracy.

"Winograd and Lara said teachers were frustrated with the growing charter school movement and Public School Choice, an unusual district program begun in 2009 that lets outside groups bid to control new and troubled LAUSD campuses. "

How can a movement demanding more freedom of access for itself decry permitting others choice? The public unions are not rallying in Los Angeles on behalf of the downtrodden, but for the Jimmy Hoffa thugs who have taken over school districts, intimidating school boards and robbing parents and children legally.

They are frustrated that the individual tax payers and frustrated families, tried of the substandard education which they and their children have had to subsist on, are getting active, forcing their school boards to make necessary changes, create competition, and fostering better facilities for their students.

The public teacher's unions, including UTLA, are the real entrenched interests that are throttling student achievement and scholastic innovation, statist status quo entities spearheaded by the likes of Ms. Winograd and Mr. Lara, liberal fire-eaters still lost in the land of "this should work," when everything that the educational status quo has done has failed over and over to improve achievement and prepare young people for the future.

Just as the Occupy Wall Street forces are raging at the wrong machine, the engine of economic growth; instead of attacking the burden of economic stagnation, the federal government - these left-wing raves are screaming and yelling for more from the very state which has bankrupted this nation with fast and loose loans laced with moral hazard, ponderous and preposterous regulations discouraging investment and limiting choice.

No comments:

Post a Comment