I noticed a few weeks ago on the LA Times website a series of articles featuring yet again the failures of LA city schools, its union, and most recently a screed about teachers who get paid not to work because they can't be fired. A cursory look at some of the headlines should leave little doubt where the LA Times positions itself: "LA schools chief critical of unfit teachers milking the system," "School officials call for legislation easing firing of teachers," "Firing tenured teachers a tough and costly task," "LA Unified pays teachers not to teach," ad nauseum. This is vintage Reagan bashing Welfare Queens.
As a former public school teacher, who, a la James Baldwin's desire to leave the church to spread the gospel and Tony Benn's to leave Parliament to practice politics: I left teaching to be empowered to teach, since I had less power due to institutions and conspiracies like this one waged by the venerable LA Times.
So I am prejudiced. I am not only a former teacher but also come from a family of school teachers.
What is essentially behind this atrocious conspiracy to malign public schools is the same as that conspiracy to malign public services for want of neo-liberal privatizations, busting the rights of works as a necessary pre-condition for profits to be earned by those stellar pillars of the society that Ayn Rand alleged in Atlas Shrugged that we cannot do without.
So we must not have any faith at all in public schools or the men and women who serve them, who love them. I have not met any outsider who when finding out I was a teacher tell me that teachers deserve more money. Maybe, but I think not. My politics inform me that expanding public services is paramount to simply raising wages. Teachers go into the profession knowing they will not be on par with your average stockbroker - but our values are obviously different. Consider that when you see who the LA Times attacks [teachers] and who they do not [stock brokers] and deduce what values they want to govern civil society. Molesting a child is an horrific crime, but so is rationing homes so millions would live on the streets, health care so millions die, jobs so 5 million+ be unable to support themselves.
What we must see, as through the prism of the LA Times, is that schools are corrupt, dysfunctional, and its [union] workers suffer hubris, and they are not serving our children.
Our children? Neither the Left or Right, Republican or Democrat or Socialist, vegetarian or carnivore have a monopoly on concern for children and society. The Times of course has a checkered history in spreading lies and using children. Way back in the early 1930's when Upton Sinclair was running for governor of the state with the EPIC Movement Campaign [End Poverty in California], his victory was in reach. Sinclair was a socialist. The Chandler Family-controlled LA Times launched a smear campaign against Sinclair alleging he was going to take children from parents. This sort of psy-ops worked effectively, and Sinclair's support plummeted, and he lost the election.
I see absolutely no moral evolution between that Depression-era campaign and the present one in its desire to make people vote against its own best interest. In this respect, the LA Times' knuckles scrape the ground as it lumbers along pre-historically. These campaigns become a self-fulfilling prophecy since the more the LA Times maligns schools and the more they are short-changed basic resources, the worse off they will be, and the greater the cries to dismantle them altogether for some Voucher/Free Market option, where you will see the voucher lowered in value and the poor relegated to truly inferior, unfunded schools and forgotten on the pages of the venerable LA Times.
People who do not know, who follow such elitist paradigms, like to tell me that socialism doesn't work. Really? Besides reminding them where many old people might be without social security or where our neighborhoods would be without community fire departments, I mention the infinite successes of public education. It is offered to all, free of charge, and along with free- and reduced lunch programs, it has socialized many a young people to understand civil society.
The answer cannot be followed fro the LA Times' leads but in the opposite direction. Public schools should be a greater funded priority, free education should not be limited to K-12 but be extended to colleges and technical programs. Society has an interest in having literate, educated, trained people. Conversely, the political elites are frightened of the demands such masses make: this is that ancient and infamous crisis of democracy and why we cannot live in one and why the The LA Times must play its role in undermining this movement.
As a former public school teacher, who, a la James Baldwin's desire to leave the church to spread the gospel and Tony Benn's to leave Parliament to practice politics: I left teaching to be empowered to teach, since I had less power due to institutions and conspiracies like this one waged by the venerable LA Times.
So I am prejudiced. I am not only a former teacher but also come from a family of school teachers.
What is essentially behind this atrocious conspiracy to malign public schools is the same as that conspiracy to malign public services for want of neo-liberal privatizations, busting the rights of works as a necessary pre-condition for profits to be earned by those stellar pillars of the society that Ayn Rand alleged in Atlas Shrugged that we cannot do without.
So we must not have any faith at all in public schools or the men and women who serve them, who love them. I have not met any outsider who when finding out I was a teacher tell me that teachers deserve more money. Maybe, but I think not. My politics inform me that expanding public services is paramount to simply raising wages. Teachers go into the profession knowing they will not be on par with your average stockbroker - but our values are obviously different. Consider that when you see who the LA Times attacks [teachers] and who they do not [stock brokers] and deduce what values they want to govern civil society. Molesting a child is an horrific crime, but so is rationing homes so millions would live on the streets, health care so millions die, jobs so 5 million+ be unable to support themselves.
What we must see, as through the prism of the LA Times, is that schools are corrupt, dysfunctional, and its [union] workers suffer hubris, and they are not serving our children.
Our children? Neither the Left or Right, Republican or Democrat or Socialist, vegetarian or carnivore have a monopoly on concern for children and society. The Times of course has a checkered history in spreading lies and using children. Way back in the early 1930's when Upton Sinclair was running for governor of the state with the EPIC Movement Campaign [End Poverty in California], his victory was in reach. Sinclair was a socialist. The Chandler Family-controlled LA Times launched a smear campaign against Sinclair alleging he was going to take children from parents. This sort of psy-ops worked effectively, and Sinclair's support plummeted, and he lost the election.
I see absolutely no moral evolution between that Depression-era campaign and the present one in its desire to make people vote against its own best interest. In this respect, the LA Times' knuckles scrape the ground as it lumbers along pre-historically. These campaigns become a self-fulfilling prophecy since the more the LA Times maligns schools and the more they are short-changed basic resources, the worse off they will be, and the greater the cries to dismantle them altogether for some Voucher/Free Market option, where you will see the voucher lowered in value and the poor relegated to truly inferior, unfunded schools and forgotten on the pages of the venerable LA Times.
People who do not know, who follow such elitist paradigms, like to tell me that socialism doesn't work. Really? Besides reminding them where many old people might be without social security or where our neighborhoods would be without community fire departments, I mention the infinite successes of public education. It is offered to all, free of charge, and along with free- and reduced lunch programs, it has socialized many a young people to understand civil society.
The answer cannot be followed fro the LA Times' leads but in the opposite direction. Public schools should be a greater funded priority, free education should not be limited to K-12 but be extended to colleges and technical programs. Society has an interest in having literate, educated, trained people. Conversely, the political elites are frightened of the demands such masses make: this is that ancient and infamous crisis of democracy and why we cannot live in one and why the The LA Times must play its role in undermining this movement.
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