Five So-Called Liberal Pundits Who Are Attacking Teachers
Chicago's teacher strike may turn out to be the most important one in a generation, as teachers stand up to a corporate-backed education reform regime that stresses testing and firing teachers as a form of "accountability" while continuing to refuse to invest real money in making educational opportunities equal for all students.
The so-called education reform movement wants high-stakes tests that students take yearly to be used to evaluate teachers and weed out the "bad" ones, and pushes money into charter schools that are privately owned and don't have union teachers. Under the guise of "accountability" for teachers and schools, reformers put taxpayer dollars into the hands of private investors despite the charter schools' negligible results when it comes to actually improving education. The movement has been particularly pernicious because it's crept inside the heart of the Democratic party and taken hold of politicians and commentators who profess to be on the side of working people, but end up bashing teachers' unions.
As Molly Ball at the Atlantic wrote last week, Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the chairman of the Democratic National Convention, spoke during the convention at a movie screening hosted by the face of the pro-charter-school movement, Michelle Rhee. "Another Democratic star, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, spoke at the cocktails-and-canapes reception afterward," Ball noted. "Across the country, Democratic officials from governors like Colorado's John Hickenlooper to former President Clinton -- buoyed by the well-funded encouragement of the hedge-fund bigwigs behind much of the charter-school movement -- are shifting the party's consensus away from the union-dictated terms to which it has long been loyal."
And of course, Chicago's teachers are facing down Mayor Rahm Emanuel, former White House Chief of Staff for Barack Obama.
It's not just politicians falling for the rhetoric of the union-busters when it comes to teachers. Few would dare to demonize police or firefighters' unions the same way they have teachers, who are mostly women, working for decent middle-class wages but hardly getting rich, and in Chicago often working in horrific conditions, with huge classes and in some cases no air conditioning. Yet as the teachers hit the streets and Chicagoans declared support, supposedly liberal pundits echoed far-right talking points about teacher salaries and budget cuts, implied that teachers were hurting students by standing up for their rights and for better conditions in the schools, and argued that not supporting the union was evidence of their independent thought—not their susceptibility to a well-funded message machine or their general contempt for public school teachers.
more . . . http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/11538-five-so-called-liberal-pundits-who-are-attacking-teachers
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in the Third Way of thinking. 
Solidarity with the teachers!