Category: The Farrell Report

Participants in the ‘Educators Spring’ of teacher advocacy are also beset by the education violence of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos who is attacking teachers’ performance and professionalism and public schools as institutions. She has refused to enforce discrimination statues in K-12 education.

Public school teachers are waking up every day angry, impatient, and increasingly militant. They are challenging politicians, many in parties they have historically supported, to address their concerns about class size, pensions, benefits, and school funding.

in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Colorado - all red states - the Cartel of corporate education reformers is completing its third decade of massive funding of efforts to dismantle and privatize public education in both blue and red states under Republicans and Democrats.

There is a growing trend where blacks are choosing to stay home on Election Day rather than cast a vote for either the Democrats or Republicans. Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by narrow margins, and the 2016 Presidential Election, but she would have won them comfortably if she had been able to increase black turnout by 7 percentage points in each state.

As we celebrate teachers and other public education staff, we must be mindful that they are engaged in a classic struggle which, if they lose, will have a substantially negative impact on future generations of students. Students of color will disproportionately suffer these adverse outcomes as their numbers are increasing exponentially, and it appears that the Cartel of the power and economic elite have little interest in in educating them.

The Clintons, like aging sports superstars, cannot give up the limelight, and are thus becoming those unwanted and uninvited dinner guests who keep showing up. In this era of the #MeToo movement, the Clintons, with all of their sexual and misogynistic baggage, picked the absolute worse time to reenter the political fray.

It would be prudent for Democrats to essentially chill in their continuing criticism of the President at every turn as a major party emphasis. There are far more important efforts that they should pursue. First, they need to support teachers, a critical part of their base, in their protests and strikes to fully fund public education, raise their wages, ensure the safety of their students, and defeat the privatization of public education.

Too often, the Democrats teachers have supported have said one thing during campaign season and done another after they have ascended to and/or have been returned to office, e.g., Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ).

Teachers are facing barriers to the current success of their strikes and protests as they have to decide whether to confront or support their traditional Democratic allies over broken promises for public education.