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D.C. Families, Trumka Demand Respect for Teachers |
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Thousands of students, parents, teachers and community members from across Washington, D.C., converged on the district’s Freedom Plaza yesterday afternoon to rally in support of hundreds of laid-off teachers.
Nearly 400 school employees have been laid off as a result of controversial decisions by D.C. school chancellor Michelle Rhee. The layoffs include 229 classroom teachers, many of them veterans. The Washington Teachers’ Union (WTU) has protested the layoffs, saying that many teachers have been targeted for their age and that the firings are poorly timed and an attempt to undermine the teachers’ contract.
At yesterday’s rally, reports Chris Garlock of the Metropolitan Washington Council, D.C. residents and students of all ages spoke out strongly in support of their teachers. It was one of the largest labor rallies in recent memory in the District. At the rally it was announced that a delegation of teachers sought to present to Mayor Adrian Fenty with a statement in opposition to the layoffs, but Fenty’s assistant wouldn’t even come to the door to accept it.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called the firings “a cold hard case of union busting,” and said that union members across the city stand in solidarity with fired teachers:
The labor movement is right here with you. We’ll stand shoulder to shoulder with you for as long as it takes.
Here and across the country, public education and our school children are the victims of wrong-headed efforts to fill state and local budget gaps. Children are the scapegoats. Class sizes are growing beyond anything that makes a shred of sense. After-school and early education programs are disappearing. Teachers are buying school supplies out of their own pockets, and children are losing teachers they love and trust.
Listen, you don’t make better schools by firing teachers. You don’t engage students in learning by disrespecting their educators. You don’t teach children values by discarding values. You may close a short-term budget hole, but it’s at our children’s expense. And that price is too high to pay.
AFT President Randi Weingarten and other top union leaders, as well as members of the D.C. City Council, took part in the rally. City Council members have announced their intention to hold hearings into the public school system’s hiring and firing policies, and the WTU has filed suit to block the layoffs. Weingarten said that these cuts to vital teachers and school staff are hitting students the hardest.
Susan Dunn, a 23-year veteran teacher and the parent of a 6th grader, said the layoffs are exactly the wrong policy to sustain D.C. schools:
Rhee is just out of touch with what’s really happening in the schools. We don’t have a contract, we haven’t had a raise in five years and now they’re firing people without explanation. Morale is terrible.
2 Comments
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spoken like a true management hack, Shapiro. Why don’t you identify yourself when you post on here. People would like to know your corporate credentials when you blow off about things you know nothing about. What the hell do you know about teachers and education? My parents were teachers, my aunt was a teacher, my sister is a teacher. The one thing they can all attest to is the complete incompetence of most school administrators. These are people that have virtually no experience in the classroom (there’s a reason why there is a saying, “if you can’t teach, administrate”) yet they think they know the best way to educate kids. They get themselves a degree in “education administration” and then try to run a school district. In the business world, I’m sure you must be familiar with
the problem of MBAs trying to run and manage businesses with no real world experience, but rather than recognize that possibility, you automatically assume that the teachers that were laid off were “bad” teachers, and that the unions is only involved in job protection. Ever heard of “due process”? that is what unions make sure teachers, and all workers, get. If you want to fire somebody, you better have damn good reason, and you better have the proof. If you actually knew anything about the education system, you’d know that the “bad” teacher problem is a false premise. Objective studies show that bad teachers are a very tiny percentage of the workforce and that, just like any other field, if you want to improve the quality of the workers and squeeze out the under performers, improve the pay so that the best and brightest are attracted to the profession. oh, but that would require paying more in taxes, and we know what the business minded think of that!
Until you are ever fired just because your boss didn’t like you, you’ll never know why such protections are important to people who work for a living and to whom the loss of a job doesn’t just mean a minor set back until the next 6-figure job comes around, but the loss of one’s home, the inability to feed and clothe the family, the loss of one’s dignity.
The trend of late to bring in corporate types to run schools like “businesses” is simply disastrous. Schools and businesses have nothing in common, but to corporate kool-aid drinkers, like you, all problems in society can be solved simply by running things more like a business. well, we didn’t run schools like businesses for the first 200+ years of the Republic and our education system was the best in the world. oh, and we still had teachers’ unions too. funny, I wonder how that happened?
Of course, the AFL-CIO will still let you post your ridiculously ignorant comments. There’s no better way to remind us who the enemy is.
Gary Shapiro should send his comments to the Chamber of Commerce where such drivel would be welcomed. The fact is that since there are no jobs and the debt has compromised the future of all working class and poor kids the ruling class doesn’t care about public education or educating the poor or working class. Only if they can sweat profits out of their hides do there care about educating the poor and working class.
What would Shapiro think about gutting the military budget or abolishing the debt which is held by other countries or the banking interests? Like i said go push your line where it feeds the interests of those who exploit labor not to those who produce.