In 2006, when the decline began, GW Bush was President. GW was a terrible education president, president over a whole lot of nonsense based on test scores. The factor of poverty was ignored, because after all, Bill Gates decided to ignore it, and he has all that money. Instead, we allowed Gates to throw a little of his money into seed projects, and then a whole lot of communities, including NYC, were left to throw a ton of good money after bad. You know, we had all those school closings and the small schools that later closed themselves.
This was so trendy that our new best friend Andrew Cuomo came out demanding the death penalty for schools. This was remarkable in that his father, who from all indications was not insane, was famous for his opposition to the death penalty. (If you're a registered Democrat, you can register your dissatisfaction with our reptile governor by voting for Cynthia Nixon today. First thing, before I go to work, that's what I'm gonna do. NYC Educator further endorses Jumaane Williams and Zephyr Teachout.)
Of course, after GW Bush took up his new career of not being President, Barack Obama came in and continued GW's awful policies. Who can forget his execrable education secretary, Arne Duncan, telling the world that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing to happen to education in New Orleans? Imagine that. A natural disaster. Almost two thousand dead. Over half the residents of New Orleans left. Unions were broken, public schools were closed, and the entire city was given to privatizers. That was good enough for Arne Duncan.
Now we've got Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos. If you can even imagine this, DeVos is less qualified than Duncan. Why? Because Duncan actually held a few jobs before getting this one. DeVos believes in everything Duncan does, plus vouchers. Vouchers have been rejected by voters all over the country. That is why reformies are going with charters. They are, however, just another means to break public schools. That's why Betsy loves them.
In other news, Betsy hates union. She's shocked that she was unable to unilaterally impose a collective bargaining agreement. Of course, as someone who's never held a job before, perhaps she doesn't even know what a union is. After all, she was born rich, married richer, and has never had to bother with working, let alone working people. Who the hell do they think they are saying no to her, after she's bought some of the finest GOP politicians she could pay for?
DeVos is upset because she lost a suit to protect predatory student lenders. In fact, she's so angry, she's ignoring a judge's order to negotiate before making agreements, and is doing any goshdarn thing she feels like. Because hey, what's the point of being rich if you can't do any goshdarn thing you feel like? She's unilaterally telling working people they can no longer telecommute. Hey, if Betsy DeVos has to show up to the office every now and again, you lowlifes who do this for salary rather than power can show up every last goshdarn minute.
And doing union business when you're actually at the workplace? Forget it. Let's make that as inconvenient as possible. DeVos would just as soon see us making minimum wage with no benefits whatsoever. Duncan was no better. He did more to actively break union than Betsy ever did. Now Arne's all over Twitter expressing outrage about Trump and the NRA. Just because he may have crawled out of someone else's pocket doesn't make him any less of a crook.
We are in crisis. We need to elect people who will help us. Cuomo wants to help us this week, but that's only because he's running against Donald Trump rather than his actual opponents. If corporate Democrats take over, expect him to become his lovable old self and trash us as an education monopoly.
It's very hard for me to understand how working people can vote for people, Democrat or Republican, who doesn't support them. I guess the easy thing would be to blame the teachers.
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