Louisiana Voice

The Washington Post was one of the few members of the media to cover a large, mostly unnoticed march on the White House by 5,000 teachers from all over the country on Saturday.

One of the organizers of the march was Katherine McBride Cox, a native of Ruston and a 1961 graduate of Ruston High School.

She recently retired after 35 years as an educator in Arizona where she served as a classroom teacher and a principal at the elementary and high school levels. As a teacher, she developed a nationally-recognized career education program for fifth and sixth graders called Window on the World.

For eight years, she taught a self-contained class for gifted students and later worked with at-risk middle school students. She also has served as an instructional coach for other teachers.

She shares her experiences as a school principal under No Child Left Behind on her website In the Trenches (www.inthetrencheswithschoolreform.com/).

Actor Matt Damon, whose mother was a teacher, was a featured speaker for the event. “This is has been a horrible decade for teachers,” he told the marchers. But even his appearance failed to attract media attention hoped for by organizers.

If the teachers’ march was largely ignored by the national media, it is somewhat understandable, considering the worldwide attention given to the national debt crisis and the accompanying gridlock that has gripped Washington.

The event was simply a victim of bad timing through no fault of the organizers, but that by no means diminishes the importance of the march.

The Washington Post, which did provide coverage of the event, featured a photo of marchers that would seem to bring the entire issue into focus. Featured prominently in the photo was a marcher carrying a sign that read, “Stop ALEC Now.”

ALEC is the acronym for the American Legislative Exchange Council. It is an organization of conservative legislators and business leaders who have formulated a lengthy laundry list of legislation on issues ranging from immigration to health care to deregulation of industry to union-busting to prison privatization to school vouchers and charter schools.

The organization is holding its national conference in New Orleans all this week and a new list of proposed legislation is almost certain to emerge after approval of ALEC’s corporate-dominated board which is represented by such companies as Koch Industries, AT&T, Wal-Mart, State Farm Insurance, Kraft, Johnson & Johnson, and Eli Lilly.

Gov. Bobby Jindal, the darling of the Republican Party until his disastrous response to President Obama’s State of the Union address in 2010, will be the guest speaker at the ALEC plenary lunch on Wednesday at 11:30 a.m.

It would be a mistake, however, for the media to concentrate on Jindal’s address and ignore events that take place behind the scenes. That’s where the delegates will get down and dirty with their legislative proposals and Jindal almost certainly will be paying close attention.

Typical of ALEC platforms is the attempt in 2010 by Rep. John Schroder of Abita Springs who introduced four separate bills aimed at abolishing the state’s civil service system. The effort failed but cropped up later that year when Wisconsin Governor-elect Scott Walker initiated efforts to abolish state employee and teacher unions.

A quick history lesson: Since 1950, the percentage of the U.S. work force represented by organized labor has dropped from 32 percent to 11.9 percent in 2010. Last year, there were 7.9 million public sector union members compared to only 7.4 million in the private sector, despite the fact that corporate America employees five times the number of wage-earners.

Because of the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs by American industry, there are fewer of those jobs left in this country. Outsourcing has cost this country literally millions of well-paying manufacturing jobs. Of course, not all jobs are outsourced overseas. In 1993, American Airlines decided to contract out its ticket counter jobs. The result was employees who were making $40,000 annually suddenly found themselves with a new employer who offered them their old jobs at $16,000 per year.

All organized labor has done for this country is to give American workers (blue-collar and white-collar alike) the eight-hour work day, the 40-hour work week, mandatory breaks, job safety, grievance procedures, minimum wages, workers comp, pensions, health care, paid sick days, vacation days, holidays, and an end to child labor.

None of that matters to ALEC, however.

Profit-driven to the core, ALEC and its corporate supporters have turned their full attention to unconditional support of charter schools and vouchers. As if in lock-step, Republican administrations across the country have cloned each other’s agendas and cloed ranks in attempts to dismantle public education in favor of more and more charter schools.

Cutting funding is one of the favorite methods of crippling public education. Transportation of private school students to and from school, for example, was once funded by the state. This year that responsibility was transferred to local school boards, already financially strapped after Jindal pulled federal funding intended for the local systems.

In Louisiana, public schools have state-mandated, uniform reasons for which a student may be expelled from school. Under those standards, a student may be expelled from a public school for only the most egregious transgression. With charter schools, those reasons vary from school to school. Lafayette Academy charter school, for example, can expel students for sleeping in class, failing to report to the office as directed, disobeying a teacher, cheating, lying or any other “disruptive, disrespectful or disobedient” conduct.

Abramson Charter School in New Orleans, which recently had its charter revoked, could expel students for not being in assigned seats before the tardy bell rings, not bringing pencils or books to class, or for not raising hands before talking.

Other charter schools may “disenroll” a student for being tardy five times or for not maintaining a 2.0 grade point average.

While public schools find it virtually impossible to expel students, the double standard between public and charter schools allows charter schools to rid themselves of the lower-performing students and thus to improve standardized test scores. This gives an unfair advantage to charter schools by creating an unlevel playing field that allows the charters to artificially inflate grades on standardized tests, the holy grail of No Child Left Behind.

Jindal has taken up the ALEC banner in his efforts to promote charter schools and to privatize state government agencies. His efforts are certain to intensify if he is re-elected in October and can carry his Republican majority in both the House and Senate over into his second administration. Those who cheer those efforts would do well to little consider the long-term effects of reducing state services through privatization.

Not that we’re making comparisons, but before these efforts are encouraged too enthusiastically, we should remember this: On May 2, 1933, in a brazen move to consolidate his political power, Adolf Hitler outlawed trade unions in Nazi Germany as a precursor to eliminating all opposition groups.

Certainly, Jindal should be astute enough to see that his agenda is not necessarily the best course of action for the state. The sale of prisons, for example, would be a move to obtain one-time revenue for recurring expenses, something to which he voiced his opposition when running for governor.

The privatization of the Office of Group Benefits would mean turning the most fiscally-responsible, most efficiently-run agency in state government over to a private entity whose only possible motive would be profit which necessarily must translate to higher premiums or benefit cutbacks. That’s the wrong reason to sacrifice the livelihoods of 149 dedicated state employees.

It’s also as wrong as wrong can possibly be to turn one’s back on the best interest of the state in favor of personal ambition.

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