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It is nice to have a post you can point to when people suddenly become hyperskeptical of Evolution. Thanks Qualia Soup.
I’ve been around the mulberry bush a couple of times about teachers and unions. It’s nice when someone puts a piece together that concisely answers the usual bally-hoo about how bad unions are and how things would be fixed if there was just more free market, because more competition always fixes everything all the time no matter what how dare you even question that assumption you commie pinko-intellectual socialist!!!1!
Lie #1: Unions are undermining the quality of education in America.
Teachers unions have gotten a bad rap in recent years, but as education professor Paul Thomas of Furman University tells AlterNet, “The anti-union message…has no basis in evidence.” In fact, Furman points out, “Union states tend to correlate with higher test scores.” As a 2010 study conducted by Albert Shanker Fellow Matthew Di Carlo found, “[T]he states in which there are no teachers covered under binding agreements score lower [on standardized assessment tests] than the states that have them… If anything, it seems that the presence of teacher contracts in a state has a positive effect on achievement” – by as much as three to five points in reading and math at varying grade levels.
Even so, Thomas doesn’t believe that high test-scores should be taken as the primary indication that union teachers are good for kids, noting that “union states tend to be less burdened by poverty while ‘right-to-work’ (non-union) states are disproportionately high-poverty” – and poverty, as we well know , has its own, profound impact on student performance.
For these reasons among others, union presence can never be isolated as the sole relevant factor in producing higher student achievement. But teachers unions are still important to student success. Why? Most importantly, perhaps, because they fight for equality of opportunity in education by, for example, opposing attempts to resegregate American schools . One of the reasons the CTU so resolutely opposed the school closures Rahm Emanuel and the Chicago Board of Education threatened was because closures have proven to have disastrous consequences for displaced students in Chicago, who are generally forced to move from one underfunded, low-performing school to another. Teachers unions oppose such injustices because they support the rights of all children to have access to high-quality education — not just the kids whose parents can afford high property taxes. That’s a good thing for America’s education system, not a bad one.
Another neat part of holding a minority viewpoint is that when talking with those still in the matrix, your arguments can be dismissed out of hand as whining or mere supercilious handwaving. This short video paints a slightly different picture and should be part of your 101 level knowledge of what Feminism is about.
Gail Dines knocks this talk out of the park – Neo-Liberalism is exposed, and all the ill-effects that come with that particular set of toxic ideals. Some quotes from the video:
“There is no such thing as cheap labour, there is only labour that has been made cheap”
“Women perform 66% of the worlds work, produce 50% of the food, but earn 10% of the income and own 1% of the property”
On Third Wave Feminism – “Orgasms are nice, but revolutions are better.”
Sit back and soak this one up folks, it is how the world is working, whether you like it or not.
We are a skeptical bunch here at DWR and claims of mind reading tend to set off our bullcookery detectors, but let me assure you this is for realz peeps, and I fully endorse this video and the message contained within.
A hat tip to mystro for plucking this handy DWR PSA out of the white ball of noise that is the internetz.
Welcome to what is going to become a DWR reference video. It is going to be step 1 or make that step 1a, step 1 being gong over to finallyfeminism101 and reading, for dudes that want to talk about feminism and equality because as of late (read always) dudes seem to have very little clue as to what the situation in society actually is and how others in society have to act to stay safe. I found this video over at Unladylike Musings along with her narrative of what it is like for women in society, today as in right now, as in the present as in…
It’s fine if you don’t get it or understand it the first time, but it is real and it is happening. I too am tired of the silence.
I am tired of the bad rap Unions get. You know why they get a bad rap, because they are one of the few institutions in society that can mount effective opposition to corporate power. You like your 8 hour work day? Thank unions for that. Health and Safety regulations? Thank a union for it. You know why you’re thanking a union and not your employer? It’s because they don’t give two shitz about you, your family or your future.
Union history does not get taught in the classrooms because of course like actual democracy, it is a threat to corporate control and power. I’ve been reading Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Hedges and Sacco and I will share a few excerpts with you today.
“Workers in this country paid for their right by suffering brutal beatings, mass expulsions from company housing and jobs, crippling strikes, targets assassinations of union leaders, and armed battles with hired-gun thugs and state militias. Unions created the middle class. They opened up our democracy. Federal Marshals, state militias, sheriff’s deputies and at times even U.S. Army troops, along with the courts and legislative bodies, were repeatedly used to crush organized workers. Striking sugar cane workers were gunned down in Thibodaux, Louisiana, in 1887. Steel workers were shot to death in 1892, in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Railroad workers were murdered in the nationwide Pullman strike of 1894. Coal miners were massacred at Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914 and at Matewan, West Virginia, in 1920.
The Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Carnegies, and the Morgans – the Goldman Sachs and Walmart of their day – never gave a damn about workers. All they cared about was profit. The eight-hour workday, the minimum wage, Social Security, pensions, job safety, paid vacations, retirement benefits and health insurance were achieved because hundreds of thousands of workers physically fought a system of capitalist exploitation. They rallied around radicals such as Mary Harris “Mother” Jones – arrested at one point in the West Virginia coalfields for reading the Declaration of Independence to a crowd of miners – United Mine Workers’ President John L. Lewis, and “Big” Bill Haywood and his Wobblies, as well as Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.
“The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle […].” Frederick Douglas said. “If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. […]” […] Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. “
From Days of Destruction Days of Revolt p. 159 – 160.
So before your next anti-union rant, maybe just stop and think of all things you are benefiting from right now that was paid for in blood and misery by people who had the courage and will to demand justice in society.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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