Sarah Anderson in her September 10, 2010 AlterNet article, "Hidden Corporate Scandal: CEO's Who Laid Off the Most Workers Rake in the Most Treasure," points out, "According to a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies, CEOs from the 50 firms that have laid off 3,000 or more workers since the onset of the crisis [the Great Recession] took home nearly $12 million on average in 2009. That's 42 percent more than the average for CEOs of S&P 500 firms as a whole." Later in the article she further states, "A University of Colorado survey of S&P 500 companies from 1982 to 2000 found no evidence that downsizing leads to increased returns on assets. In fact, stable employers--companies that have less than 5 percent annual staff turnover--outperformed companies that had major layoffs." We are sending mixed signals to our children: you can be completely incompetent if you are a CEO plutocrat running a billion dollar business, but God help you if you're a teacher.
(http://www.alternet.org/story/148035/)
If you want better teachers in the sciences, offer a higher starting pay to teachers who have a Bachelor of Science degree in a science or mathematics, rather than a Bachelor of Arts. A Bachelor of Science degree requires an additional 15 to 18 semester hours in your major (and related subjects) to earn a degree, than the Bachelor of Arts degree in the same subject.
If we are going to improve our education system nationwide, we also need to remove the bottleneck of Texas from the decision making process of which textbooks are available to the other states. Every state should have a broad choice of textbooks--especially in history and social studies--to choose from. Texas, because of its population, has served as a sieve for our public schools' textbooks for the last thirty years.
We discovered last year the danger in this set-up when it was reported that Thomas Jefferson's more revolutionary ideas were being removed from the Texas history books (together with all mention of America's labor movement), and that Jefferson Davis's reputation was being revised and rehabilitated in a manner that would make the Red Chinese Politburo proud.
(http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/01/19/77885/texas-textbooks/)
We are often told by the conservatives that the secret to fixing the problem is so called "charter schools," which circumvents unions and the state certification of teachers. As Paul Thomas pointed out in his October 23, 2010 OpEdNews article, "The (Shifting) Truth About Charter Schools," "Charter schools are mechanisms for promoting the claims that schools can reform society, and thus a mechanism for discounting the impact of poverty on the learning and lives of children"Corporate reformers are fully invested in branding public education as a failure while simultaneously arguing that schools can overcome social forces, despite evidence to the contrary."
Mr. Thomas continues, "Charter schools also help promote "no excuses" ideology ("new paternalism") and deficit perspectives of children living in poverty that perpetuate classist dynamics in the schools, thus exacerbating the inequities of children's lives in the schools themselves. These corrosive ideologies are further wrapped in compelling rhetoric such as the "soft bigotry of low expectations," despite the practices themselves institutionalizing racism, classism, and elitism."
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Shifting-Truth-about-by-Paul-Thomas-101021-188.html
Whatever the oligarchs and their corporate surrogates are for, I am reflexively against, as a matter of principle. Charter schools have always seemed to me to be nothing more than a way to strip public education of yet more money, and put it into the pockets of the plutocrats.
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