Wednesday, May 23, 2012

The most vile attack yet on Wisconsin teachers

This is the most cowardly and treacherous attack yet on public school teachers, make that, on all public employees. That image above is of a full-page newspaper ad taken out in the Janesville Gazette, the local newspaper in Paul Ryan's district. The Gazette, to its credit, didn't print the ad, but it still managed to find its way into subscribers' mailboxes through fliers placed in the paper's home-delivery tube system. The names you can't read in this image are the names of teachers in Janesville who signed the petition to recall Scott Walker. Next to their names, is their salary. At the bottom of the unsigned ad, there is a space to sign to "opt-out" of any teacher's classroom who signed the petition.

Walker and his cronies at the Heartland Institute and front group,  Citizens for Responsible Government, aka CRG Network, have figured out another way to use their Bradley Foundation and their Koch Bros. money to first, go after the unions, and then after any teachers who dare exercise their democratic right to sign a petition, with public acts of intimidation.

The flier distributed by CRG this weekend is done in the same style as a flier stuffed in Janesville mailboxes in March. Those fliers listed the salaries of some district administrators and teachers and made specific charges against public schools, including "dumbed-down curriculum," "Marxist/globalist agenda," "sexualization of children" and "union bullying and vindictive targeting of students." The first flier also contained no information about who made it. It suggested parents pull their children from public schools and put them in private schools.

Wisconsin public school parent karoli, posts in Crooks & Liars blog
I have never seen any teacher who deserved the treatment they are receiving, and I've never seen any reason to tell any teacher they don't have the right to participate in our political system and still teach school. What outrages me most about this evil, cynical, ugly, thuggish act on the part of rich old men and women in Wisconsin and their precious John Birch principles is their utter lack of humanity. 
One can't help but notice the similarities between this style of attack on teachers and the publishing of teachers' names next to student test scores in the L.A. Times. If anyone ever needed a better reason to recall Walker or to  fight in defense of teacher unions, I don't know what it would be.


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