Waukegan teachers hanging tough. Cuomo vows to break public schools 'monopolies'.

At last night's board meeting, Waukegan board member Victoria Torres blows it. Tells angry striking teachers and parent supporters, "Sit down and shut up!" Probably not the best way for elected official to open dialogue. Meeting up for grabs. Quickly adjourned. At 10 p.m. teachers union releases a statement calling Torres’ behavior “abhorrent” and calling for her immediate resignation. Statewide support is building for teachers who are in 4th week of strike for a decent contract.

While N.Y. Gov. Cuomo is busy playing political games with quarantined Ebola health workers, he still finds time to attack public education with a broad brush. According to this story in the Daily News, Cuomo has vowed to break the public schools “public monopolies” and replace them with more privately-run charter schools.

That's really hard to understand since Cuomo has always been a big fan of monopolies. Take for example his love affair with Pearson Publishing, the British conglomerate that monopolizes Common Core and the standardized testing industry.

According to Alan Singer, writing at Huffington,

 Pearson is already creating teacher certification exams for eighteen states including New York, organizing staff development workshops to promote Pearson products, and providing school district Pearson assessment tools. In New York, Pearson Education currently has a five-year, $32 million contract to administer state test and provides other "testing services" to the State Education Department. It also recently received a share of a federal Race to the Top grant to create what the company calls the "next-generation" of online assessments. 

“Gov. Cuomo has laid clear plans to expand his frontal assault on our public schools through high stakes testing, starving our public schools and privatization,” says Billy Easton, executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education.

“It’s not that shocking when you look at the enormous pile of cash he has raked in from the Wall Street billionaires who are investing in charter schools. He is rewarding his financial backers at a devastating cost to our children.”

Please tell me again why the Working Families Party (WFP) thought it a good idea to endorse this guy? The Nation's explanation only makes me dizzy.

AFT Prez Randi Weingarten Tweets this follow-up to this week's teacher-bashing TIME cover:

85,000 have signed @AFTunion petition asking @time to apologize for it cover which was a sucker punch to teachers everywhere #TIMEfail
— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) October 29, 2014