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Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Dan Burns at MPP writes of Republicans' war on the teachers' union; not directly called that by the Republicans, but they just might get SCHOOLED.

Burns' item, here, and it speaks for itself.

SCHOOLED, here.

If you like your's dumbed down, nuance-free, hundred-words-or-less, don't bother reading about Cory Booker and Chris Christie, and Facebook's Zukerberg getting SCHOOLED.

If, instead, you might be curious how a hundred million philanthropic dollars can be disappeared without ever a dollar of it appearing to reach a classroom, have a look.

UPDATE: a GOOGLE. (Readings for a cold day spent indoors.)

FURTHER UPDATE: For further Republican mythology some may vouch for, Craig Westover, here and here; looking backward at backward thinking alive today.

Giving public tax money to privateers never seemed sound to me.

But teachers have to get soundly behind the class size problem that substantial pay levels and penurious school board practices generate. It is not long-term thinking to settle any possible strike by a pay raise compromise at the expense of class size compromise to unrealstic levels for actual education to happen.

The last GOP Senate candidate (I forget his name) and his touting of the SJ tiny experimental Cristo Rey efforts, where only children of highly-motivated parents get in and the student/teacher ratio is below what any public school board in the state funds, show what can work, but what likely cannot scale to Anoka-Hennepin District sizes. Certainly not so, without class size changes. That, class size reform, is the key to everything else, and "solutions" ignoring that are smoke screens from hucksters.