How's this for some premonition from the spouse of an elementary school teacher who's been paying attention:
"Once the media horror dies down about Soto and her co-workers’ sacrifices, I guarantee you this: public school grade school teachers will go right back to being the despised class. “Union thugs.” “With three-month vacations.” “Teaching kids their ABCs.” All the idiotic, ill-informed, right wing anti-intellectual myths will rev up again as if nothing had happened. And in the meantime the people the Fox pundits despise will go on teaching kids to read and do math and treat each other with respect."
I'd been thinking the exact same cynical absolutely correct thing too. I guess what surprises me is how the Buffalo News couldn't even wait until the funerals in Newtown Conn were over before they went after teachers again. Is it the new editor? Are they really feeling the hopelessness of their cause? I can only imagine what's got under their saddles down there in the editorial bunker that's made them so goddamned nasty and hateful. Last week in Buffalo a second grader kicked a teacher in the head and a knife packing teen age girl while trying to attack her boyfriend struck another teacher in the head with a steel chair. Two headshots in one day and the news has to cover the story by mentioning that it's going to revive a touchy issue about student suspensions. Yeah it's touchy because one of the moronic things Buffalo has tried to do to appease loudmouths who don't mind their kids acting like animals at home is to cut suspensions to the point where they do whatever they want, laugh in their teacher's faces and say What are you gonna do about it? This isn't my conjecture it's the words of Marc Bruno a BTF rep and Riverside teacher who had his head smashed in by an animal who needs a cell and an ass kicking not a seat in anyone's classroom.
And today, not that there's been any period of decency from the assholes of the Buffalo News, they are right back on their donkey braying at the moon and howling for teacher blood. Here's just a taste of their same old tired teacher hating bullshit :
Between union-friendly state labor laws and a contract that long ago gave away the candy store, the union is empowered to do nothing it doesn’t want to do. Most recent is its intransigence on negotiating a new teacher evaluation agreement, a refusal that threatens to cost the district as much as $59 million. BTF President Philip Rumore dresses his refusal in nobility, claiming he can’t possibly negotiate with the district while the district continues to appeal a ruling that recent involuntary teacher transfers violated the contract.
Absent in their logic is the little untrained twit who was handed the Commissioner's job who got the brilliant idea to impose mandates on Buffalo teachers then tie federal funding to their slavish obeisance to said mandates. The News like everyone else professing to have the low down on the Buffalo teacher's situation, pigheadedly refuses to admit that John King is the one who is trying to blackmail Buffalo's teachers with federal money by demanding they cooperate with a ridiculous and destructively inaccurate and unreliable evaluation system. In standing up for themselves and their students Buffalo's teachers earn terms like "intransigent" and "dysfunctional" while the squibbers refer to Buffalo's "mistreated" students.
Wouldn't it be funny if this bunch of editorial eunuchs through some karmic boomerang found themselves dropped into a Buffalo school and had to fend for themselves for a day. I wonder if they'd still be talking about intransigence and dysfunction and claiming our students are being mistreated. Or would they be writing something more in line with Ebeneezer Scrooge's journal entry from 12/25. They are so full of venom and bile that they have completely lost sight of reality. We live in that reality every day and we're usually too damned busy to make time for know nothings and do nothings with entirely too much to say. Thoughts and prayers to the families in Connecticut. Peace, friends.
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