Teacher Protests in Russia

UNPRECEDENTED RUSSIAN TEACHER PROTEST GROWS
By Stephen Wilson


(Moscow, Russia) - In recent months Moscow has witnessed new waves of protests from angry, antagonized and alienated teachers.

              Students and parents are losing patience with Russian officials who are attempting to impose a brutal austerity program. We see forced mergers of schools, cutting of staff levels, benefits, pay and the privatization and almost complete commercialization of education.

              On October 11th in Moscow there was a turn-out of 1500 protesters.This represented one of the biggest demonstrations in education for years! A subsequent demonstration organised by the 'Civil initiative against the commercialization of
education and medicine' drew approximately 300 demonstrators. Although this time the turn out was relatively low, it would be rashly premature to predict support will dwindle away. The anger and the intensity surrounding those issues runs too deep. In fact, many teachers were unaware of this protest as it had not been that well publicised or given enough notice. Nevertheless, the demonstration has helped keep up the momentum of events.

              The mass meeting took place at Lermontov Square near Metro Krasnaya Vorota, under the gaze of a huge statue of the Russian poet Lermontov who stood gazing over the demonstrators with tensely folded arms and great bulging baleful eyes.

              Political parties such as Yabloka, different communist parties and anarchists brought their banners, papers and leaflets to the demonstration. But it was the banners
of the school union 'Teacher', and 'Solidarity' which caught my eye. Many demonstrators had made their own modest placards which they stoically displayed for the next few hours in cold weather.

             I met one physics teacher who told me, 'I'm a pensioner and teacher. This is the first time I have been to a demonstration like this. I have come here because my patience has run out. I don't see why anyone has the right to ruin the future of young children.' When asked 'How long have you taught physics at your school?', she answered 'For forty six years!'

             I told her 'You must have alot of patience.' 
             
             'It is not just patience. I'm devoted to my job'.

             When I asked a young teacher why she thought the combination of School Number 1089 with 2077 was illegal, she told me, 'Our school has an existing agreement with the state that our school operates according to a special programme for  children. Officials are violating this very agreement by fusing it with another school.'

             The young teacher started to become tense and stuttered a little when a television journalist tried to film her. She was evidently not used to speaking in public. Neither were some of the speakers who took the rostrum. They spoke nervously and not knowing what to say next resorted to chanting slogans, such as 'A free education for all', 'Hands off our state education' and 'I say not just 'Learn, learn and learn, but struggle, struggle and struggle.' The best speeches were those which flowed from bitter experience. One teacher
spoke of how ludicrous it was to ask a low paid teacher who has to support a family, to stay in the class room filling in endless forms and helping organise a school electronic newspaper. 'Who needs this newspaper?

             How can a teacher find the time to do this when he has to work outside the school to supplement his poor wages? 'Speakers repeatedly spoke of rising red tape which is pointlessly straining already overworked teachers and the perceived illiteracy of government officials. 'Let's ask them to show us diplomas and qualifications for carrying out such decisions. Those officials are illiterate!' The officials were viewed as attempting to attack literacy. 'The only literacy those officials understand is how to make money and turn everything into a business. They consider that a school is just a factory and education no more than a conveyor belt'. Sometimes the speeches could become hysterical. 'It is fascist when officials attempt to impose a system on pupils without acknowledging the differences of children'.

             Prince Otto von Bismark got a word in at the meeting!

             A speaker quoted him, 'Wars are first won with teachers and priests and not soldiers'. He might also have mentioned two other quotations, 'Those who don't build schools end up constructing prisons ' and 'Never declare war on Russia'.

             The last quote could be paraphrased as 'Russian officials should not declare civil war against their own citizens.'

             The presence of the independent union, 'Teacher' was significant. This union, which was established in 2011, boasts a membership of 6000 members and have already begun to have found many new branches throughout Russia and seem increasingly confident of organising campaigns against the closure of schools, mergers and unfair dismissals. The union was fishing for potential members amongst the audience and handed me a kind of leaflet promoting their activities.

              WHY IS 'REFORM' AROUSING ANGER?

              For the past four years the Government has intensified the process of rapidly privatising and commercialising the state education sector. As one speaker declared,       'state education is the last domain where much potentially profitable property is still in public hands.' The privatisation of school buildings acts as a magnet for those who crave
wealth at any price. Of course, officials don't call reform privatisation, but use euphemisms such as 'Modernisation', 'Optimisation' and 'reform'. They never 'close down' schools but 'merge 'them with others. Teachers are not made immediately 'redundant' but have their hours ridiculously reduced to being dependent on 'sub standard' earnings!

             Under the term 'Optimisation', approximately 12,000 schools have been closed down throughout Russia over the space of the last four years. As many as 10,000 of those schools were in the countryside. There are many cases where schools are abruptly closed without the proper consultation of teachers, parents or children. One of the reasons for increasing bitterness is the way those closures are carried out. Officials often don't bother to warn, consult and discuss those changes with teachers. Opposition to those changes can lead to illegal dismissals, threats or even imprisonment from corrupt officials.

             But officials are also attempting to find novel ways to make parents pay for what is traditionally a free education. For example, officials declared that any parent that leaves his child in school after school hours will be charged a new fee. Parents are also asked to donate money to repair a broken roof which is the legal responsibility of the council.

             An abortive attempt was made to make the teaching of some school subjects payable until it was withdrawn in the face of indignant parents.

             REFORMS ARE ILLEGAL!

             All those attempts by the government blatantly violates the law of the Russian Federation. According to article 43, 'Everyone has the right to education and it is       guaranteed freely at a pre-school level, general school level as well as further educational level.'

             Another important part of this article stresses how, 'The Russian Federation supports different forms of education and self-education. It does not impose standardized education on everyone.' This point has been lost by Russian officials who wish to erode the identity of 'Intellectual' school, for gifted children from disadvantaged families by merging it with another school with a different way of teaching. As with all mergers, there is often a loss of school staff, not to mention the identity and atmosphere of a school.

              It comes as no surprise to discover that the teachers of those schools perceive those changes as 'an attack on the very identity of the schools.' Some teachers even express fear that the government aims to liquidate the state education system.

              How do officials react to those charges?

              WHAT OFFICIALS CLAIM

              A recent interview with Russian paper 'Kommersant' offers an insight. In one interview on October 23, 2014, Leonid Pechathinkov stated, 'No teachers are going to be made redundant' and 'that schools such as 'intellectual' can still attain grants from the government on a different basis.'

              What those teachers don't understand is 'the simple fact that money does not drop down endlessly from the sky'.

              In his opinion the cost of funding schools such as 'Intellectual' are just too high. The government simply can't afford it.

              'We have a law on the secondary education, but we don't have a law on general tutorial system. Schools like 'Intellectual' operate on a costly tutorial system of a teacher student ratio of one to two.' At today's meeting this figure was challenged.

              Now schools are going to be financed on the basis of how well their students perform on the dubious United States exams and Olympic school competitions. The better the performance, the greater the grant. Any educationalist will inform you this is not the most rational way to fund an educational system. It fails to acknowledge the unique     circumstances of each school. Furthermore, the value of a school can't just be evaluated on the basis of final year exam results, but on many hidden factors such as whether the student who leaves becomes a better moral and spiritual person and develops non academic skills.

               However, it is the insidious philosophy of many officials who believe that the school should be fully commercialised and students turned into soulless consumers which most angers teachers. They ask the public, 'Do you want us to rear a highly materialistic generation of soulless students who care much more about making money than their       friends, family and the suffering stranger?

               One thing is certain is that the government intends to drastically cut the budget on education. They planned to cut the budget from 1% in 2013 to 0.7% by 2016. What
this means is less schools, less specialists for children with special needs and less psychologists. Kindergartens will also be a luxury for more and more families.

               At today's demonstration the arguments that officials don't have the money and can't afford to finance schools is wholly unconvincing. Speakers stated, 'If that is so, why
do those officials have huge businesses not only in Moscow, but in Switzerland? 'Where do they acquire such money?'

               From the local council budget on education?'

               'Why does the local government ask council workers to tear apart a road in Moscow, which is in perfect condition, only to rebuild it with poorer material ? '(because the high quality material for the road is secretly sold off). Why waste money in such an idiotic and irrational way?' 'Why doesn't the local government use this money to maintain
or improve the dire condition of so many schools?'

               It is not the schools which have to justify attaining finance, but the local government which is squandering and plundering financial  resources. It is high time the local government 'opened the books' to the public.

               Unfortunately, attempts to investigate what may be corruption not only seem frustratingly futile, but dangerous. A Journalist who worked for the paper, 'Hammer and Sickle' received a two year jail sentence for accusing a local government official of closing down kindergartens, firing teachers and illegally taking money.

              The journalist, Alena Polyakov, was charged with threatening to kill for political reasons'. The officials took her writing too literary or more likely used her careless words of saying she deserved to be shot as a pretext for jailing the person who had made accusations of corruption against the official. (The head educational official, Alena Sokolskaya has a lot of estate property as well as a registered company in Spain.) Instead of investigating this head official in Klinkova, Russia, they deprive a journalist of freedom! Forget justice!

              No wonder the teachers at the demonstration were bitter and Lermontov looked on as if he too was frowning.

Education Data Jargon

The jargon of school reformers masks the poverty that stifles student achievement

http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2014/11/13/the-jargon-of-school-reformers-masks-the-poverty-that-stifles-student-achievement/

I sat in on my first Families and Education Levy Oversight Committee meeting yesterday and the one thing that struck me the most was the useless jargon bandied about, phrases such as:

Leveraging/Leverage (take your pick)

Data

Quality

Equity

Thought partners (?)

Matrix

Proportionality (a legal term that didn’t describe whatever it was the presenter was really trying to say)

21st century skills (these days that’s hard to define when there are no jobs)

Career readiness (the term “college readiness” was not used in this context)

This useless language occurred mostly when the presenter was talking about low-income/minority/ELL/IEP students

The idea that any outside factors might be involved in a student’s performance had no place in the discussion. It was all about test scores and the “effectiveness” of teachers and principals based on the student test scores as if teachers could wipe away hunger, the effects of poverty, the emotional and physical stress of homelessness or strife at home, illness, learning disabilities or the fact that a child is new to the English language.

Those human factors and others were ignored.

The following article beautifully describes what is happening in Seattle and around the country.

Mystifying Poverty

By Will Johnson

The jargon of school reformers only masks the poverty that stifles student achievement.

Rarely has a dull, technical document created as much controversy as the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. Everyone from parents and teachers to politicians and op-ed columnists is debating the merits of the Common Core, though it’s unclear how many of them have actually read the full book-length document.

But who can blame them, when the standards are full of sentences like: “Part of the motivation behind the interdisciplinary approach to literacy promulgated by the standards is extensive research establishing the need for college and career ready students to be proficient in reading complex informational text independently in a variety of content areas?” It’s not a fun or illuminating piece of literature, but it is a great example of the type of jargon that has taken over America’s public schools.

Of course, public school teachers have no choice but to familiarize themselves with the Common Core. Around the country, school administrators are demanding that teachers of all subjects adapt their lesson plans and painstakingly explicate how they are aligned with the Common Core.

Before the next semester begins in January, these teachers will be required to submit their “UBDs” to their supervisors for approval. (UBD stands for “Understanding by Design, a trendy new term for “unit plan.”)

Each UBD must contain a list of “essential questions,” “enduring understandings,” “exhibition descriptions,” and rubrics for student assessment. Additionally, each UBD must explain which “Habits of Mind” the unit focuses on, which “active reading strategies” and “graphic organizers” will be applied throughout the unit, and what efforts the teacher will make to create UBDs that are “student centered.” Of course, teachers must also identify which Common Core standards will be addressed throughout every single unit, lesson, and task the students complete.

The jargon doesn’t end with the Common Core and curriculum. Throughout the year, when students misbehave, teachers must follow the protocol laid out by their schools’ “ladder of guided discipline.” They will document students’ “problem behaviors” in “low inference” language — describing “just the facts,” a rather illusory proposition — as well as which interventions they have employed to address the problem behaviors.

Since it’s possible that a teacher’s ineffective pedagogy is triggering the problem behaviors, they must make sure they have fully differentiated their instruction to meet the varied learning needs and multiple intelligences that their students present.

If teachers’ interventions adhere to protocol yet fail to yield results, they should engage other school-based professionals in a conversation about how best to support student learning and ensure that each and every student in her class is on the path to success.

If a teacher fails to complete any of these steps, or in any other way displeases her principal — perhaps by refusing to supervise test-prep sessions on the weekends or attending union meetings — she risks being rated “unsatisfactory,” which could lead to “termination.”

The rise of jargon is not accidental. One of the key goals of the school reform movement is to exclude the public from educational policy. That’s why reformers have aggressively advocated mayoral control and the privatization of massive urban school districts like Detroit and New Orleans. By using needlessly technocratic language (see “relevant stakeholders,” “high-impact strategies,” and “culturally sensitive manner”), reformers are able to pursue an anti-democratic agenda without ever being pressed to clearly articulate tangible goals.

Neoliberal education reformers’ use of vague hyperbole about “failing schools” and the “achievement gap” works in concert with meaningless phrases like “the times have changed — our schools need to change with them.” Reformers have overwhelmed parents and the public at large with the general impression that “our teachers are bad and change is good.”

Beyond confusing and misleading the public, jargon obscures the fact that when we talk about schools, we’re talking about places where children live and grow for seven to nine hours a day, ten months out of the year. If they’re poor, these children spend their days in overcrowded classrooms that are poorly lit and poorly ventilated.

My first two years teaching in the public schools, I worked at a high school where students spent their entire school day, five days a week, without ever leaving the building. These teenagers received a single thirty-minute break each day for lunch and recess combined. Their recess consisted of milling about the school cafeteria after eating. Jargon reduces these pent-up children to abstractions and effaces the brutality of this type of captivity.

Just as jargon obscures the inhumane conditions in which students learn, it obscures the degree to which management has made the workplace a hostile environment for teachers.

At the same time states across the country were rushing to adopt the Common Core, they were also adopting a new tool for evaluating teachers: the Danielson Framework. Like the Common Core, the framework is so laden with technocratic language that one might imagine its sole purpose is to confuse its readers. And as with the Common Core, if a teacher does not meet its demands, she may be out of a job.

Taking its name from the education consultant Charlotte Danielson, the framework divides the teaching process into four “domains”: “planning and preparation,” “classroom environment,” “instruction,” and “professional responsibilities.” Each of these domains is then broken into four or five subcategories ranging from “using questioning and discussion techniques” to “showing professionalism.”

Subcategories are then separated into a series of components. For example, the components of the subcategory “participating in the professional community” are: “relationships with colleagues,” “involvement in a culture of professional inquiry,” “service to the school,” and “participation in school and district projects.”

Danielson describes “proficient” (tolerable) instruction in the “communicating with families” subcategory of the “professional responsibilities” domain as follows: “The teacher provides frequent and appropriate information to families about the instructional program and conveys information about individual student progress in a culturally sensitive manner.”

This is the language of school reform. It is a language so riddled with unintelligible, meaningless talk as to be all but indecipherable to speakers of plain English. More than that, by imposing the language of management upon the classroom, reformers have also imposed the profit-driven ideology of the corporate world.

US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan provides another good example. In an interview with Target’s online magazine, he describes how private businesses can help fix America’s allegedly failing public schools:

It is going to take the sustained involvement of every stakeholder group, at every level – local, state and national – to transform education for the 21st Century. Private sector partners can help ensure that state and local investments go to projects that have the strongest data and show the greatest impact – or, that help move the field forward by building a stronger body of evidence. They can also support and encourage work already happening in schools.

The private sector can do so much to promote high-impact strategies, develop company-specific initiatives, and collaborate with relevant stakeholders to focus more than ever on excellent, evidence-driven, publically accountable education reform.

Reformers have argued loudly and aggressively that our schools and students are failing. But the language they use is by necessity obscure and technocratic, because no matter how emphatically they argue that America’s students are falling behind their international counterparts, the data repeatedly show that when studies control for the effects of poverty, American students are competitive with the top percentile of students in the world. And a 2011 Stanford University study found that family incomecontinues to be far and away the biggest determining factor of student achievement.

Make your way through the jargon about achievement gaps and teacher accountability, and the problem becomes clear. Nearly a quarter of all children in the US live in poverty, among the highest rates in the developed world. Combine this with the fact that in America, poor students receive less educational funding than rich ones and you have a real civil rights issue: the U.S. government discriminates against poor children.

In this context, discussing how teachers should align their curricula with the Common Core or how to teach effectively under the Danielson system is akin to debating the ergonomics of segregated water fountains. It distracts us from the problem of poverty and offers tacit approval to a discriminatory system of school funding.

In The Elements of Style, E.B. White wrote that “muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope.” By using impossibly complicated language, school reformers create the impression that improving school conditions for poor children is impossible. Given the muddiness of the language around educational policy, it’s no wonder that so many people have given up on the public schools.

But, as George Orwell noted, “from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase … into the dustbin where it belongs.”

The list of worn-out phrases is long: “evidence-based practices,” “hold teachers accountable,” and “informational texts” are just a few bits of jargon we must send to the dustbin. When we hear these phrases, we may jeer, as Orwell suggests, but we must also insist that the conversation focus exclusively on poverty and its cancerous effects.

The problem is poverty. The rest, as they say, is noise.

Cutting Medical Services!

MASS REDUNDANCIES ARE AROUSING ANGRY OPPOSITION FROM BOTH TEACHERS AND DOCTORS

SOME MANAGERS ARE THREATENING TO FIRE ANY STAFF SEEN ON DEMONSTRATIONS 
By Stephen Wilson


(Moscow, Russia) - Over the past few weeks both teachers and doctors are taking to the streets in what observers state are unprecedented attended demonstrations against what many see as an attempt to commercialise both medical care and education. For instance, as many as 1500 gathered at a protest against cuts in education on the 11th of October, while a few hundred assembled at Lermontovskya Square on the 25th of October. However, on Sunday the 2nd Nov, at Suvorovskaya Square, an estimated crowd of between 5000 and 6000 health care workers took to the streets against 'the commercialisation of medical care. '

              What has largely provoked the increasing militancy of health workers is a leaked document of the local government which indicates a plan to close down 28 medical centres and 15 hospitals. There are also proposals to fire 1000 medical personnel. All those changes are being justified by the rhetoric of the need to 'modernise' medical services, 'make them more effective' and the need to 'optimise' scant resources. However, critics doubt the sincerity of officials and see it as an attempt by the local government to not only fully commercialise medical care but to grab lucrative real estate property where those 'ineffective medical centres' happen to be located.' According to Semyon Galperin, a neurologist at Hospital Number 11, 'All the hospitals in the centre of Moscow that occupy the most expensive plots of land, have suddenly been labelled 'ineffective'.' The hospital which he works at was merged with Clinical Hospital Number 24 as part of 'reforms'. As a result of
this merger salaries fell drastically from 60,000 rubles a month to 20,000 rubles (470 dollars a month). This case undermines a recently made ludicrous claim made by Deputy Mayor Leonid Pechatnikov, in a recent interview with Kommersant, that the salaries of full time doctors and teachers stands at 70,000 rubles. In fact, Moscow Deputy Mayor Leonid       Pechatnikov has even been offering a serious of interviews explaining the logic behind the reforms and attempting to refute some of the fears of the protesters. Unlike head educational officials, he has not kept arrogantly aloof from the public. In some interviews he explained that the leaked document was only a proposal presented by a consultancy firm and not a plan about to be imminently implemented.

              Plans are not always intentions. In fact, one wonders if the planning stage has long passed. When Second City Teachers spoke to a medical nurse, we attained the impression
that it was not so much a case of planned redundancies 'on the cards,' but worse; the cards are already being dealt out!

              Many medical care workers had already lost their jobs without much of a murmur or stir until the last few months. We also discovered striking similarities between how the cuts were being imposed at both medical centres and institutions of further education. For example, instead of 'closing' schools, they, like medical hospitals, were 'merged', instead of being made redundant, workers had their hours cut to such low levels it might as well have been disguised unemployment and the increasing commercialisation of services where free medicine or books were no longer available freely.

             I spoke to one young nurse, who we will call 'Nadia,' who works at Hospital Number 133 which is located in the Lefortovsky district in Moscow. She told me 'the managers       gathered us together and told us directly that if we were seen on any protest demonstrations we would be promptly fired'. I asked her ' Were you made to sign a document saying you promised not to attend any protest demonstrations?'

             'I did not, but I know that medical staff at another hospital were asked to do this. Nadia answered that that itself seemed to echo a strikingly similar process going on in education. Only the other day, a 17 year old student of Moscow's Institute of Architecture and Construction were asked to sign a statement promising not to attend demonstrations. 'The student, whom I won't name told me she never even bothered  to read the document before she signed it.

             'I'm not interested in politics anyway and I don't want any big problems with the authorities,' she told me.

             So the authorities are attempting to illegally scare away people from attending demonstrations despite the fact that Article 31 provided them with this right.

             Nadia told me of how the polyclinic she had attended had not only lost a lot of staff, but had been stripped of its former services. For instance, massage services as well as a
cardiac care for patients with heart disease was no longer available. Instead, patients had to make a long journey to a clinic near the end of the purple line. Within the locality, Nadia told me how Hospital 29 was closed as well as a maternity hospital within the vicinity of the Old German Graveyeard. Nadia stated 'Medicine is becoming increasingly unavailable to older people.'

             Nadia stated that many people lost their jobs not so much by being explicitly fired but being threatened with redundancy in the event of not voluntary resigning.

             'They don't immediately fire them but simply cut their hours until they are virtually underemployed or virtually almost unemployed.' So we have a disguised slow-motion         redundancy process which is similar to the kind being executed in the Institute of Power and Energy. By the way, it may be just a coincidence but this institute is located just a 15 minute walk away down the road from the hospital! Nadia told me 'Our wages have been cut       severely from as much as 30,000 rubles a month to 21,000. (525 dollars). We can also no longer earn extra money under a bonus scheme where we were entitled to extra cash if we, say, cleaned a ward or room'.

             We can see that two articles enshrined in the Russian Constitution; Articles 31 and 41 are being blatantly and shamelessly violated. While the former provides every citizen of the Russian Federation to gather peacefully at demonstration, the latter insists that all citizens have the right to medical care.

             According to Alexsandr Saverskii of "the League of Patients,'" The government is making the maximum effort to move away from a system of free medical care to paid.'

             The results of this transition (which did not begin in 2012 but as far back as the 1990's ) can be tragically horrific. Only two years ago, one of my students of English turned up at my lesson at The Family Club and bitterly told me of how a 17-year-old boyfriend had died after being knocked off his motorbike by a speeding hit and run driver. She told me, 'The ambulance refused to take him to hospital because he did not have medical insurance. It is disgusting. I cried for three days after I heard of his death.' 

             Natasha 's story reminded me of the days when Jim Vail and I worked in a Brotherhood where we helped the homeless. I remember having to argue with ambulance drivers on the need to take some sick patients to hospital. Many drivers were stubbornly refusing to take them for all kinds of reasons, such as 'he has no proper documents' or 'he is not a Russian citizen'. If the medical care system is further privatised, we will witness even more tragic deaths!

             The plight of medical care workers is very similiar to teachers.

              Both are being threatened with lower pay, redundancies and longer hours! This explains why unions such as 'Teacher' are forging links with medical care workers. If they don't demonstrate, they may lose their jobs, but if they don't dare to go on demonstrations, their jobs will still be endangered! Therefore, the best defense against redundancy is not avoiding protest, but in bravely embarking upon it. Teachers and medical care workers can't afford to be intimidated .

Dems Lose Big

Was the Latest Election a Referendum on Unions?
By Jim Vail

The Lesser of Two Evils?

Will there even be a union in five years?

This was a question my colleague posed after last month's Chicago Teachers Union House of Delegates meeting.

I scratched my head, and said, yeah, that is the question.

The latest election in which multimillionaire hedge fund vulture Bruce Rauner defeated democrat machine hack Pat Quinn raises this exact question.

Rauner ran on a very visible anti-union platform. He wants to go to war against "union bosses."

Even Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who stripped the unions of collective bargaining rights so everybody's salaries dropped, got re-elected. 

A lot of people earn very little and hear the corporate media rail on and on about overpaid public servants that our tax system can't afford.

Now the question would be, did the people vote for Rauner to whack the unions (and support millionaires who don't pay their fair share of taxes!) or did working class people, union or not, just stay home on election day.

I understand the numbers were down in terms of how many people voted in Chicago. That is not good for the democrats who depend on the unions to deliver the vote.

Certainly the unions, including the Chicago Teachers Union, worked hard to get people out to vote.

But to vote for whom?

Quinn was a terrible choice for the democrats and ran with a despised running mate in Paul Vallas. 

Quinn chose Vallas to appease the business leaders who fund elections. All the politicians are aligned to money interests who buy and pay for elections!

So what is the solution?

Some are calling for a third party - a labor party. But such a political party can be easily manipulated, as it has in the past. The unions today would not all be openly supportive of such a course of action. Several have donated money to anti-unionist Rahm Emanuel to be re-elected mayor of Chicago!

I personally feel we should follow the steps of those brave teachers who led the fight to opt out of senseless over-testing in the schools.

Let's opt out of their political system to show the ruling class we are totally against the direction this country is taking the people. 

We need the Occupy Movement back to say we don't want your stinkin politics! We want jobs, health care, environmental protections now!

If we, including myself, continue to live in fear and allow them to rule with impunity as they do now, it only continues to get worse.

Let's fight power with people power.

We have no other choice!