H/T Heather @ Monologues of Dissent!
As our children go back to school and you meet with the teachers, administrators and classmates, tour the schools and get caught up in the excitement of a new school year, keep something in mind. The Republicans in Wisconsin are trying to dismantle it all!
As Heather points out, this is from the 2013 Wisconsin Republican Party State Convention Resolutions as Adopted.
The “education” part of the WisGOP message is pasted below. The entire thing is dripping with thinly veiled contempt for, and unfounded assumptions about the bias within, public education. I started to bold the sections that you might find most shocking or outrageous, but within minutes, pretty much the whole thing was bolded, so I’ll just give you a chance to wrap your mind around the highlights before you read on:
They want to eliminate 4K, which research shows is one of the leading factors in graduation rates, retention and test scores for all students, but especially low income students.
They want to eliminate funding for mental health screening (which potentially reduces violence in schools and helps troubled kids get the help they need), but create funding to put armed staff in public schools, a potentially tragic idea against which mental health professionals strongly warn.
They want to eliminate minimum certification requirements to create a system so lax that teachers need neither degrees in education nor student teaching experience to enter a classroom, a move that feeds on increased funding to groups like Teach for America that undermine qualified teaching staff by putting inexperienced temps into the classrooms that most need experienced instructors for short-term assignments. This move also has a disproportionally negative impact on low-income students and those with disabilities.
They want to amp up public funds to private school vouchers AND increase the already massive tax break for private school tuition regardless of a family’s financial need. Maybe you didn’t catch that last part. It was this: REGARDLESS OF A FAMILY’S FINANCIAL NEED. Pardon the shouting, but I just want to make sure this is crystal clear: rich families in Wisconsin will now get both tax breaks AND vouchers, a supreme double-dip government handout, an unconscionable subsidy for the wealthy at the expense of taxpayers and public schools.
They not only oppose adopting Common Core State Standards (or any standards for public education), but they actually endorse the ABOLISHMENT of the U.S. Dept. of Education. That’s right. In the same breath as claiming that the taxpayer should fund the education of wealthy, and that they support de-funding virtually every aspect of public education that helps level the playing ground for low-income students, they’ve revived the most laughable, least reasonable, of the anti-government-school Tea Party mantras: “we endorse that the U.S. Department of Education be abolished.”
Everytime you meet with the teacher who you have trusted to teach YOUR child, the same person who our Governor and his minions have demonized for the last two years, the same person who works countless hours to make sure to give your child the best possible learning experience they can, the same person who the republican party of Wisconsin feels is overpaid and forced a 12% pay cut in with more to come if they have their way.
The republican party and Scott Walker, want to continue to diminish and demonize that person. Scott Walker and the republican party want to continue to funnel the money that makes our school great into the slimy pockets of convicted felon Scott Jensen and disgraced former reps John Gard and Jeff Fitzgerald.
Forget the fact that all he has done successfully is give unemployable people big government jobs and has made a mockery of our economy, the biggest reason we must defeat him in 2014 is to save our schools.
We owe that to the people who give up so much to educate our children!
