The resident "Progressive" Spammer recently lobbed this letter to Governor Corbett from a Teacher whose "right to collective bargaining" is a target of the Republicans in Harrisburg,
March 10, 2011 Dear Governor Corbett, I am writing as a grandmother who is very concerned about the proposed cuts to educational funding. Education is the last place we should be skimping. I am worried that you are considering legislation to ban collective bargaining by teachers. And worse, there is talk that you propose legislation to allow school districts to remove teachers for any economic reason. This move would be dreadful for our children for these reasons: - Nepotism would run rampant. School boards could hire their relatives and cronies and replace excellent, mature teachers with inexperienced, untested rookies at will. - Experience would be undervalued. Budget cuts would force higher paid, master teachers out of jobs just when they are most effective. What a tragedy this would be. Younger teachers would lose the mentorship and wisdom of teachers in their 50’s and 60’s. - Fewer capable young people will be attracted to education. One of the ‘pulls’ for those called to education is job and pension security. Educators give up early, high income for security. It frees them to be creative as teachers without having to worry about whether they will be employed or replaced each year. That is too much stress for a profession that is extremely stressful under the best of conditions. - Collective bargaining has ensured that teachers receive a decent pay. It has taken years for teachers to be given a fair wage that is commensurate with their education and ability. We don’t get to bargain about gas prices, food, or dental costs. Of course the public wants teachers on the cheap. But that doesn’t make it right. Unions always take into consideration local costs when bargaining. They typically come up with a formula that boards and union members can accept. - Teachers contribute heavily to their retirement and health insurance. I don’t think the public realizes that from day one, each paycheck has a hefty deduction toward a pension and health insurance. - The public has scapegoated teachers as a visible force that is to blame for the deficit in state and national budgets. Where is the outrage toward millionaires in the health care, banking industry and Wall Street? Politicians have been adept at pitting those in the middle class against each other, and it saddens me greatly. - Budget cuts have a negative impact on students. Larger classes reduce the quality of human connections in teaching, which is the single most important factor in creating a classroom atmosphere conducive to learning. - It would be a better country if we were all willing to give our fair share, have pensions and be able to trust that each is willing to sacrifice some. Let’s just not lay everything on the laps of teachers and other public sector employees. It just isn’t right. Thank you for listening. I pray you will do the right thing, and not try to strip hardworking teachers of their rights. We need to find ways to support excellence in teaching, and that is done by paying teachers well, helping them achieve pensions and health care benefits that give them a sense of security, and providing districts with professional development that encourages best practices. Discouraging teachers is the wrong path. Respectfully, Gail Holmstrom
Dear Ms. Holmstrom: Your letter to Governor Corbett making the case for teaching professionals is read differently by the two sides. Most of my formative years were spent in Catholic schools. To provide their children with this opportunity, my parents followed their strength, courage and common sense. They went to the numerous entities involved to discuss their wishes and found the path that worked for them. Driven by their openness to resolution, they formed partnerships with the Pastor, and Council of our Church, the nuns who ran the school and other families who also wanted this type of education for their children. Catholic Schools continue to devise creative and reality-based stratagem to thrive in the face of a siege level opposition to their existence. The key, however, to their ability to remain faithful to their Mission, of providing families who entrusted their children to them with a quality education that prepared them for life’s challenges. Professional Sales trains one to step out of your comfort zone. Do something new, a little bit challenging, in unfamiliar territory. So I opened my mind to Bill O’Reilley’s “Bold, Fresh Piece of Humanity.” The title came from his homage to a teaching professional, a woman, a nun who observed in him what she had ften discerned in the classroom. Without losing her dignity, his teacher put him on notice that she had responded to his behavior and made the decision about the manner in which she would deal with him that school year.
“Bold Fresh” illustrates the divide in the United States between those of us educated in Parochial, Private or Home Schools and those produced by Organized Labor. S-2 Draft deferment in the 60’s, not the vocational call, drove men into teaching. At College, I was scandalized by the behavior of frat boys bound for the classroom to escape Viet Nam. Not an Education major myself, I viewed the change in the profession and felt that the efforts of Al Fondi to organize teachers was driven, not by a respect for educators, but the influx of men into the field. At the same time, males were entering the nursing profession in large numbers bringing about a similar shift in the economic realities faced by hospitals.
A comment made by one of my history professors alerted me to another factor impacting Education. In the years following our exit from Southeast Asia, the Administration of elementary schools, the higher paying positions, had come to be dominated by men. The overwhelming take-over of the Office of Principal at the elementary level, to Professor Smith, was what should have been alarming to the Educational Community. In the business world, where my own degree in Poli Sci led me, I worked within the structure of the difference between a Profit motive and Profession. I learned that there truly is a distinction that must be taught:
Government is not Business.
Medicine is not Business.
Education is not Business.
These areas of Professional Endeavor are all Institutions, Social Structures created as the backbone of Civilization. All of us participate in these institutions and our Society has benefited as the result of the brightest and the best choosing a career in these areas by virtue of what has always been regarded as a
higher calling.
Professionals are guided by principles of their respective fields and conduct themselves with comportment and integrity that distinguishes them from everyone else. Nursing graduates were “capped” to set them apart from everyone else and called “Angels” because of the care they provided. Traditionally, the platitudes about Teachers cited in your letter were accorded those who eschewed higher earnings to find gratification and meaning in their life’s’ work. During summer months, my teachers in Rostraver Township worked on their family farms, or in Construction or Summer Jobs to supplement their teaching income. They helped each other build and maintain homes, employed high school kids in seasonal businesses, offered summer school for themselves and their charges. Their behavior showed their commitment to the Community of which they were a part.
When Teachers Unions went out on strike to disrupt the normal order of things, when Nurses refused to attend to Patient needs, when Law Enforcement Professionals and Fire Fighters, Postal and Transit Workers and Telephone Operators threatened our “natural order” with behavior that conveyed a seriousness about their demands for higher pay, the rest of us experienced a seismic shift in our regard for them. Services upon which our own jobs were predicated were denied. All the points you make in your letter about the nobility of Educators were “suspended” by these so-called Professionals who communicated to their students’ families that they were prepared to remain off the job until it hurt.
These were not the steel workers, coal miners and blue collar laborers whose contracts with Business Owners were up for renewal in April when the need for their products would permit their employers to resist their actions for months before their withheld services would be felt as loss of profits.
These were people employed as part of the System that ordered our daily lives. The “Golden Rule” had been tarnished, proven to be a Fool’s Gold. Those once revered for their professionalism were regarded as “shake-down artists,” bullying us and destroying communities with escalating demands for increases followed up and reinforced by strikes. To the Every Man, it seemed that Teachers were uniquely equipped to evolve negotiation using those purported “superior” skills at the bargaining table, in developing income stream programs that would permit them to earn as our children learn. The Thirteen Original Colonies of the United States of America were founded as Commonwealths. They banded together for the purpose of Defending their Country from the invading French, Indians and scandalously, the King of the Country they left in search of an alternative: control over their own Religious, Economic and Personal lives. They declared their Independence from that King’s oppressive taxes. They chose Revolutionary War over submission to burdensome taxation without Representation. Your neighbors have elected Representation. Your neighbors, through their Voting, have stood up to those of you who straddle Academia and Reality. Are you selfless Contributors to the Common Wealth or Sophist Beneficiaries of Representation that employs tactics you wouldn’t tolerate in your own classrooms? The Voters, the Tax Payers, the “Independents” reject Unprofessional Behavior. They expect Educators to apply their superior knowledge to this issue and find a
better way. The results of Professional Interdisciplinary Work should be
mutually beneficial. The Union's Win/Lose model failed the Taxpayer forced into submission by those protected in their Union jobs. Unions represented a new class demanding what was perceived by the rest of us as more than their fair share. What we lost above all, was the naïveté that teachers adhered to a performance standard upon which we could build the Future. Results simply aren’t there. If you were a business looking at the results of your advertising, which you would track along with your Accounts and Inventory, you’d see test results and seek prospecting alternatives. The Free Market – not platitudes – drives those choices. People move out of School Districts that subordinate. Businesses as well, abandon punitive tax-based communities. A population that has been taught by their Teachers to resort to disruption and bare-knuckles bullying to achieve ends are thus, unlikely to be moved by those same Teachers’ appeals for respect for their professional contributions. The cold-blooded politicians who stripped Public Employee Unions of their Collective Bargaining rights in Wisconsin are the products of Public Employee Strikes disrupting the households of those who went to the polls on November 2, 2010 and elected them. They learned from their Teachers what works, what is valued, what counts. They’re not Republicans, deserving of abuse; they are opportunists who became “positioned” to make this move against Organized Labor by virtue of the failure of the Progressive Agenda to achieve results. The Hope via Change promised by an incompetent Academic was “selected” through a combination of breach of Faith by the 4th Estate and the misrepresentation of Pay-To-Play tactics as accomplished Political Skill. Those of us sidelined by the Progressives and denied Voice by the “gaming” of the Electoral Process view Unions as glorified Organized Crime and are neither moved by your appeal nor inclined to support anything but continued heat to the feet of the Academic In Chief who preaches Accountability but defaults to the Bully Pulpit when his inept Advisors from Academia are incapable of achieving worthwhile, universally agreed-upon goals through a respectful exchange of ideas. Why can’t the Academic Community practice what they teach? Why can’t they SHOW us instead of telling us? Just as your Excuse Mill running the White House cost HUNDREDS of Democrats in Congress, the Senate and State Legislatures their jobs, Blaming Bush has evolved into Blaming Obama. Accountability begins with those who still have their jobs, who still make the rules. This is the Teacher’s Time To Shine, to transcend the cowardly Victim mentality and be the superior leadership for which we have paid dearly. We looked at the Clintons who studied and perfected diplomatic skills but were brusquely shoved aside in favor of a pig in a poke forced upon us by the Progressive Leadership of the Democratic Party. We watch in horror as our sisters throw us over for Paycheck Protection. We don’t WANT these creeps educating our children! We are outraged that vicious remarks about a self-made success like Sarah Palin is crudely diminished as inferior because she had to pay her own way through college. We are insulted beyond our ability to take in breath by the quintessential Trust Fund Baby, the grandson of a Banker, who has the unqualified support of Teachers’ Union Representatives at the expense of our life savings, our homes, our businesses and our jobs. We endure his endless vacationing while we work two and three low-paying jobs and we just don’t feel you deserve our support. You bought that pig in a poke and it is now the result of your choice that your security is a chip your President will cash in a callous political maneuver to save his own job. Joe Sestak, whom the University Women of Mercer County supported, deprived the Commonwealth of a Senior Senator and now your own Seniority is about to be zeroed out by the same callous progressive punks who are after YOUR job. In the real world, workers who believed themselves to be valued by their employers learned what you now face. Through painful losses of our jobs, businesses and homes, the rest of us have switched to the new “global economy” and are putting our earned status to work in the interest of our own survival. I’m sorry that times are now changing for you but trust that in the future, instead of calling PUMAS, Tea Party Activists and Town Hall Attendees crazy, unworthy of a hearing, dismissed as disgruntled and marginal, you’ll respect and regard your neighbors with a more appropriate civility. Had the Adults behaved as Adults instead of inducing their children to commandeer the elective process, you would not have experienced the backlash that wrenched the power from the partisan Democrats and restored it to the People. You possess the resources, the Professional connectedness and the reliable leadership skills that will bring you and your colleagues through this seismic, tectonic shift in the socio-economic landscape. This is truly a time of great opportunity which you can only discover when you quit complaining about what has actually gone down and re-evaluate the choices that have brought about this situation.
Power finds Processors.
It is a grievous mistake to attempt to possess or wield power. Governor Walker and Governor Corbett will pay the price, likewise, for resorting to gaming the system to oppress their own people. On a world-wide scale, we are seeing The People demand their fair share. It is no longer a contest of will, but a time for all Men and Women of Good Will to come together and write off their losses to make something of whatever remains. Try to understand that the Voters, the Taxpayers, The People are insisting on a
BALANCE OF POWERS.
Common Wealth - not Communism...
Social Health - not Socialism…
Results - not Rhetoric…
The People have seen the destruction of the Economy that once provided them with a life worth living and have accepted that Everything Has Changed. Wasn’t CHANGE what the 2008 Campaign was about? I felt then and assert now that the advocates of Change weren’t experienced enough to understand that Change in one place inevitably brings Change to everything else. Political Professionals know to patiently and methodically lead us through Changes with ethical, responsible choices, not Hope. I guess the results of this Change, brought about by your uninformed choices weren’t exactly what you’d HOPED for.
That’s just Life In The Big City, Baby. What you got is what you demanded. You accused your opponent of bigotry, racism, insanity, corruption and any other unflattering association in a rush to get yours first. Now you need to take personal responsibility for your rash choice. You celebrated at Obama’s Inauguration and totally got off on taking down the Clintons. Now you should be satisfied with what your choice got you while the rest of the Country scrambles for a piece of what your Academic Approach was incapable of understanding. As your “Post Racial” President discovers that his promise to close Gitmo was a hollow pronouncement of somebody who had no idea what he was talking about, as your “No Lobbyist will run my White House” appoints one lobbyist after another, as your “Health Care Shove” begets incomprehensible Push Back to the thugs who lived by the “Push Back,” you’re experiencing what the rest of us suffered in 2008. We know it hurts. We can’t do it for you, but look at us and take faith that you’ll get through it just as we did. Respect yourself. As a PUMA, I cringed every time one of yours shouted me down with statements such as: “YOU LOST!!! Get OVER it!!!” You left me with no choice but to just eat it, and get over it. I did, and found no more need, wish, desire to have anything more to do with anything that was aligned with “Progressive.” In the words of the Culture Club and Jesus, I say to Donna Brazile, Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean and the corrupt Democratic Rules & By Laws Committee: I know you’ll miss me when I’m gone. You disposed of me to clear a path for yourself to a level for which you were neither qualified nor prepared to master. You blew me off and refused to hear any word of criticism of “Your Guy” just like Fox News and the Religious Right did when we criticized Bush. You were just the other, UGLY side of political ineptitude. You should have stuck to the books and the classroom, protecting the Children from rash, reckless Change when you had no earthly idea of what you were setting in motion. You sent them on a doomed Crusade to force an Agenda on their Accountable Elders that we know doesn’t work. We’re not crazy; we’re educated in the School of Hard Knocks and were trying to reach those of you who were irrationally, impossibly out of control under the influence of an Empty Suit who wasn’t Organizing a Community, he was harvesting your votes. You threw over an accomplished Woman of Senior Status who was ready on Day One to lead with proven, established, accepted skills. You substituted a blank slate and gambled away your Country. You bought the proverbial pig in a poke and abused those of us who weren’t buying him OR your fatuous rhetoric. Let the buyer beware. Not only could the Progressives and Your Guy not get it done, even with filibuster-proof majorities in both houses, they didn’t give a damn about the Democrats whom they sent to defeat in their “Save Obama’s Presidency” forcible imposition of a 2000-Plus Page Health Care Bill the People didn’t want. You traded your own job for his. If you re-elect the jerk, you will have proven that you don’t belong in the classroom with tenure and a pension to provide for you in your retirement. You will belong in the streets with the rest of us, scrambling to earn a living by your wits, fearing the “Death Panels” who will rule on your worthiness for “One Size Fits All Health Care.” You’ll hope those punk, more “hip” urban professionals don’t dispose of you the way they no longer needed White, Older Women of the Democratic Party to win elections. Those Women are “dead” to you and yanking their grandkids out of the Schools where your half-baked principles have done more harm than good. Your “Change” cannibalized a healthy party to win ONE election and those kids under whom you lit a fire with your unproven, untested, unqualified Celebrity went back to the typical apathy of kids, but they changed YOUR world in their wake. They have complete confidence that you’ll provide for them and sacrifice your future for theirs. We promised to say “We Told You So!” every time crap like this bit you in the behind, so here we are, and WE TOLD YOU this would happen. Don’t expect us to listen to YOU when you proved what we already KNEW about all that you DON’T know. The sooner you all admit that you screwed up and get back in line, the more of your hard-earned everything you’ll salvage. It’s time you bit the bullet and do what is necessary to bring about Party Unity since your Party has taken a major hit and your Union is on the ropes. Negotiation, not Demonstration is in order. Get your MOB under control with professional behavior and show us you’re Class. Your President did no work in the Chicago Legislature, voted “Present” rather than lead. Your President ignored the sage advice so readily dispensed to Senator Clinton about keeping her head down and working hard, learning policy and listening to Constituents. Your President chose to exploit Chicago instead of stepping out of his comfort zone as did Hillary Clinton, herself born and raised in suburban Chicago. She went first to Arkansas, “land of opportunity,” then to New York and earned the respect of the world’s toughest electorate. Along the way, she endured enough bullshit from men to choke a horse. I look at a woman like you who doesn’t recognize that teaching is a Woman’s field and Women are the Majority in this Country. Women don’t need to resort to the tactics traditionally used by men who have failed us so spectacularly. Instead of giving Women the chance they earned, you gave them the Change you deserved. Ann R Augustine, Butler County Democratic State Committee
