A new hard-hitting documentary entitled, “The Lottery,” from director Madeleine Sackler premieres tomorrow, for one night only, in theaters across the country. The focus of the film is the battle for the future of our nation’s children over education.
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“In a country where 58% of African-American 4th graders are functionally illiterate, The Lottery uncovers the failures of the traditional public school system and reveals that hundreds of thousands of parents attempt to flee the system every year. The Lottery follows four of these families from Harlem and the Bronx who have entered their children in a charter school lottery. Out of thousands of hopefuls, only a small minority will win the chance of a better future.”
And at the core of that battle is a network of special interests; a coalition of community groups, labor unions, and politicians, all working together to hold onto power and control, while losing sight of the children; the future of our country.
The inner workings of such a web are little known or understood to most, even to some of those close to the system. To understand how powerful this network is, first you need to be extremely observant. And then, you need to go right to the source. Within no time, many of the issues that stand in the way of reforming our public education system become as clear as the most perfect of ocean waters on a sunny day.
For years, labor unions like the SEIU and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), in partnership with community organizations like ACORN and their sister organization, the Working Families Party, have opposed the implementation of or the expansion of charter schools. After seeing stats like those above, if you didn’t know these groups, you’d wonder why.
Just last week, the 2.4 million member AFL-CIO took its shots against charter schools when it opposed the NY State Senate’s bill to expand the state’s charter schools from 200 to 460. As the bill awaits a general assembly vote after passing in the Senate, the AFL-CIO then went after politicians who supported the Senate bill. Their claim? The proposed law “fails to take into consideration more effective oversight for charter school operations and fair worker protections for charter school educators.”
Translation: Most charter schools are not unionized; in many states, charter schools are also privately operated, making it also more difficult to force those facilities into unionization, in contrast to the relative ease of unionizing public school workers in many states and school districts. Especially when ACORN candidates sit on the city councils and school boards of so many regions.
According to its annual Year End/Year Begin report [see below] for 2006, ACORN works closely with local city councils and public school boards to get its own endorsed candidates elected. For instance, in one such report, ACORN celebrates that it “helped defeat Chamber of Commerce backed incumbents in both [school board election] races, giving African-Americans a majority on the school board.” The reality is that with charter schools dispersed throughout communities, the public school landscape becomes more diluted, and ACORN and its partners have a much more difficult time exerting any of their power and control over an entire school district.
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At the same time, ACORN focuses on other ways to ensure that more control is concentrated in their favor at all costs. In the same Year End/Year Begin report, ACORN acknowledges the following plan in Little Rock, Arkansas:
“We are part of a coalition that is working to eliminate the at-large positions on the City Board and to strengthen the power of the elected Mayor. We have gathered around 4,000 signatures to place the proposal on the ballot. We will use this campaign to begin to rebuild our involvement in city politics.”
With tentacles spread across varying levels of local government, ACORN has made it a practice to ensure its interests are protected at all costs. Even if that could mean that students may suffer at the hands of a poor-performing school district, or worse yet, a corrupt system. Once special interests are embedded into local politics and into the systems those politicians control, it is usually very difficult to reverse that trend.
It’s a common trend that ACORN follows. The culture of the organization is to partner with the unions under master agreements, in many cases receiving compensation by way of a donation or direct payment from the organizations. Their services can include anything from providing organizing assistance, to finding disgruntled workers in non-union facilities to provide inside information to the labor unions, to sending protesters to facilities upon which their partners wish to place pressure or create negative PR. Assisting in the fight against charter schools is simply a natural fit for ACORN, as it benefits ACORN, monetarily and structurally, as much as it benefits its partners like the United Federation of Teachers and the SEIU.
“Our program continues to be that we will work with any federation and any union committed to a major organizing program, and that will continue to be our message and program in 2007 and beyond. This area of our work has also become very large for us in a very short time. Not surprisingly because of our history, the most significant partner continues to be SEIU. An attack editorial in the Wall Street Journal drawing from 2005 Labor Management reports indicated that we had done more than $2.5 million worth of business with SEIU over that period, so besides being good work in the main, our collaboratives are producing important and critical capacity and infrastructure support for the organization.”
In places like New York, where “The Lottery” director drove by such a protest and stumbled into the web that is ACORN and its allies, the marriage of ACORN, the teachers and child care unions, and the local politicians is quite evident. Again, ACORN describes in its own report the very relationship that established its first projects with the United Federation of Teachers and American Federation of Teachers.
“Our partnership with United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and AFT to organize over50,000 home child care workers in NY continues to develop. AFSCME and AFT split jurisdiction in an agreement in 2006, but our partnership continued to maintain numbers that could yield between 25 and 30000 workers in the metro NYC area once the unit is incorporated. Legislative action achieved a near victory to yield a process for recognition that hopefully will either be secured before year end or reset in early 2007 through an executive order. Working with NY ACORN, the re-signing required continues to move forward. With the stars and moons aligned we could see this project brought in fully in 2007. We continue to be hopeful that we can construct a permanent partnership in the ongoing organizational maintenance and support for this unit as well.”
As a largely non-unionized profession, providers of child care –especially home based child care – have often been the initiating target for labor unions and ACORN to gain a stronghold in non-unionized areas. This is the proverbial “foot in the door” for the unions. The community-group/union/political collaborative has colluded in many states to secure an Executive Order from the states’ governors to ensure a unionized teachers workforce from the earliest of learning stages.
And this kind of abuse of power and collusion is prevalent in many places.
For instance, on the other side of the country in California, the Lucia Mar school board privatized school bus operations to save taxpayers money in 2003. SEIU and the California School Employees Association (CSEA) union teamed up to force the pension fund, California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), to sell off shares in any company that competes for public sector jobs, and to prohibit investments with any firm that builds or staffs charter schools, demanding “a strong anti-privatization stand”.
This is a problem that is pervasive in America. It is larger than our child’s school, or our local community. It’s larger than our state. This is an issue of national significance with national consequences. We say it all the time. Our children are the future of this great nation. Unless we recognize the ugly issues that lurk inside the system from every angle, at every level, and unless we as citizens take action to clean it out, the future won’t look very bright – for our children, or for our nation.
I for one was very excited to see Ms. Sackler’s documentary appear in the headlines these last few days. Perhaps it will bring some much needed attention to these issues and serve as a rallying cry to citizens all across the country. I certainly hope it does.