Saturday, June 14, 2014

Are Teachers and Teachers Unions Really to Blame for the Shrinking of the Middle Class?

If the American Dream of upward mobility seems to be fading away, if in fact more people are falling out of the middle class than moving into it- is the explanation for this really "a failing public school system, filled  with incompetent teachers" which is what Billionaires and the media would have you believe.

Not a,government protected, too big to fail, banking system that creates mega compensation for its executives?
No huge companies that would rather outsource jobs than create new ones here?
Not drug and law enforcement policies that give us a larger prison population than all of Europe combined?
Not companies like Wal- Mart and McDonalds which pay their starting associates 7 dollars and hour while their top executives make $16,000 an hour?

Yes, it's the teachers and the teachers unions fault we have one of the highest child poverty rates in the advanced world, one of the lowest wage rates for industrial workers and tax rates that help the wealthy far more than the middle class and the poor.

Let's go to the numbers.

The bi-partisan attack on teachers, teachers unions and public schools has now been going on for 13 years, under a Republican President and a Democratic President

And the concentration of wealth at the top in America is greater now than it was in 2001, while its prison population is larger, and up to 70 percent of the population will at some point live in or on the edge of poverty

Perhaps this is no accident. Perhaps this is an elite strategy to have the public blame one portion of the middle class for a tragedy befalling all of it.