Stop the Attack on the Nation's Veteran Teachers!

The attack on the nation's veteran teachers- which has taken and continues to take an incredible toll on the mental and physical health of hundreds of thousands of people- is something which must be analyzed and exposed no matter whose "ox is gored" and that includes leaders of the nation's teachers unions. All over the nation teachers are being evaluated, micromanaged and rated in ways that are intrusive, humiliating, and demoralizing. Almost everywhere, teachers at the high end of the salary scale are the ones most targeted. Programs billed as necessary to improve the quality of the profession have turned into  cost cutting through humiliation. Administrators target teachers with the highest salaries; elected officials support such purges as an indirect way to cut pension costs. The varied measures chosen to evaluate staff and remove "bad teachers" have also contributed to the "whitening" of the teaching profession, something which has been documented in city and city which has been willing to provide researchers with the data. We now have a teaching force in this nation which is much younger, more unstable and whiter than it was fifteen years ago. And much less able to resist high powered campaigns to privatize public education and make it a profit center for corporate interests, to the detriment of the students and families public schools serve.