Seattle school boards files for injunction

[pscot]

against striking teachers. The Stranger explains it:

Only Sue Peters, who The Stranger endorsed in 2013, voted against the injunction-seeking resolution—out of seven board members. In an interview today, she said it sends the wrong message and, to boot, the teachers could choose to ignore an injunction anyway, as striking teachers did in Pasco earlier this year. "A sure way to end the strike is not with a court order," she said, "but with an agreement."

Peters never would have been on the board to begin with if billionaires Nick Hanauer, Steve Ballmer, and the Seattle Chamber of Commerce's political arm had had their way. All of them poured money into her opponent's campaign coffers. Hanauer financed slimy attack mailers against Peters.

And while Peters was the lonely voice of dissent yesterday, the moneyed education "reformers" are surely scrambling to figure out their next move after a surprise blow to their efforts from the Washington State Supreme Court came late last Friday when the court ruled unanimously that public funds cannot be used for charter schools, effectively invalidating Initiative 240. Washington voters had rejected charter schools three times, but in 2012, Initiative 240 squeaked through. Here were the major donors to that campaign, according to the Washington Post:

*Microsoft founder Bill Gates, with more than $3 million

*Alice Walton of Walmart Stores (who, unlike Gates, doesn’t live in Washington state), with about $1.7 million.

*Entrepreneur Nicolas J. Hanauer of Seattle, with $1 million.

*Jackie and Mike Bezos, about $750,000. (They are the parents of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com and the owner of The Washington Post.)

"The Supreme Court has affirmed what we’ve said all along," said Washington Educators Association (the parent organization of the Seattle teachers union) in a statement last week. "Charter schools steal money from our existing classrooms, and voters have no say in how these charter schools spend taxpayer funding."

And it is the Bezoses and the Hanauers and the Gateses and the big companies of the state (with the complicity of spineless Democrats like Frank Chopp) who have also fought efforts to create a progressive income tax, leaving us with the paltriest, most regressive tax system system in the country.

http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/09/09/22834553/blame-the-billionaires-not-the-teachers

[Downwinder]

1. The Stranger nails it again.

"So, again, to underline Jen's point: If you're, say, the Seattle Times or the district itself, you can go around blaming the teachers for being allegedly greedy bastards. But if you keep your eye on what counts, you'll reserve your ire for the powerful 1 percenters who systemically defund and devalue our public schools, whose influence ranges from the state level right on down our district, where, today, students are not in school and teachers are walking the picket lines."