Posted on 08/03/2020 2:18:58 PM PDT by ransomnote
Ten teachers unions, the Democratic Socialists of America, and other groups are organizing a National Day of Resistance to protest for demands including no reopening of schools, police-free schools, and a “massive infusion” of federal funds while banning new charter schools.
Over 20 cities across the United States are scheduled to have protests tomorrow, including Chicago, Dallas, New York City, and Los Angeles. Prominent teachers unions are supporting the “actions” including the Chicago Teachers Union and United Teachers Los Angeles.
The list of other demands include: “Police-free schools”, “Moratorium on new charter or voucher programs and standardized testing,” and a “Massive infusion of federal money to support the reopening funded by taxing billionaires and Wall Street.”
MORE AT LINK
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The Journey for Justice Alliance was launched in 2012, in response to the growing problem of school privatization (starving of neighborhood schools, school closings, charter and contract school expansion, turnarounds) impacting cities across the United States. Initially starting with Chicago, Detroit, Newark, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington DC, Oakland, Euphora MS and Minneapolis J4J started with monthly conference calls to build connections. From there, in 2013 we organized a 5000-person march from the U.S. Department of Labor to the U.S. Department of Education to advocate for summer jobs and ending the harmful practice of school closings. After this action, the group adopted the name Journey for Justice Alliance and in 2014, first made national news with a 1000-person rally and “Community Hearing” at the U.S. Department of Education where we released our first report “Death by a Thousand Cuts” and made our first national demand for the option of School Improvement Grant resources to be used for sustainable community schools. J4J has an Education Platform rooted in racial justice and education equity.
1. A Moratorium on School Privatization
2. 25,000 Sustainable Community Schools by 2025
3. End Zero Tolerance Policies in Public Education NOW;
4. Equity Mandates for Public Education at the Local & State Level;
5. Stop the Attack on Black Teachers;
6. End State Takeovers, Appointed School Boards & Mayoral Control;
7. Eliminate the Over-Reliance on Standardized Tests in Public Schools.
Allies
The Advancement Project
Washington, DC
1220 L St NW, Ste 850
Washington, District of Columbia 20005
202-728-9557
Facebook: @advancementproject
Twitter: @adv_project
www.national.advancementproject.org
Contact Us For More Details
The Alliance To Reclaim Our Schools
Chicago, IL
Facebook: @ReclaimOurSchls
Twitter: @ReclaimOurSchls
www.reclaimourschools.org
Contact Us For More Details
American Federation of Teachers National
Washington, DC
555 New Jersey Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20001
202-879-4400
Facebook: @aftunion
Twitter: @aftunion
www.aftunion.org
Contact Us For More Details
Association of Raza Educators
Los Angeles, CA
Facebook: @ARELosAngeles
www.razaeducators.org
Contact Us For More Details
Bad Ass Teachers Association (BATS) National
Facebook: @BadassTeachersAssociation
Twitter: @BadassTeachersA
www.badassteacher.org
Contact Us For More Details
Black Lives Matter National
Facebook: @BlackLivesMatter
Twitter: @blklivesmatter
Contact Us For More Details
Chicago Teacher’s Union
Chicago, IL
1901 W. Carroll Ave.
Chicago, IL 60612
312-329-9100
Twitter: @CTULocal1
Contact Us For More Details
Coalition for Community Schools
Facebook: @CoalitionforCommunitySchools
Twitter: @commschools
Contact Us For More Details
National Education Association
Washington, DC
Facebook: @NEAToday
Twitter: @NEA
Contact Us For More Details
Network for Public Education National
Facebook: @networkforpubliced – NPE
Twitter: @Network4pubEd
www.networkforpubliceducation.org
Contact Us For More Details
Teacher’s for Social Justice
Chicago, IL
Twitter: @TeachforJustice
Contact Us For More Details
The Center for Popular Democracy
449 Troutman Street, Suite A
Brooklyn, NY 112371
730 M Street NW, Suite 1115
Washington, DC 20036
347-985-2220
Email: cpd@populardemocracy.org
www.populardemocracy.org
Contact Us For More Details
Dignity in Schools Campaign
ZAKIYA SANKARA-JABAR
937-558-8712
212-253-1710 ext. 308
Facebook: @DignityinSchool
Twitter: @DignityinSchool
www.dignityinschools.org
Contact Us For More Details
NAACP
Baltmore, MD
National Headquarters
4805 Mt. Hope Drive
Baltimore MD 21215
410-580-5777
Email: cpd@populardemocracy.org
www.naacp.org
It receives funding from George Soros’s Democracy Alliance and Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation.
National Educators United is a network of radical educational activists allied with:
Social Equity Educators (Seattle Education Association)
NJ21 United (New Jersey)
Arizona Educators United
Indiana Educators United
Virginia Educators United
Oregon Public Employees United
Washington State Educators Unite
California Educators United
Heather Booth, Chair (Democracy Partners)
Heather Booth is one of the country’s leading strategists and organizers for progressive issue campaigns. She began organizing with the civil rights movement. She founded the Midwest Academy with funds she won from a back pay settlement while labor organizing. She has directed many election campaigns and was the training director for the Democratic Party. She was the founding director of the NAACP National Voter Fund that helped increase African American voter turnout by nearly 2 million votes in 2000. She was the senior strategist for the campaign for comprehensive immigration reform. She was the director of the AFL-CIO health care campaign for the Affordable Care Act and ran the campaign for the first Obama budget. She was the director of Americans for Financial Reform, the coalition leading the fight to hold the big banks accountable that passed the Dodd/Frank bill and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She directed the campaign for marriage equality around the Supreme Court decision. She has worked on many other campaigns. There is a movie about her life in organizing, “Heather Booth: Changing the World.” (www.heatherbooththefilm.com). She is a member of Democracy Partners consulting firm.
Jacky Grimshaw, Secretary/Treasurer (Center for Neighborhood Technology)
Jacky joined at the Center for Neighborhood Technology ( CNT) in 1992 and created many initiatives in the areas of public participation in transportation planning, environmental justice, community development, air quality and water quality. She developed its capacity to engage in public policy advocacy, transportation research, public participation tool development, GIS mapping, community and economic development. Jacky advocated for and provided expertise to increase transit in the Chicago region. She created and led CNT’s transportation and air quality programs for over a decade. She has advocated for and provided expertise to increase transit service in the Chicago region and led CNT’s Transit Future campaign in the fight for mass transit reform in the Chicago region in 2008. Subsequently, created a new Transit Future campaign aimed at seeking the Cook County Board identify a dedicated revenue stream to expand transit in Cook County. She is also leading CNT’s initiative on creating more equitable TOD. This includes leadership in Elevated Chicago, a project funded by a national collaborative that seeks to promote racial equity, prosperity and resiliency in Chicago communities through eTOD.
Since 2005, she has led CNT’s policy efforts at all levels of government including service on the Transportation Committee of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Transition Team. Jacky serves on numerous boards, including: National Academy of Sciences’ Transportation Research Board’s Environmental Justice and Public Involvement Committees. She has just completed terms on the Chicago Transit Authority and TRB’s Women’s Issues in Transportation Committee. Before joining CNT she was the Deputy Director and Director of the Chicago Mayor’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Deputy Treasurer of the City of Chicago. Ms. Grimshaw has been a talk show host for public radio, a talk show regular panelist for commercial radio and a columnist for Crain’s Chicago Business newspaper.
Saqib Bhatti, Director (ACRE)
Saqib is the Co-Executive Director of ACRE. He works on campaigns to win racial and economic justice by taking on the financial institutions that are responsible for extracting wealth and resources from communities of color and poor people in order to further enrich themselves. Coming from an immigrant Muslim family from Pakistan, Saqib’s first foray into organizing was as part of the student anti-war movement following 9/11. He interned with the Midwest Academy in 2003, where he organized Muslim and Latinx communities in the Chicago suburbs around immigration issues. After college he spent 10 years working on corporate social responsibility campaigns with the Culinary Workers Union (UNITE HERE) in Las Vegas and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). He was awarded a Nathan Cummings Foundation Fellowship in 2013, which he used to launch the ReFund America Project, a predecessor organization to ACRE. Saqib serves on the boards of the Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, the Midwest Academy, and Political Research Associates, and is on the Advisory Council of Community Labor United in Massachusetts. He graduated from Yale University.
Jitu Brown, National Director (Journey For Justice)
(image and bio coming soon!)
Robert Creamer, Director (Strategic Consulting Group)
Robert Creamer has been a political organizer and strategist for over four decades. During that time he has worked with many of the country’s most significant issue campaigns. He was one of the major architects and organizers of the successful 2005 campaign to defeat the privatization of Social Security. He has been a consultant to the campaigns to end the war in Iraq, pass universal health care, hold Wall Street accountable, pass progressive budget priorities, and enact comprehensive immigration reform. He works with Americans United for Change where he helped coordinate the campaign to pass President Obama’s landmark jobs and economic recovery legislation.
During the 2008 Presidential Election he worked for the Democratic National Committee as National Coordinator of field based rapid response to Republican candidates McCain and Palin. During his career, he has worked on hundreds of electoral campaigns at the local, state and national level. Creamer began his organizing career in 1970 working with Chicago’s Citizen Action Program (CAP) which had been organized by Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. CAP successfully campaigned to reduce the sulfur dioxide in Chicago’s air by almost two thirds.
In 1974 Creamer founded the Illinois Public Action Council – later known as Illinois Citizen Action – which became the state’s largest consumer advocacy organization and progressive political coalition. He directed the organization for 23 years. He has been a full time political consultant since 1997 when he co-founded the Strategic Consulting Group.
Judy Hertz, Executive Director Emeritus
Judy served as Director of Special Projects at the Midwest Academy from 1999- 2010 and was the Executive Director from 2011-2019. She still serves as a trainer at the five-day Organizing for Social Change workshop, the 3-day Supervising Organizers workshop, and consults with a variety of organizations, from neighborhood organizations to state and national groups.
Prior to joining the Academy, Judy worked as a community organizer in Chicago for 20 years. She began with an institution-based organization on the southwest side, and then served for ten years as executive director of Rogers Park Tenants Committee, Chicago’s largest and most powerful neighborhood-based tenants’ rights organization. During her time there, she helped lead campaign to pass the Chicago Tenants’ Bill of Rights, which dramatically transformed renters’ rights in Chicago, and helped launch the Lead Elimination Action Drive, which improved Chicago’s response to lead paint poisoning. She guided the organization through a transition into a multi-issue organization, changing its’ name to Rogers Park Community Action Network (RPCAN).
Following her work with RPCAN, Judy spent two years working on Organizing and Family Issues, conducting leadership training in a feminist organizing model with low-income Hispanic mothers. Judy was a member of the founding board of the National Organizers Alliance, a professional association for progressive community, issue, and labor organizers. She was also a founder and member of the Board of the NOA Retirement Pension Plan, a multiple employer pension plan for community organizers.
Jackie Kendall, Director (Democracy Partners)
After winning a successful campaign to get freshness dates on food, Jackie Kendall attended the Midwest Academy and went on to help build Illinois Public Action one of the first statewide multi-issue coalitions. In 1981 she moved to the Midwest Academy where she made arming progressives with the Midwest Academy organizing fundamentals her life’s work. She has trained thousands of organizers from a wide range of organizations: labor, civil and human rights, faith based, women’s, disability, LGBT, senior citizen and student groups.
As Executive Director of the Midwest Academy (1982-2010), Kendall steered the Midwest Academy to meet the needs of the progressive movement. In the mid 80’s she identified the need to routinely infuse the movement with new generations of skilled organizers and forged a partnership with the United States Student Association (USSA) to create the Grassroots Organizing Weekends (GROW). In that same spirit, she expanded Midwest Academy’s reach with a paid Internship Program specifically for students and young people interested in learning direct action organizing.
With extensive experience working in electoral campaigns (both partisan and non-partisan), Kendall was part of the team that developed and delivered the first Camp Obama trainings for volunteers going to Iowa the summer of 2007 through the Iowa Caucuses.
Currently she is working for Food and Water Watch/Food and Water Action as Organizing Advisor. She is also a partner at Democracy Partners.
Kendall is co-author of Organizing for Social Change: Midwest Academy Training Manual by Kim Bobo, Jackie Kendall, and Steve Max having over 500,000 copies sold.
Mike Lux, Director (Progressive Strategies)
Mike Lux is the co-founder and CEO of Progressive Strategies, an innovative consulting firm that is guided by a mission of building the progressive movement through collaborative work between progressive organizations, issue campaigns and causes. Progressive Strategies assists a variety of clients in political positioning, coalition building, developing short and long-term public education campaign strategies, and by turning ideas into reality.
Mike is an active player in the blogosphere and a frequent blogger on Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Crooks and Liars. He is the author of the book, “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be.”
Mike currently serves on the boards of several important organizations, including the Arca Foundation, Netroots Nation, Midwest Academy, Americans United for Change, and USAction, the latter two of which he helped to launch. Mike sits on the Advisory Board of the Democratic Strategist. He also was a co-founder and a former board member of Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, Progressive Majority, Women’s Voices/Women Vote, and the Center for Progressive Leadership. He played a role in helping launch the Center for American Progress and Air America, as well as MoveOn.org and People for the American Way PAC (PFAW PAC). From January 1993 to mid-1995, Mike served in as a Special Assistant to the President for Public Liaison in the Clinton White House. He has played a leadership or staff role on five Presidential campaigns.
David Medina, Director (Results for America)
David Medina currently serves as the COO and Co-Founder of Results for America. David previously served in the Obama Administration as First Lady Michelle Obama’s deputy chief of staff and as the Peace Corps’ public engagement director. Throughout his career, David has also served as the U.S. Global Leadership Campaign’s government relations director, U.S. Senator John Edwards’ national political director, the 2004 Democratic National Convention Committee’s deputy CEO, an AFL-CIO legislative representative, the Democratic National Committee’s policy director, and U.S. Senator Carol Moseley-Braun’s legislative assistant.
David has served on the University of Chicago’s Alumni Visiting Committee, Human Rights Campaign, Millennium March on Washington, and Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute national boards of directors. David received his B.A. from the University of Chicago and his M.P.P. from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Eddy Morales, Director (Morales Public Relations)
Eddy brings more than ten years of senior leadership experience to the Democracy Alliance, most recently serving as the Deputy Director of Voto Latino, an organization founded by actor Rosario Dawson aimed at increasing Latino civic engagement. While there, he helped increase the annual operating budget and oversaw strategy and day-to-day operations.
Previously, Eddy was the Deputy Director of Leadership Development at the Center for Community Change, where he launched a leadership development program to recruit and nurture low-income community organizers of color into community based organizations.
At the DA, Eddy was the Director of the Latino Engagement Fund, a collaborative effort between individual and institutional donors designed to strengthen high-performing Latino civic engagement organizations and increase the political power of the growing Latino population. Since 2009, Eddy has been continually recognized by Washington Life Magazine as” one of the most influential people under 40 in DC” and also is a proud Midwest Academy Alum.
Marvin Randolph, Director (Southern Elections Fund)
A nationally recognized expert in voter registration, voter contact and Get Out The Vote operations, Marvin has worked on over 120 campaigns in 31 states. Past work includes: Senior Vice President for Campaigns at the NAACP; Director of Organizing and Politics at the Center for Community Change; DNC Political Mail Consultant at the Baughman Company; Western Regional Political Director, SEIU; Southern California Field Director, AFL-CIO Labor ’98 Campaign; National Executive Director, 1994 Project Vote; and Managing Partner at Urbanomics Consulting Group. He is a long-time friend and supporter of the Midwest Academy.
*Organizations are listed for identification purposes only
In October 2016, investigative journalist James O’Keefe’s “Project Veritas Action” (PVA) released a series of undercover, hidden-camera videos showing that Creamer was a leading orchestrator of an initiative where the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign had been using trained provocateurs to instigate violence and chaos at Republican events nationwide – especially at rallies for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence – throughout that year’s election cycle. In one video clip, Creamer was shown emphasizing the importance of beginning these disruptions as soon as possible: “I’m not suggesting we wait around. We need to start this sh*t right away on every one of these fronts.” In a separate clip, Creamer affirmed that the Clinton campaign “is fully in” on his strategy, and that “Hillary knows through the chain of command what’s going on.” Creamer also revealed that his own organization, Democracy Partners, coordinated its efforts with the Clinton campaign via daily telephone calls.
Yet another video segment featured one of Creamer’s consultants, Scott Foval – the former national field director of Americans United for Change, a former employee of People For the American Way, and the founder of a political consulting firm called the Foval Group. He explained that his own Foval Group played a key role in training and organizing the aforementioned provocateurs to carry out a Creamer-approved tactic called “bird-dogging,” whereby these Creamer/Foval operatives planned, in advance, their confrontations with carefully selected, targeted individuals. Said Foval: “So the term bird-dogging, you put people in the line at the front, which means they have to get there at six o’clock in the morning because they have to get in front of the rally, so what when Trump comes down the rope line they’re the ones asking him the question in front of the reporters, because they’re pre-placed there. To funnel that kind of operation, you have to start back with people two weeks ahead of time and train them how to ask questions. You have to train them to bird-dog.”
Moreover, Foval stated that he – and, by logical extension, Creamer – sometimes recruited homeless and mentally ill people to serve as their provocateurs: “I’m saying we have mentally ill people that we pay to do sh*t, make no mistake. Over the last 20 years I’ve paid off a few homeless guys to do some crazy stuff …”
The purpose of bird-dogging, said Foval in the video, was to create a public perception of “anarchy” around Trump, on the theory that its shock value would undermine his political support.
Foval also explained that the Democrat bird-dogging operation was structured in a manner that – if the public were ever to find out about it – would allow the DNC and the Clinton campaign to pretend that they knew nothing about it. “The thing that we have to watch is making sure there’s a double-blind between the actual campaign and the actual DNC and what we’re doing,” said Foval. “There’s a double-blind there, so that they can plausibly deny that they heard anything about it.” To help ensure that this plausible deniability was not in any way compromised, Democratic funding for the Foval Group was channeled through a highly circuitous path. Said Foval: “The campaign pays DNC, DNC pays Democracy Partners, Democracy Partners pays the Foval Group, the Foval Group goes and executes the sh*t on the ground.”
In yet another video clip, Foval shed light on the relationship that existed between the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and the Creamer/Foval tactics: “We are contracted directly with the DNC and the campaign. I am contracted to [Robert Creamer] but I answer to the head of special events for the DNC and the head of special events and political for the campaign. Through Bob. We have certain people who do not get to talk to them, at all.”
Further, Foval explained that once his foot soldiers had either obtained their own video footage of a campaign-event disruption, or had caused various media outlets to cover the disruption, Creamer’s Democracy Partners would promptly provide the relevant footage to the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and numerous pro-Clinton super PACs and activist organizations that were “involved in this project.” Among these groups, he said, were Americans United For Change, the Alliance for Change, the Alliance for Retired Americans, and Priorities USA.
On the same day that this video was released, Creamer resigned in disgrace from his post as Clinton campaign manager, explaining that he was “unwilling to become a distraction to the important task of electing Hilary Clinton and defeating Donald Trump in the upcoming election.”
In a December 17, 2015 email that was later (in October 2016) made public by WikiLeaks, Mike Lux, who co-founded the progressive consulting firm Democracy Partners with Robert Creamer, revealed that Creamer had a “close” relationship with Robbie Mook, the manager of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. In an October 2016 interview with CNN, Mook falsely stated that Creamer and Foval had “never had a relationship” with the Clinton campaign.
In a second PVA video that was released in October 2016, an undercover journalist with a hidden camera met with Creamer and proposed an elaborate voter-fraud scheme to him, saying: “…[W]hat do you need [in order] to be able to vote?… What makes you a citizen?… [I]f you look at that checklist, it’s an ID card of any kind that shows you who you are and a pay stub that shows you’re getting paid at a local address someplace…. So … if you have those two things, you’re registered to vote. So, let’s say I had business inside of say Illinois or Michigan and I hired people and I had addresses for them, I could write them checks for those, I could use them as day laborers or whatever and use them and find my way around the voter ID, the voter registration laws for Hispanics…. that sounds like something we could register huge numbers of people that way.”
As the journalist spoke, Creamer nodded repeatedly and was clearly interested. He replied to the proposed voter-fraud plot by saying: “Alright, let me, on that front, I’m gonna write down these options. Let me see if I can chat with these people who are most involved in Hispanic voter registration. And uh, I can see what their thoughts are. I mean there are a couple of different organizations that’s their big trick.… We’ll help you do this. I mean this is very important this stuff. Turnout is huge, huge, huge.”
In the same video, Scott Foval gave an elaborate explanation of how voter fraud could be committed on a massive scale by either bussing people to polling places, or, in order to avoid the appearance of voter fraud, organizing them to drive to the polls in separate vehicles. Regarding the possibility that some of the fraudulent voters might be caught in the act, Foval said: “The question is, whether when you get caught by a reporter, does that matter? Because does it turn into an investigation or not? In this case, this state, the answer is no, because they don’t have any power to do anything.” He also emphasized the importance of implementing voter-fraud schemes “on a much bigger scale.” “You implement a massive change in state legislatures and in Congress,” he said. “So you aim higher for your goals, and you implement it across every Republican-held state.”
Moreover, Foval spoke reverentially of Creamer: “Bob Creamer is diabolical and I love him for it. I have learned so much from that man over the last twenty years, I can’t even tell you. And he calls me to be his firefighter a lot of the time, because there are people who in our movement will not do what it takes to get sh*t done. And I’m not that person. I’m the one they send when everything has gone to sh*t.”
Have you heard of the “ homeschool-pods” that are blooming everywhere?
Yep, and that’s the way they plan to keep it.
I have heard of the pods and they also go by another name. What a great idea!
Homeschool newbies, check out Classical Education. It is through Hillsdale College.
Not to be confused with Classical Conversations which is certainly a more religious curriculum.
https://www.hillsdale.edu/educational-outreach/free-online-courses/
Also, if you are NOT a going child, but would like to learn through FREE college level courses, check out the above link to Hillsdale College. Mostly literature and history, but there is an Economics 101 class.
This is not an ad, just exciting to see this.
It’s an all out war, wonder if the GOP is noticing?
The ironic thing is that police-free and discipline-free schools makes the job of teachers much more difficult and even puts their lives at risk.
Oh, don’t worry. The normal police will be replaced with a union approved “Force”. Another version of 0bowmao’s Army.
$120K for 2/3rds of a day for 2/3rds of a year; with healthcare for life and three pensions; state (which cannot ever be cut as to do so would be “unconstitutional”), school district and union.
Fire them all.
Let the new college grads from spring 2020 that probably cannot get work take the jobs. They can’t possibly do any worse.
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