Diane Ravitch, do you remember when teachers crashed the economy?

From the Diane Ravitch blog

Do you remember when teachers and principals brought the economy down in the fall of 2008? Remember how they caused the stock market to collapse?

You don’t? Neither do I.

No matter. States are busily figuring out how to take away teachers’ pensions to right the economy, and reformers are blaming “bad” teachers for the outsourcing of jobs to China and India. The reformers say that the jobs are being outsourced because Americans aren’t skilled enough to do the work, but it seems more plausible to believe that they are being outsourced because educated workers are cheaper in China and India than in the U.S. Know any engineers willing to work for 1/3 (or less) their current salary? Know any workers willing to sleep in a dormitory at the plant and be available 24/7 to assemble Smartphones for $17 a day?

A reader comments on the great pension robbery:The raids on pension systems across the land are accompanied by the exact same kind of noise machine that accompanies the movement to privatize our public school system. You will never hear a peep against any of it from the President. I don’t know what these union presidents talk about when they’re on the bus with Arne Duncan, but they certainly haven’t been persuasive in getting him to acknowledge that one of the greatest robberies of all time is taking place in fast motion. Our states have run up a credit card debt with these underfunded pension systems, and now they’re walking away from that debt, and somehow we keep talking on and on and on about teacher evaluation.

http://dianeravitch.net/2012/10/05/remember-when-teachers-crashed-the-economy/