Wisconsin, the workers Waterloo

From CNN.com

by Rick Fantasia

There should be no illusions. What is unfolding in Wisconsin and a half-dozen other states may be the beginning of the end for American labor.

Both the corporate leaders who are funding these initiatives and their Republican Party valets feverishly trying to push them through state legislatures understand this. The billionaire Koch brothers, for example, have pumped money into the Wisconsin effort; their energy and consumer products conglomerate was a top contributor to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's election campaign.

They must be giddy with anticipation, knowing how close they are to their long-standing goal of removing any significant opposition to their rule in American society. Too dramatic? If anything, it is an understatement.

As anyone following the events in Wisconsin knows, it has not been a matter of public employee unions showing intransigence in the face of a state budget shortfall.

The public sector unions have agreed to the financial concessions Gov. Walker had claimed were necessary to right the fiscal ship. No, the prize he hopes to deliver to his corporate supporters and ideological soul mates is much larger and more important than a simple balanced state budget.

Shock and awe has been the method employed, but just like in the war through which the phrase entered our national lexicon, momentary disorientation can give way to obstinate resistance, and no one anticipated the counter-mobilization that has galvanized workers in Madison, Wisconsin, and elsewhere.

Union labor recognizes that this is it: a Waterloo for the working class in America. Up to now it has been mostly a one-sided class war as private sector corporations have systematically weakened or destroyed their existing labor organizations, while intimidating and firing their workers when they have sought to organize themselves into unions.

For three decades this war has mostly played out beyond the public radar screen, as corporations and their consultants have turned workplace after workplace across the country into battlegrounds over the rights of workers to have some voice in the conditions of their labor.

When Walker and other governors complain that public sector workers receive better pension or health care benefits than do private sector workers in their states, they may be right, but this is because workers in the much larger private sector -- with unionization rates now at about 7%, down from 35% in 1955 -- have already had their pensions, their health care benefits, and their working conditions gutted. (About 35 % of public sector workers are unionized.)

Until now this corporate assault was not aimed at the destruction of public sector unions and the decent jobs and benefits that they were able to negotiate for workers. Public employee unions have agreed to concessions in the face of state and municipal budget problems across the country, as they have in Wisconsin, but asking them for more -- taking away the right to organize and bargain collectively -- tramples Americans' human rights.

Americans may not fully grasp what is at stake here, but we fail to do so at our peril. Unions have made mistakes, but they are the only defense that workers have.

Without viable unions to serve as a counterweight to corporate power, America's working people and their families are at the mercy of the largest and most powerful economic organizations on the planet.

Ironically, while mobilizing to destroy unions here, U.S. corporations have been somehow able to thrive in foreign countries that have much higher unionization rates and where labor movements have much more influence in society.

Unionization rates are about twice as high in Germany and Canada, for example, and as much as five times as high in the Scandinavian countries, but U.S. companies have been able to do their business quite profitably for decades.

Strong unions in these countries mean that their citizens enjoy high quality health care for all without having to pay huge insurance premiums, free or inexpensive child care for working families, university educations that leave no one in debt, five to six weeks of paid annual vacations, and worker standards of living that are mostly equal to or higher than those of American workers.

Socialism? Hardly. The capitalists of Europe and Canada do perfectly well for themselves, thank you, even though their CEO's don't generally expect salaries and stock options reaching into the stratosphere, like ours do.

If there were no labor movement in the U.S., there would be no social security system, no Medicare or Medicaid as we know them (unions regularly provide power and push-back at attempts to privatize or cut back ), no limits to child labor, or hours worked, or safety standards, or any ability to prevent or respond to unfair or despotic treatment by employers.

Whether in unions or not, American workers hold these protections because of unions. How long will they last if the unions are destroyed? Wisconsin is either the beginning of the end or it's a beginning.

Which side are you on?

http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/02/24/fantasia.union.wisconsin/index.html?hpt=C2

Poverty Hurts, Teachers Help

From the Blog, Modern school

By Mike Dunn

A common theme in my writing is how much poverty impacts our students and their academic success. On average, middle class and higher income kids simply do better in school and on standardized exams than lower income kids. The reasons for this are complex and have not been fully explored. However, we do know that wealth affects health and cognitive development, social development and language acquisition, creating an achievement gap that exists before kids have even entered school. Two seminal pieces of research bear this out: Unequal at the Starting Gate, by David Burkam and Valerie Lee, and Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, by Betty Hart and Todd Risely. The latter work was discussed today on NPR, including an interview with coauthor Betty Hart. You can hear the interview or read the transcript at Closing the Achievement Gap with Baby Talk.

Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and many other Ed Deformers claim to be color and class blind, arguing that all kids can succeed in school, if we only provide quality teachers and schools. Many teachers enter the profession with these same assumptions. Likewise, when Betty Hart first started working with low income preschoolers, she believed she could help them transcend their limitations. Together with Todd Risley, she tried to improve the vocabularies of 4-year-olds in a low income preschool. However, after years of effort, they realized that they weren’t making much progress because they were catching the kids too late.

Shockingly, by the time kids are four, the effects of familial wealth have already made their mark on a child’s vocabulary. But Hart and Risely wanted to know why and they wanted to know how early these effects started to occur. So they followed 40 families from different income levels over the course of their children’s first three years, recording what the children said.

It took 10 years to transcribe and analyze their tapes. They found that children in welfare homes heard an average of 600 words per hour, compared to 2,100 in homes of professionals. By the time kids are four, this adds up to a total of about 13 million words heard by poor kids and 48 million words for affluent kids. Thus, before they have even entered kindergarten, there is a significant gap in language acquisition that affects school readiness.

Hart and Risely’s work was published in 1995 and led many in child development to rethink how they could work with parents to improve children’s language development. An important follow up to their research was conducted by Alan Mendelsohn, a pediatrician at New York’s Bellevue Hospital. In this study, Mendelsohn, et al, enrolled 675 mother-infant pairs in a randomized controlled experiment that compared two interventions that occurred during pediatric checkups: the Video Interaction Project and Building Blocks. A control group received standard pediatric treatment. For details, please see Study: Doctor Visits Give Opportunity for School Readiness Check-up.

All three groups of mother-child dyads received books and literacy materials from the Reach Out and Read program. Parents in the Building Blocks group also received developmental questionnaires and newsletters suggesting additional reading and play activities they could do at home to encourage literacy development. Those in the Video Interaction Project also met with child development experts at each of 15 wellness visits during their child’s first 3 years. During these visits, mothers were videotaped playing with their children. The child development experts then debriefed the videotapes with the mothers and coached them to help them become more effective in their interactions with their children.

By the age of 6 months, the infants in the video intervention group had significantly higher scores than those in the control group on the StimQ infant test, which measures pre-literacy activities. Those in the Building Blocks program had slightly higher scores than those in the control group. In summary, Mendelsohn’s work indicates that coaching parents can help them become better at communicating with their infants and improve their early language development.

It should be pointed out, though, that Mendelsohn’s program, even if fully implemented by pediatricians across the country, cannot alleviate all the negative effects that poverty has on school success. First, low income families are less likely to receive prenatal and postnatal care or regular checkups, thus precluding many families from receiving coaching during pediatric visits. Also, poverty negatively affects children in a variety of ways that cannot be mitigated solely through better parental communication. For example, poor children are much more likely to suffer malnutrition, low birth weights, lead or other environmental poisonings, and anemia, each of which can impair cognitive development and lead to learning disabilities. Financial insecurity creates chronic stress that can impair the immune system, memory and learning, and increase absenteeism. Low income families are much less likely to be able to provide ongoing extracurricular enrichment activities like travel, summer camp, art classes and athletics. Therefore, to really close the achievement gap requires a social movement that succeeds in closing the wealth gap.

http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2011/01/poverty-diminishes-vocabulary.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ModernSchool+%28Modern+School%29