Portland Public Schools Targets Teachers
By Portland Teacher (writing anonymously out of fear of reprisal)
Just months after angry parents, students, and teachers forced Portland Public Schools (PPS) officials to back down from closing several neighborhood schools, PPS has found a new target: teachers.
Negotiations between the school district and Portland Association of Teachers (PAT) began this month with such enormous differences between their two proposals, that the local media is already raising the possibility of a strike next year.
Negotiations between the school district and Portland Association of Teachers (PAT) began this month with such enormous differences between their two proposals, that the local media is already raising the possibility of a strike next year.
Given the widespread attacks on teachers nationwide, the decimation of the public school system in cities like Philadelphia and Detroit, and the relative success of union-bashing in states like Wisconsin and Michigan, PPS evidently believes now is the time to seize as much control as it can.
District officials recently appropriated the language of the Chicago Teachers’ strike in an Orwellian letter to the community that claimed their proposal was “updating” the teachers’ contract to give “our students the education