How About a Working Teachers Political Party?
I read yesterday that Diane Ravitch will "have a role at Saturday's (WFP) convention." The Daily News speculated that the Working Families Party might ask Ravitch to run as its candidate for Governor if they fail to endorse Cuomo. If Ravitch did run, she would help deflect votes from Cuomo who has been unrelenting in his support for Moskowitz's charters (at the expense of the other 90%+ public-school children in NY). Cuomo has been pounding De Blasio's liberal agenda to a pulp at the same time as he lowers corporate taxes and defends the use of VAM as a weapon against teachers.
What I think we really need today is a new third party, akin to the Populists of the 1800s. The Populists represented the farmers. They never won the really big election, but they made gains and more important than anything else they put their views "out there." Populists' views resonated with a large portion of voters. Although some ideas fell by the wayside as overly radical, the major parties could not ignore their demands. It was some time in coming, but the major parties eventually picked up on their ideas for a progressive income tax, the direct election of U.S. senators, greater government regulation of the economy in the name of protecting the people, an eight-hour work day and a greater political voice for women.
Populist Mary Lease was purported to have said (or at least a newspaperman said it for her), farmers have to "raise less corn and more hell!" In the past few years under Bloomberg, amid a backdrop of newly created credit-recovery schemes to magically up graduation rates, some NYC Educator: How About a Working Teachers Political Party?: