Weingarten rips Trump’s push for teachers to carry weapons | New York Amsterdam News: The new Black view

Weingarten rips Trump’s push for teachers to carry weapons | New York Amsterdam News: The new Black view:

Weingarten rips Trump’s push for teachers to carry weapons

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten slammed President Donald Trump for his pro-armed teachers remarks at a National Rifle Association event.

One of the NRA’s top goals is to allow trained teachers to carry concealed weapons in the classroom and add more armed security guards to schools around the country. Trump is a fan of that proposal and parroted a familiar talking point about how gun-free zones are invitations to potential attackers to harm children.

“They love their students and they’re not going to let anybody hurt their students. But you have to give them a chance,” said Trump at the rally. “In America, we trust the people to be wise and good…that is why in America, we’ve always trusted the people to keep and bear arms.”

That did not sit well with Weingarten.

“Gun violence now kills more young people in our country than car accidents,” said Weingarten in a statement. “Instead of being a champion for children and working to fight our nation’s gun violence epidemic, the president wants more guns in schools regardless of the consequences.”

Nine states, including New York, have enacted laws that ban domestic abusers from purchasing guns. Florida’s law came after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Fla., Feb. 14 of this year.

“The president should be a cheerleader for students, parents and educators, not for the NRA and gun manufacturers,” stated Weingarten. “President Trump continues to call for arming teachers and school staff with guns, but he’s been completely silent when it comes to what educators have asked to be armed with—the respect and resources they need to teach students.”

New York’s state government is pushing for more gun reform as well. A Continue reading: Weingarten rips Trump’s push for teachers to carry weapons | New York Amsterdam News: The new Black view:

Top NAACP official slams charter schools – People's World

Top NAACP official slams charter schools – People's World:

Top NAACP official slams charter schools

WASHINGTON—The president of the California NAACP is slamming the nation’s burgeoning charter school movement as bad for teachers, bad for kids and bad for accountability to parents. And it especially hurts kids in inner-city schools, Alice Huffman says.

Huffman headed a special NAACP commission on the charters after her state chapter raised the issue at the last convention of the nation’s oldest civil rights group, she told a May 9 symposium on charters and their impact on public schools.

It found, in so many words, that charters were a mess: Most did not fulfill their promises, they keep their budgets and spending secret, they discriminate against the disabled, and they yank due process protections from disciplined kids and from their teachers, too.

The American Federation of Teachers, which has been skeptical of charters — and which is also trying to organize many of them – sponsored the symposium, along with the union’s Albert Shanker Institute.

“I don’t have the data” the other panelists presented, Huffman said. “I want to talk about the kids.”

“Believers in privatization” of schools, including for-profit charter school operators, “want to get the pot of dollars” states make available to public schools, she said. “And the one group they hated more than African-Americans was unions.”

She also set charters as one of several public school “remedies” that hurt minority-group kids. Charters, Huffman said, were preceded by vouchers and tuition tax credits funneling public dollars to parents of private school kids.

In the South, after the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation ruling, the response was to close the public schools rather than integrate. But charters take advantage of parents’ desires for the best education for their children, Huffman noted – a desire mostly left unfulfilled, the NAACP report last year found.

Other panelists at the May 9 session also criticized charters, for different reasons. Most pointed was David Arsen, a Michigan State University education policy professor. He faulted the state’s politicians for bending to a strenuous lobbying campaign by GOP big giver Elizabeth “Betsy” DeVos against public schools in general and for charters.

Overcoming opposition from the state’s teachers’ unions and even the Chamber of Commerce, she won. Michigan’s charters, Arsen said, have virtually no accountability for their results, which have sunk the state to the bottom of national rankings in achievement, per-pupil spending and other measures.

DeVos, a vitriolic foe of public schools in general and unions in particular, is now carrying on the same crusade as GOP President Donald Trump’s Education Secretary – over opposition from the AFL-CIO, AFT, the National Education Association, the School Administrators (AFSA) and other unions.

Cities nationwide often use charters to evade union contracts, financial accountability to parents and, sometimes, teacher standards. The for-profit charter operators promise better student performance, but often – including in Detroit and Milwaukee – haven’t delivered.

That’s what prompted California’s complaint and the NAACP panel Huffman headed. It visited charter systems in New Orleans, New York, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland and elsewhere.

Ironically, Huffman noted, Shanker, the union’s dominant president in the 1960s, first came up with the idea of charters. But he envisioned them as cooperating with public schools and demonstrating best practices Continue reading: Top NAACP official slams charter schools – People's World: