Sunday, October 9, 2011

Which New Yorkers have the best interests of working people and children at heart?

See below video made by Darren Marelli of GEM, who interviewed NYC parents and teachers joining the Wall St. protesters on Wednesday.


As the NY Times points out, children are most hurt by the nation's cutbacks to social services:
"Children will be among those most harmed by the jobs crisis. The Economic Policy Institute, using data from the September report, has calculated that 278,000 teachers and other public school employees have lost their jobs since the recession began in December 2007. Over the same period, 48,000 new teaching jobs were needed to keep up with the increased enrollments but were never created. In all, public schools are now short 326,000 jobs. At a time when more and better education is seen as crucial to economic dynamism and competitiveness, larger class sizes and fewer teachers are the last thing the nation needs. Staffing reductions also mean that schools are less able to respond to the needs of poor children, whose ranks have increased by 2.3 million from 2008 to 2010."
Bloomberg has ruthlessly cut the education budget five times in the last three years, forcing the elimination of thousands of teaching positions rather than support raising taxes on millionaires.  As the richest one percent of New Yorkers gains more and more wealth, our ,ayor continues to be their biggest defender, favoring their interests over our children. Now, he is proposing yet another 2 percent mid year cuts to schools, with another 6 percent cut next year

Meanwhile, on Friday, Bloomberg laid off nearly 700 school aides and parent coordinators, the lowest paid DOE staffers who serve crucial roles in helping kids in high-poverty schools.  And on the same day, he had the nerve to criticize the protesters on Wall Street, as "trying to destroy the jobs of working people in this city."

From the video above, who do you think really has the best interests of working people and children at heart?

2 comments:

mclemson said...

When I share this link to Facebook(using your share widget) a lot of personal email addresses show up in the link. I can send a screenshot if you'd like

I'll try and share it some other way -

Bill Gunlocke, a city reader said...

Teaching poor kids to read well is the best thing schools could do. But they don't.

Check out this blog.

acityreader.blogspot.com