There are strong corporate interests that are trying to destroy unions and public education in this country. Ultimately, they will earn huge profits by privatizing public schools turning them into for profit charter schools for which citizens will have to use vouchers funded by your tax dollars. Your taxes will pad the pockets of charter school CEO's. So far, many charter schools have performed worse than public schools. They hire inexperienced untrained teachers and pay them badly. Governor Cuomo has accepted Federal “Race to the Top” funding and claims he will "improve" public schools in NYS. Politicians claim that U.S. schools are falling behind the rest of the industrialized world, and they claim that it is the fault of teachers and teacher unions. There are very many fallacies in those claims:
1. When the international PISA test scores are corrected to account for socioeconomic status, U.S. public school students actually score ahead of Europeans and Asians.
2. It has been shown that poverty is the #1 predictor of student success academically. The U.S. has a huge gap between rich and poor students.
3. U.S. states with strong teacher unions often have better educational outcomes than those without.
4. Recent data shows that the majority of private charter schools are doing much worse than public schools serving the same population.