Please know that our coalitions may be calling on you for more witness slips in the coming days, and now is not the time to go wobbly, as Margaret Thatcher once told Ronald Reagan.
Did I just quote Margaret Thatcher?
The charter accountability bill and the charter commission bill appear to have been assigned to the charter subcommittee and have possibly survived that process to return soon to the full Senate Education Committee.
More details on that when I have wi-fi again.
There are many other good bills out there moving forward; I hope to read status reports on those soon. Whichever bill it is that requires LSCs for charters is possibly stll alive in the Senate. Good bill. I wish I had worked on more of them.
The Senate in Illinois is just as mysterious as the US Senate. We may at short notice have to get on the phones with a few specific senators. The truth is-- in my opinion-- that some of our Democratic senators have delegated their ed policy thinking to charter extremists. These are people who want unfettered privatization at any cost, even without basic accountability or a modicum of respect for elected school boards.
I can think of one such senator right now. I've seen it with my own eyes. We nay very shortly have to get on the phones with him.
When I look at the votes over in the House, it seems like mainly just a certain anti-government wing of the Republican Party voted against charter accountability. And Christian Mitchell and possibly Dan Burke? Did I get that right?
The corporate ed privatization movement is now most accurately described as an arch-conservative + Rahm Emanuel Democratic-wing coalition. It's that way everywhere.
I'm up in Michigan at the moment. There's a lot of hard-right radio up here. I'm hearing a lot of support for Indiana's decision to drop out of the Common Core. It seems that no matter how hard the Obama administration works against the Democratic base to aid and abet the corporate reform movement, it will never be enough. It will never produce a single vote in a general election. and it will set back public education decades.
We may need to remind a couple senators that generally speaking people like their public schools in Illinois, and they don't want the schools destroyed by wholesale, unsupervised privatization, no matter what these Rasputins for Education Reform are whispering in their ears.
But hang in there. And when the time comes to do another witness slip or get on the phones, act quickly. If we can get an up or down vote on the Senate floor, we can't ask for more than that. But we should get at least that.
No moose sightings today. The back roads are almost impassible, I broke the zipper on my parka, my husky has some invisible object stuck in her paw, and it's supposed to be nine below tomorrow morning.
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