Mitch "Red Menace" Daniels Going for the Public Jugular

With the reckless urgency that marks a desperate cynical scrambling to sustain a corporate welfare education scheme that is doomed by its own greedy overreaching and fraudulent machinations , the Koch Industry governors have gone All In to dismantle public schools and to crush teachers and staff.  From Nick Anderson at WaPo:

INDIANAPOLIS - The Republican faceoff with labor unions in the Midwest and elsewhere marks not just a fight over money and collective bargaining, but also a test of wills over how to improve the nation's schools.


GOP governors are pushing to limit teacher bargaining rights, dismantle teacher tenure and channel public money toward private schools. All are direct challenges to the teachers unions and their mostly Democratic political allies in Congress and in statehouses across the nation.

This approach to school reform is far more confrontational than President Obama's and threatens to polarize what has been a largely bipartisan movement to overhaul education. Analysts say teachers might grow leery of signing onto a school improvement agenda if they believe it will trample their rights.

"This is big," Rick Muir, president of the Indiana Federation of Teachers, said of the Republican agenda. "It's not one item. It's not two. They've seized the opportunity to go on the attack. They're going for the jugular."

Here in Indiana, Gov. Mitch Daniels (R), a possible 2012 presidential contender, and several of his Republican peers are pushing a bill to connect teacher evaluations with test scores, launch a system of performance-based pay and make it easier to dismiss teachers repeatedly rated ineffective or in need of improvement. Other Daniels-backed bills would offer publicly funded vouchers to help children of low to moderate means attend private school and narrow the scope of collective bargaining to wages and benefits.. . .