Imagine someone walking up to an elderly person and asking if they can help you across the street for a price, but when questioned on what they will do, they put on their cleats and say they'll "help" by kicking you into oncoming traffic. No one in their right mind would be that stupid or arrogant, right? Wrong, says Matt Taibbi.

When he comes to speak at CII, Loeb will almost certainly be seeking new clients. There will be some serious whales in these waters: For instance, CalSTRS, the California State Teachers' Retirement System, will definitely be represented (Anne Sheehan, the director of corporate governance for CalSTRS, will be moderating Loeb's panel).

But here's the catch. Dan Loeb, who isn't known as the biggest hedge-fund asshole still working on Wall Street (only because Stevie Cohen hasn't been arrested yet), is on the board and co-founder of a group called Students First New York. And Students First has been one of the leading advocates pushing for states to abandon defined benefit plans – packages which guarantee certain retirement benefits for public workers like teachers – in favor of defined contribution plans, where the benefits are not guaranteed.

In other words, Loeb is soliciting the retirement money of public workers, then turning right around and lobbying for those same workers to lose their benefits. He's essentially asking workers to pay for their own disenfranchisement (with Loeb getting his two-and-twenty cut, or whatever obscene percentage of their retirement monies he will charge as a fee). If that isn't the very definition of balls, I don't know what is.

It's one thing for a group like Students First to have an opinion about defined benefit plans in general, to say, as they have, that "today's district pensions and other benefits are not sustainable and contribute to a looming fiscal crisis." But it's another thing for a VP of Students First like Rebecca Sibilia to tweet the following just a few weeks before one of its board members asks for money from a fund like CalSTRS:

Outdated & underfunded #pension systems like CALSTERS break promises to #teachers#edreform #thinkED http://huff.to/15vdALJ via @HuffPostEdu

If this isn't Gordon Gecko writ large, I don't know what is. "Hello, teachers. Invest with me, and I'll make sure your pensions make a lot of money by eliminating your jobs! And your pensions, too -- even after they're entrusted with me for maximum investment return."

Loeb serves no one but himself. After giving a six-figure donation to Obama in 2008, he turned tail and gave over twice that amount to Republicans. He also funded a series of ads against the Obama administration's policy on Palestine through the same front group that opposed Chuck Hagel's nomination and ran all those "Democrats hate him too" ads -- the Emergency Committee for Israel.

Loeb's little rant to his investors in 2010 drew the scorn of RJ Eskow:

A hedge-fund manager's "investor letter" -- really more of a staged, theatrical tantrum -- has been getting a lot of attention lately. Daniel S. Loeb's diatribe demonstrates that banker greed is still out of control, and that it's as shortsighted and destructive as ever. The fact that Loeb is a registered Democrat and former Obama supporter doesn't matter as much as some people think. It's the same old story: Politics is just a means to an end, and the end in this case is self-enrichment.

If Loeb's pose as Hedge-Fund Revolutionary seems like a ridiculous form of populism, remember: The Tea Party began with an angry outburst on the Chicago Board of Trade, from traders who were outraged that homeowners might be given a fraction of the aid bankers received. Loeb's letter is mostly a marketing ploy, but if he can become the Robespierre of the Hedge-Fund Revolution I'm sure that would be fine with him, too.After all, that would be good for business.

This is why StudentsFirst is not ever, ever to be trusted. Loeb denies he had any knowledge of StudentsFirsts' attitude toward pensions over 401ks. Nonsense. Of course he did. They don't keep it a secret. They actively campaign against teachers' pensions on their website, they have an action page, and have been lobbying to kill teachers' pensions in Florida and other states. It's part of their overall state report card. He was just hoping to pull the wool over everyone's eyes.

In Taibbi's article, he describes an eye-opening exchange between AFT President Randi Weingarten and Loeb. She offers to meet with him to explain why it is a spectacularly bad idea to be a board member on StudentsFirst while soliciting teachers' pension trustees as investors. As the back-and-forth continues, Loeb suddenly isn't available for the sales meeting he solicited.

Well, of course he's not. That would require accountability, and as Taibbi says, Loeb is one of a group who "...can swoop in, make a pitch after a fancy lunch or two, and then take big chunks of that cash to buy private jets and Picassos."

Right. Profit über alles.

In case you just thought teachers were under fire from those who want to break their unions and kill their jobs by handing them to charter schools, guess again. Every day, teachers get to walk into their classrooms and wonder whether or not one of their students is angry enough to do something like this:

A Poway student sent a threatening email over the weekend to a Twin Peaks Middle School administrator stating he planned to shoot a teacher and 23 fellow students at the school on Monday morning.

Detectives from the San Diego County Sheriff's Department investigated the alleged shooting threat Saturday and found numerous rifles and handguns in the 12-year-old student's home.

According to officials, the email threat -- which was sent to a school administrator Friday night -- made reference to 3,000 rounds of ammunition as well as numerous firearms in the planned shooting at the Poway middle school located at 14640 Tierra Bonita Rd.

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While Rupert Murdoch tweets in favor of gun control, and some Fox Newsies kinda sorta follow suit, Roger Ailes is promoting armed teachers as the answer to school shootings. So this morning, the superintendent of the Harrold, Texas school district told an approving Steve Doocy that having a gun-free school is like asking for the kind of mass shooting that happened in Newtown, Connecticut last week.

Harrold schools superintendant David Thweatt said:

We’ve gone through several passive types of security. We have extended camera systems, we have external locked doors… We did everything passively we could do. What seemed to me to be a problem and (since) whenever we made schools gun-free zones is that we basically left our schools open to attack. This is like putting a sign in front of your house that says, “I really think that it’s a good idea if you come in and attack me because I don’t believe in guns.

…I needed a plan that would protect our kids… Security guards are an idea and that’s fine. But what do you do when that one security guard is at a dentists appointment or has the flu?

Doocy nodded along in agreement and murmured supportive comments like, “Sure.” His only concern seemed to be the fact that the school district does no psychological testing on its gun-toters (because they “know each other fairly well” and “we trust our teachers," according to Thweatt).

Doocy never asked what happens if the gun-toting teacher or teachers are not on hand when a crisis erupts, or if they're supposed to carry a gun with them every moment of the workday? He never showed a concern about how the guns stay accessible without becoming a threat to the children or what kind of training the teachers get. I don’t know about you, but the only thing worse than having my kid shot by a madman would be to have my kid shot mistakenly shot by some inept vigilante.

Instead, Doocy noted sympathetically that another problem for the Harrold school district is that it’s “about 20 miles, 20 minutes away from the sheriff’s department… If something went haywire, and you needed help, you’re on your own for a good piece of time!”

As he spoke a banner on the screen first read, “PACKING FOR PROTECTION” and then, “PREVENTING THE NEXT NEWTOWN.”

In case anyone missed the message, Doocy “asked” if Harrold’s policy would work elsewhere. Thweatt answered, “Whenever you have a situation where you can put multiple people within a school building that are there to potentially protect the kids, that’s a good idea.”

Doocy said, “Right.”

The NRA lunatics seem to have settled on their counterpoint theme to the outcry for some kind of gun control. In their twisted little minds, we should simply arm the teachers, and make sure everyone has access to a gun.

Yep, that's the answer. MORE guns. Guns for everybody! Too many guns to count, just arm them all and let's see who's the last one standing.

It's unspeakably stupid, and it's the last thing our schools need right now. Will we also require teachers to wear bulletproof vests while they're teaching their classes in case there's a shootout between the teacher in the classroom next door and some insane crazed lunatic with a weapon that should never have been invented, much less used by a civilian?

Last summer, I spent time in Detroit at the American Federation of Teachers convention. As I walked around the convention center I picked up snippets of conversations here and there. More than once, teachers expressed concern that they could not keep the children safe if their class sizes were too big. You may recall that Mitt Romney, Michelle Rhee, and other "reformers" are all fans of large public school classes, provided the teacher is "competent."

I wonder how they would measure those teachers' competence in the area of shielding 40 kids from a crazed gunman with a couple of assault rifles? Let's assume those teachers took some district-mandated gun safety course and carried a gun with them in the classroom -- an odious thought. Salon's Alex Sietz-Wald spent some time looking at the question of whether carrying guns is an effective defense when the bad guy has the element of surprise. His conclusions will not surprise you. The answer is an emphatic "NO."

The truth is that it’s extremely difficult for anyone, let alone a lightly trained and inexperienced civilian, to effectively respond to a shooter. The entire episode can take a matter of seconds and your body is fighting against you: Under extreme stress, reaction time slows, heart rate increases and fine motor skills deteriorate. Police train to build muscle memory that can overcome this reaction, but the training wears off after only a few months if not kept up.

In 2009, ABC’s “20/20″ demonstrated the problem with a clever experiment. They recruited a dozen or so students, gave them gun training that was more comprehensive than what most states require for concealed carry permits, and then entrusted them with a gun and told them they would have to fend off a shooter later that day. Separating them, they placed each one in a real classroom with other “students” (actually study compatriots). When a gunman burst in and started shooting, each student tried to respond by drawing his or her gun. Every single student failed, including several who had had years of practice shooting guns, and they all got shot (fortunately, it was just paintball bullets in real handguns).

The truth, as difficult as it is to accept, is that it’s often impossible to stop a shooter no matter how many guns are present. John Hinckley Jr. managed to nearly kill Ronald Reagan and permanently disable James Brady despite the fact that they were surrounded by dozens of heavily armed men with the best training imaginable. The only way to stop the incident would have been to prevent the offender from getting guns in the first place.

The entire article is the one long read you should indulge in today. Seitz-Wald does a terrific job of debunking the myths about defensive shooting in an already-chaotic scene, and cites cases where highly trained police have reacted with a tragic result of shooting innocent bystanders instead of the perpetrator.

Arming teachers isn't the answer. Scapegoating teachers isn't the answer. Supporting teachers, making sure they have adequate security, an evacuation plan, enough teachers' aides and a manageable class size is about the best anyone can do. For all of the stories of tragedy told over the past few days, there are also stories of heroism, of teachers shoving the kids into bathrooms and closets, keeping them safe and shielding them with their bodies.

This is what teachers do. It's what they're trained to do. It's why they're teachers. Arming them is not the answer. Supporting them is.

Good news, at least for now, though I expect an appeal will be filed and stop any reversal of the harm already done.

Via Washington Post:

Dane County Circuit Judge Juan Colas ruled that the law violates both the state and U.S. Constitution and is null and void. The ruling comes after a lawsuit brought by the Madison teachers union and a union for Milwaukee city employees.

Walker spokesman Cullen Werwie said he was confident the decision will be overturned on appeal.

“We believe the law is constitutional,” said Department of Justice spokeswoman Dana Brueck.

I'm reading through the ruling now, but the judge first noted that the plaintiffs (Madison Teachers Union and Milwaukee city employees) had the burden of proving the unconstitutionality of the statute beyond a reasonable doubt. Judge Colas then went on to rule that the limitations on collective bargaining for public employees violated the union's right of free speech, association, and equal protection, and voided those sections.

It appears from the ruling that this applies to city employees, but not state employees, since they weren't included as plaintiffs. I'm not sure how it relates to state employees, but am looking for more information.

This is just the first step in a series, I'm sure. By ruling that the US Constitution had been violated, I believe the union will have the right to take this case to a federal court, too. But I'm not a lawyer and I'll wait for one to weigh in on that.

In his town hall appearance in New Hampshire this morning, Mitt Romney celebrated the individual, who clearly needs no support system to succeed in RepublicanLand.

Speaking to a crowd of FreedomWorks devotees and other New Hampshire residents, he said this:

"We celebrate and recognize the success of each individual and acknowledge their success. We don't denigrate it, we don't divide Americans based on their level of success. We come together.

The other day, you know, I thought about a kid that works hard to get the honor roll. And she works real hard. I know that to get the honor roll she had to go on a school bus to get to school. But when she makes the honor roll, I credit the kid, not the bus driver!"

This statement right here underlines the differences I have with conservatives. Because that bus driver did make a difference. So did the teacher that child had, and the parents who made sure she did her homework. If she was an underprivileged child, part of her success came from the lunches that filled her tummy enough to actually be able to concentrate.

Is making the honor roll the student's success? Of course it is, but that student had a lot of hands bridged together to help her meet that goal. And having met it, she can understand the joy of success and the joy of learning, but she did not hatch ready to learn or make the honor roll.

Although Romney intended for this to be a metaphor relating to the economy, I think it speaks volumes about his approach to education. Teachers and bus drivers are expendable; they're luxuries. Feeding kids lunch so they can learn? An 'extra' thing. No, education is solely the result of the child's effort. No teacher can make a difference, no bus driver can make a difference, no parent can make a difference. It's an individual thing.

Studies prove this false over and over again. Children learn in small classrooms with well-trained teachers. They are given the tools to be able to achieve. Children living in poverty are less likely to have an opportunity to learn in such an environment, but even if they are, their poverty will still drag them down if not addressed.

Anthony Cody wrote this about poverty and education in dialogue with the Gates Foundation:

Our education reformers want teachers to come into the schools like knights on white horses, plaster the walls with college logos, and push students to new heights with our high expectations. I have seen this in dozens of classrooms of novice teachers, often associated with programs like Teach For America. We are pretending that there is some sort of level playing field here, but we are failing to create such a field. Instead, we just pretend these students are going to be able to compete with their well-heeled counterparts in the suburbs for shrinking higher educational opportunity. For most of them it is an empty promise.

At the end of the day, whatever advances teachers can make with their students are swamped by the statistical mix of unsupportable life circumstances, and progress is not "adequate". There will be a few individuals who emerge from this system as success stories, by luck, by extraordinary resilience, and through the dedication of their teachers. Education reformers elevate these exemplars to prove that "anyone" can make it, and condemn the teachers for failing to accomplish similar results for all their students. The whole system is built around the idea that anyone can make it and therefore we will ensure the highest level of success if we attempt to hold everyone to the same high standards, while largely ignoring the conditions in which they live.

The Gates Foundation's response to him concluded with this:

What we can't do, however, is address all of the problems that put or keep families in poverty. We just don't have the resources to do that. But we are part of a community of donors who are committed to eliminating the causes of poverty. We believe the most effective philanthropic efforts are ones that remain focused on addressing particular problems and are creative about their approach to supporting solutions. That philosophy is based on the data and research of successful philanthropy.

We agree with Anthony Cody that poverty is a central problem; we just don't think we can ever effectively turn the tide by creating false choices for the daunting series of challenges students in our schools face.

If the Gates Foundation can't effectively address the issue of poverty, there's only one avenue left: government. Really, think on that. Warren Buffett has given much of his fortune to the Gates Foundation. Gates has done a lot of work trying to eradicate malaria in Africa and spread of the HIV/AIDS virus. Really important work. Yet they admit they cannot, even within a philanthropic community, make a dent in the issue of poverty.

So if the bus driver and the Gates Foundation aren't part of the solution, how does Mitt Romney think students actually succeed? And why on earth would he opt out of a solution that, in the long run, invests in our educational system and our economy to produce 21st century productive workers?

Mitt Romney is simply wrong about that child's success. And if you thought he was wrong, wait until you see how wrong Paul Ryan is. Jeff Bryant :

With Ryan teaming up with Romney, what we have is a devastating duo when it comes to supporting children. A page at the website for Care2.org lists even more travesties:

• Cutting as much as $1.1 billion from early childhood education, denying "more than 2 million poor children the opportunity for high-quality early education."
• "Blocking support intended to help avoid educator layoffs and prevent ballooning class sizes.
• Increasing support for school vouchers, "which give public money to families to attend private and religious schools."

Romney-Ryan don't spare higher education from the assault either, as they've voiced opposition to federal funds and lending that help disadvantaged students attend college and promoted privatization of the public university system.

And that's okay with them, because Mitt and Paul "credit the student, not the bus driver."

If Detroit Emergency Manager and Rick Snyder appointee Roy Roberts thought it was a good idea to pink slip all of Detroit's teachers, gut funding for schools and then force a contract on those teachers who were returning, he hasn't come face to face with AFT President Randi Weingarten recently. She and over 500 angry teachers had a message for Roberts: You had better sit down at the table and start negotiating rather than dictating.

Weingarten met with Roberts for about 45 minutes Friday after firing up the troops at a general session of about 3,000 teacher-delegates. As things stand now, the "new", imposed contract by Roberts ignores teachers' concerns while he imposes total control over the schools. As Weingarten said, "[Roberts] has used that power to gut school funding, pink-slip every teacher and slash teacher pay. He has refused to negotiate with us to solve the deep challenges that Detroit schools face."

Those paragraphs tell you a story, but they don't tell you the story. My last encounter with Randi Weingarten was last November, when I got to see her vision of "solution-driven unionism" in action in McDowell County, West Virginia. Recognizing that poverty is one of the biggest barriers to students' success in school, the AFTis partnering with local and state government, private enterprise, and charitable organizations to not only educate children, but improve their lives and the lives of their families.

It's working, too. As Weingarten pointed out in her keynote today, Cincinnati students are achieving at a higher rate than other schools in Ohio based on a similar model of uniting those they represent with those they serve. Or in simpler terms, widen the community from the ranks of union members to the community. If you think union membership is simply about strikes and contracts, I challenge you to think again.

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Mike Huckabee was part of a particularly awful "This Week" panel Sunday morning, and when asked about Mitt Romney's remark that our economic problems in this country are all because we have too many "government workers," he doubled down.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hold on one second. I'll ask the governor about this. What is wrong with jobs for teachers, firemen and police officers?

HUCKABEE: I can tell you. There's nothing wrong with it. My dad was a fireman. I love firemen jobs. But here's what you need. You need enough firemen to put out the fires. You don't arbitrarily go, hire firemen, policemen or teachers unless you have more kids in school. And what we need to be talking about is not hiring more teachers, but hiring better teachers and getting rid of the ones that don't teach. When 50 percent of the kids in Chicago, where Obama's campaign headquarters are located aren't even graduating, we need to be talking about improving graduation, not just increasing the number of public employees who in Chicago get $100,000 a year in salary and benefits.

JONES: Look, look, first of all, maybe I was raised wrong. I never heard of this threat to America called public employees. In my neighborhood, we called them teachers, we called them firefighters, we called them cops, we called them nurses, and we were taught to look up to them and to respect them. And for them now to be a punching bag, people like my father and my mother, who were public school teachers, who did not make $100,000 a year or whatever you just said and nothing near it, for them to become a punching bag is wrong.

Furthermore, I think we need to take a big step back here. When you have the amount of pain that's happening in the country, the Republican Party has not only been missing in action, they won't pass their own bills to help Americans right now. They won't pass their own ideas to help small businesses right now. Why? Because their gain will come when America has more pain. It's like having a life guard trying to help you--

STEPHANOPOULOS: You say they're rooting for failure?

JONES: I say they're rooting for failure. It's like having a life guard, Obama is a life guard trying to help people drowning. These guys are sitting back on the rocks hoping more people drown. That's wrong. It's morally wrong.

Very good job by Van Jones. But he also should've pointed out that over the past 4 years, we've lost hundreds of thousands of teachers, firefighters and cops. So Huckabee is just dead wrong -- there's absolutely nothing "arbitrary" about saying we need to hire more.

Michelle Rhee loves charter schools. She hates teacher unions. She thinks teachers shouldn't have pensions, only 401k plans. She really, really loathes teacher tenure and is doing her very best to make sure teachers get no respect, have no long term career plans, and that they're divided on a generational basis. She's funded by lots of right-wingers, including Rupert Murdoch, who had the audacity to tweet this:

@kevingulliverright. Now urgent job is to provide all with equal first class education, then outcome up to individuals.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) June 2, 2012

As far as I'm concerned, Rhee and Murdoch own this tragedy, via CoLab Radio.

I just quit my job as a teacher in an urban charter school. Even though I still don’t have another job and I support myself entirely, it is the best decision I ever made. It is especially liberating this week while my colleagues – and after five incredibly stressful years on the education front lines, my truly beloved friends – wait for the June 1 ax to fall.

Every June 1, the exhausted teachers and staff at my school learn whether they will be rehired for another grueling year. Last year the school gave 43 staff and teachers the you’re-outta-luck-pal letters, including the entire three-man physical education department and the student support genius, Dany Edwards, who somehow made harmony out of the schools’ cacophony of crazy student behavior. This year the school’s three glorious new gymnasiums are largely unused because we have no gym teachers and Dany is dead of unknown causes. Whatever happened to this beautiful young man, firing him didn’t help him live any better or happier for his last few months on earth. And the kids he championed lost his tender, tough, hilarious and real guidance.

[...]

To you Michelle Rhee and all you anti-union fanatics, you are wasting your time waiting around for superman. They already fired superman at my school. You see a union would have protected Dany as well as these three talented teachers who provided quality physical education to all of our 1200 students. Meanwhile, some not-so-gifted staff and teachers get to keep their jobs every June 1. At least public schools and their unions have transparent guidelines for tenure and enough respect to let teachers know they won’t be rehired for the next school year by March or earlier. June 1 is late to jump into the teacher hiring season. I suspect the administration keeps it a secret to the bitter end because they don’t trust us to keep working hard. They are suspicious and we are paranoid. It’s part of my school’s culture.

Go read the rest. It's fascinating, tragic and true. And happening everywhere.

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Be forewarned. This is a rant. It is not a test of the emergency rant system. It is an outright, full-throated rant.

That image is of a full-page newspaper ad taken out in the Janesville Gazette, the local newspaper in Paul Ryan's district. What it is, is thuggery in typeset letters. The names you can't read in the image are the names of teachers in Janesville who signed the petition to recall Scott Walker. Next to their names, is their salary. At the bottom of the ad, there is a space to sign to "opt-out" of any teacher's classroom who signed the petition.

This is part of the strategy the Heartland Institute laid out for breaking the teachers' union and holding onto the their water boy, Scott Walker. According to Blogging Blue, this is part of an intimidation strategy to suppress enthusiasm, free speech, and the right to have a voice in one's government. Cognitive Dissidence outlines the strategy as outlined in Heartland's 2012 Funding Plan, released in January:

The recall elections of 2012 amount to a referenda on collective bargaining reform at the state level, making them of national interest. Successful recalls would be a major setback to the national effort to rein in public sector compensation and union power. Heartland is the largest and most influential national free-market think tank in the Midwest, so we are in the right place and with the right resources to help defend and secure Wisconsin’s recent gains.

We are contemplating five projects:

1. Recruit and promote superintendents who support Act 10
2. Explain the benefits of Act 10
3. Document the shortcomings of public schools in Wisconsin
4. Expose teacher pay in key districts
5. Create blogs that shadow small town newspaper coverage of the controversy

We anticipate that this project will cost about $612,000. Maureen Martin, Heartland’s legal counsel, with be the chief researcher and writer for this project. The anonymous donor has pledged $100,000 toward this project. We are circulating a proposal to other potential funders.

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