Guest poem by Bill Schechter.



So who dares criticize Private Equity?

Who has the temerity to malign Private Enterprise,

- or suggest that Bain actually was a bane?

But when it came to trashing Public Education & Unions

the businessmen were first in line, with their Roundtables, their Councils, their Chambers, their PACS, followed by their Hedge Fund and Equity colleagues, with their phony grassroots groups, their bought education commissioners, their for-profit charters, their testing companies feeding at the public trough, their dollars counting double our votes,

and the bashing of teachers -- fifteen long years now -- why not?

Let the mandatory assessments proceed:

Wasn't it teachers whose voracious greed drove the economy off the Wall St.

cliff?

destroyed democracy?

grade papers?



You say, no?

Didn't my kids' teachers deceive us into a war in Iraq?Isn't it their munificent salaries that have enthroned vast inequalities andHaven't their callous lesson plans condemned millions to poverty?Aren't they the ones who refuse to invest or hire, while they calmly sit andIsn't it they who are raking in gads of unprecedented profits?And the Achievement Gap? Didn't millions of uncaring teachers cause it?

Perhaps one day, the mayor of an American city, let's



call it Newark, New York, or Boston, or a school committee

States will have the guts to speak out/say/state/declaim

that attacks on America's teachers are



"nauseating" and must stop.

member, or a town selectman, or the even the President of the Unitedat a press conference, in a meeting, or on Meet The Press,





Sitting here...waiting.