Two public school teachers have found themselves in hot water at work after posting messages critical of President Barack Obama to their personal Facebook pages, the Daily Caller reports. After last Tuesday’s election, according to ABC affiliate WSOC-TV, South Carolina-based eighth-grade math teacher Sharon Aceta updated her status on Facebook with this sarcastic message: “Congrats Obama. As one of my students sang down the hallway, ‘We get to keep our food stamps’ …which I pay for because they can’t budget their money… and really, neither can you.” A spokesperson for Rawlinson Road Middle School, Aceta’s employer, said that multiple people had contacted the school with complaints…
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At NEA convention, mixed feelings among teachers for Obama ahead of 2012 vote
When her union endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008, retired Montgomery County teacher Jane Stern wrote checks to his campaign and spent hours calling voters in swing states to support a Democrat she though would stand strong for public schools and break from a federal education policy of “testing, testing, testing,” reports the Washington Post. Three years later, all the standardized tests are still there. In some places, they are beginning to be used to fire teachers. Lately, Stern said, the solutions to all of public education’s troubles seem to boil down to a refrain: “Blame it on the teacher who works her tail off for 14 hours a day.”
…Read MoreTeachers’ union shuns Obama aides at convention
For two years as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama addressed educators gathered for the summer conventions of the two national teachers’ unions, and last year both groups rolled out the welcome mat for Education Secretary Arne Duncan. But in a sign of the Obama administration’s strained relations with two of its most powerful political allies, no federal official was scheduled to speak at either convention this month, partly because union officials feared that administration speakers would face heckling, reports the New York Times. The National Education Association meeting opened in New Orleans July 3 to a drumbeat of heated rhetoric, with several speakers calling for Duncan’s resignation, hooting delegates voting for a resolution criticizing federal programs for “undermining public education,” and the union’s president summing up 18 months of Obama education policies by saying, “This is not the change I hoped for.” “Today our members face the most anti-educator, anti-union, anti-student environment I have ever experienced,” Dennis Van Roekel, president of the union, told thousands of members gathered at the convention center. Obama and Duncan have supported historic increases in school financing to stave off teacher layoffs, but they’ve also sought to shake up public education with support for charter schools, the dismissal of ineffective teachers as a way of turning around failing schools, and other policies. That agenda has spurred fast-paced changes, including adoption of new teacher evaluation systems in many states and school districts, often with the collaboration of teachers’ unions. But it has also angered many teachers, who say they are being blamed for all the problems in public schools…
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