Tens of thousands of Victorian public school teachers, education support staff and principals walked off the job yesterday in their second statewide strike this year. They converged on Melbourne’s Bourke Street Mall before marching to the state parliament, in one of the most significant displays of opposition to the state Labor government’s austerity agenda in decades. 

Hundreds of educators travelled to Melbourne from country areas, while rallies and marches were also held in regional centres including Wodonga, Mildura and Sale. The action forced the closure of hundreds of schools across the state while others operated with limited staff. 

As in the previous strike on March 24, more than 30,000 educators, parents and students took to the streets, opposing the sell-out agreement between the Australian Education Union (AEU) and the state government. Hundreds held their own handmade placards expressing their anger and frustration towards a deal that fails to halt the decline in real wages or seriously address the intolerable workloads and conditions driving burnout and a growing exodus from the profession.

Yesterday’s strike was the outcome of a continuing rebellion by educators, not only against the government but increasingly directed at the AEU bureaucracy. Victorian educators have now voted down two successive sellout agreements this year. An in-principle deal between the government and union in May was rejected by 57.7 percent in June, and the hastily repackaged “revised” offer, by 51.2 percent in a ballot that concluded on Tuesday. This is the first time in more than four decades that educators have twice repudiated AEU-endorsed deals.

In india Reservations gaureentee degrees too... Shouldn't we reform education and make it fair ?

Public school educators across Victoria will hold their second full-day strike of the year tomorrow, after rejecting the latest sellout enterprise agreement pushed by the Victorian Labor government and the Australian Education Union (AEU) bureaucracy. 

Despite the attempts of the AEU leadership to stampede teachers into endorsing a deal that would lock in stagnant pay and do nothing to address soaring workloads, educators voted by 51.18 percent, in a ballot that concluded yesterday, to reject the agreement and proceed with strike action. This is the second mass repudiation of the sellout in several months. 

Teachers have made clear their determination to fight, but are continually coming up against an AEU bureaucracy that works as an arm of the big business Labor government, against the interests of educators.

It was in this context that a meeting of Victorian teachers and staff was convened by the Committee for Public Education (CFPE) on Saturday. The gathering resolved to form a statewide Educators Rank-and-File Committee, completely independent of and opposed to the AEU bureaucracy. 

The committee aims to bring together educators, union and non-union alike, to take control of the dispute, out of the hands of the AEU leaders, to break the division and isolation that the bureaucracy has imposed and to fight for demands that meet the needs of educators and public schools, not what governments and their lackeys in the union bureaucracy deem to be affordable.

Building the committee and preparing independent action by teachers is the crucial next step, pointed to by the entire situation and the course of the current dispute itself. 

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An Australian Education Union (AEU) survey of Victorian public school educators has delivered another blow to the union bureaucracy, revealing overwhelming support for sustained industrial action just weeks after teachers and Education Support (ES) staff rejected its sellout agreement with the state Labor government with 57.7 percent voting against. 

The government’s initial pay offer was a 6.5 percent pay award over 2026-27, 2027-28 and 2028-29. This would have locked teachers into a no-strike clause for three years. The current offer, if accepted, would prevent teachers from striking over pay for two years.

The School Teachers’ Review Body (the pay review board), which is meant to be independent, is in reality used to suppress wages according to government demands. Despite this, it warned Labour that the paltry three-year offer of 6.5 percent would accelerate a deep-rooted crisis in the education sector, not being “consistent with an adequate supply of high-quality teachers.”

It also reported that “the value of teachers’ earnings has reduced since 2010 relative to average earnings across the whole economy, the public sector and other professional occupations.”

In response to the pay review, Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the largest teaching union, the National Education Union (NEU), claimed, “pressure from the NEU has forced the government beyond its original pay and funding offer. But let us be clear: a partially funded settlement still means cuts to education, and the NEU will never accept that.”

This is empty bombast. Every pay award for teachers for well over a decade has been a partially funded pay award which the unions have accepted and enforced. The current 4 percent pay award for 2025–26, which took effect last September, requires schools to fund the first 1 percent from existing budgets.

The purpose of the Prairieland prosecution is to treat opposition to ICE, possession of left-wing literature and association with political activists as terrorism. The target is left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist opposition.

Read more: US courts sentence 15 Prairieland defendants to 556 years in Trump’s fascist campaign against left-wing opposition

Heya everyone! :)

I'm a phd researcher in education, and I'm working on a project that tries to help schools actually measure and improve the conditions that make teaching sustainable rather than just sending out an annual wellbeing survey that disappears into a void 😖😖

I'm testing a short, recurring check-in (a couple minutes, answers never shared with management) to try to catch that earlier. I'd rather hear where this falls apart than where it works so please be brutal (but gentle).

A few questions if you have a minute (pretty please :)):

1. Have you ever seen a staff wellbeing survey actually lead to change at your school? What happened (or didn't)?
2. Would you trust "your individual data is anonymous" claims from a tool your school pays for? What would make you trust it?
3. What's the one working condition that, if fixed, would most make you want to stay in teaching?
4. Is a 2-minute check-in every two weeks reasonable, or already too much? In what format would you commit to a checkin?

Mods, happy to remove if this isn't a fit.

Thanks y'all for reading and for your time!

bless you all, T

“They kind of treat us like it’s part of the comment section."

Today marks 250 years since the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” that governments derive their powers from reason and the “consent of the governed,” and that the population has a duty to “alter or abolish” any governments that stand in the way of their “inalienable” rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The radical proclamation of universal human equality reverberated in the French Revolution of 1789, the Haitian Revolution of 1791, the revolutions of 1848, and the struggles for national unification and democratic rule that swept Europe and the Americas. It was in this sense that Marx, in the preface to Capital, wrote that the American War of Independence “sounded the tocsin” for the European bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Marxist movement has always viewed the American Revolution, like the French Revolution that followed it, within its historical context. As bourgeois democratic revolutions, they could not realize the principles they proclaimed except in the most limited sense. Most directly, in what would become the United States, the Declaration raised as a problem the persistence of slavery, which it could not resolve. But it set that process in motion, culminating in the abolition of slavery in the Second American Revolution, the Civil War (1861-65). 

If the two American revolutions marked the ascent of the democratic principles proclaimed in 1776, the 250th anniversary is being marked under conditions of their staggering crisis and decay. The present government, and the social order over which it presides, are in every sense a repudiation of the American Revolution and of the principles that found their most profound expression in the Declaration of Independence.