California Students Take To The Streets For Education
Posted on June 16, 2005
The film System Failure highlights how California is spending more money on keeping its youth incarcerated as opposed to educated.
Last week, in front of the very elegant Fairmont Hotel in Sillicon Valley, a bunch of fired up students and nurses stopped a limo from approaching the hotel. They surrounded it and rocked it back and forth. It looked like they might tip it over completely. The besiegers were looking for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he was not inside the vehicle.
The governor's proposed cuts in education and public services that is fueling grassroots mobilization among affected constituencies — "special interests" to Arnold. Students are adding bulk and confrontational energy to protests by firefighters, teachers and nurses that have grown in size — 15,000 people in late May in Sacramento; thousands in Los Angeles on the same day; hundreds in San Francisco the month before; 2,000 in San Jose, which is not known for mass mobilizations. For the first time in state history, the students have created a cross-system (UC, state and community college) coalition called Action in Defense of Education (AIDE).
READ more about this campaign in Raj Jayadev's article "California Students Protest Cuts in Education" published on AlterNet.
Sign the Books Not Bars petition.
Related Films: System Failure
MediaRights is a project of