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Over the last few months, the Occupy Wall Street movement has grown from a small collection of hardcore activists to a groundswell of everyday Americans frustrated with the lack of opportunity afforded them in the United States. Of course, the irony of society having 24/7 coverage of our country's ills is that some members of the media portray those same news consumers as uninformed and lacking a clear, concise message.

Randi Weingarten talked about possible impact of the $30 billion for schools included in President Obama's jobs bill, and she responded to telephone calls and electronic communications. Other topics included the No Child Left Behind waiver proposed by the Obama administration, the Occupy Wall Street protests, and the role education could play in the 2012 elections.

Over the last few weeks, a small team of New York City building inspectors descended upon UFT headquarters, responding to a mysterious 311 call. Our building has been placed under police surveillance, and at times police have been posted as guards at our doors. The One Percent appears to be a tad bit irritated by the UFT's support for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

One of the perks of being a billionaire is that anything you submit to a newspaper is definitely going to be published. No one has been more successful in this respect than Bill Gates opining about education. His latest essay, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal, was nothing more than a rehash of what others have proposed as a way of improving educational quality ("Grading the Teachers," Oct. 22). Yet Gates believes that he has broken new ground.

Imagine you are David Tepper, a 54-year-old guy with $5 billion in the bank. You've played the Wall Street game all your adult life, and you've scored huge wins, over and over. Now what? Tepper, a hedge fund manager who lives in Livingston, has found his answer: He is jumping into the political game in New Jersey, promising to spend huge bucks over the long term to change the state of play on school reform, starting with tenure.

Michael Mulgrew talks pension reform, the millionaires tax and Occupy Wall Street on NY1's "Inside City Hall" (Video)

New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author Daniel Pink discusses motivation and how it relates to student education experiences. Pink, hosted by The Patterson Foundation, presented this topic to an audience of more than 200 in Sarasota, FL.

"If you're a public school teacher in Kentucky, the state has a message for you: You have no right to know the details of the investments being made with your retirement savings. That was the crux of the declaration issued by state officials to a high school history teacher when he asked to see the terms of the agreements between the Kentucky Teachers' Retirement System and the Wall Street firms that are managing the system's money on behalf of him, his colleagues and thousands of retirees."

"Horace Meister, a regular contributor, has discovered a shocking instance of contradictory research, posted a year apart by the same "independent" governmental agency. The first report, published a year ago, criticized New York City's charter schools for enrolling small proportions of high-need students; the second report, published a month ago, claimed that the city's charter schools had a lower attrition rate of high-needs students than public schools. Meister read the two reports carefully and with growing disgust. He concluded that the Independent Budget Office had massaged the data to reach a conclusion favoring the powerful charter lobby. Eva Moskowitz read the second report and wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal called "The Myth of Charter School 'Cherry Picking.'" Horace Meister says it is not myth: it is reality."

The question today is whether a democratic society needs public schools subject to democratic governance. Why not turn public dollars over to private corporations to run schools as they see fit? Isn't the private sector better and smarter than the public sector? The rise of charter schools has been nothing short of meteoric. They were first proposed in 1988 by Raymond Budde, a Massachusetts education professor, and Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. Budde dreamed of chartering programs or teams of teachers, not schools. Shanker thought of charters as small schools, staffed by union teachers, created to recruit the toughest-to-educate students and to develop fresh ideas to help their colleagues in the public schools. Their originators saw charters as collaborators, not competitors, with the public schools. Now the charter industry has become a means of privatizing public education. They tout the virtues of competition, not collaboration. The sector has many for-profit corporations, eagerly trolling for new business opportunities and larger enrollments. Some charters skim the top students in the poorest neighborhoods; some accept very small proportions of students who have disabilities or don't speak English; some quietly push out those with low scores or behavior problems (the Indianapolis public schools recently complained about this practice by local charters).

Class Warfare: that's the title Steven Brill gave to his recent book on the state of American education. With such a title, one might think that that Brill's book would investigate how the deep class divisions between America's wealthy class and our poor and working class, a gap that has grown immensely over the last four decades, has harmed our schools and our students. After all, educational research has shown that greatest challenge our schools face is the grinding effect of poverty on so many of the students we teach.