PrintJuly 11, 2009
Who said it?
A report on National Teachers Unions and the Struggle Over School Reform, issued July 4, 2009 concludes
Over the last decade the national leaders of the National Education Association and the American Federal of Teachers havew made their unions implacable foes of laws and policies designed to improve public education to disagvantaged students.
Was it education maven Bill Bennett? Maybe cultural critic Lynne Cheney? The Heritage Foundation? Some conservative bloggers?
Then there is this:
In their attacks on education reform, the national unions have often been unconstrained by considerations of propriety and fairness. They have sought to inject weakening amendments to appropriations bills, hoping they would prevail if no hearings were held or the public was unaware of their efforts. They have used the courts to launch an attack on education reform, employing arguments that could imperil many federal assistance programs going back to the New Deal. They have failed to inform their own members of the content of federal reform laws.Worse yet, the NEA has on more than one ocassion counseled disobedience to the law
That sounds a lot like Linda Chavez in her book Betrayal: how union bosses shake down their members and corrupt American politics.
Try the Citzens' Commission of Civil Rights, chaired by William L. Taylor, who was staff dicector of the US Commission on Civil Rights Commission in the turbulent 1960s. The twelve member board in whose name the report was issued includes former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, Indiana Democrat Birch Bayh, Former President of Notre Dame, Father Theodore M. Herberg, Ray Marshall, Secretrary of Labor under Jummy Carter and Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia's Representative to Congress.
With these prominent liberals blasing away it seems time to end the myth that the national leaders of the teachers' union had the best interests of children in mind when they work to protect the incompetent, the staff heavy and the unaccountable.
A cynic like me might even be pardoned for wondering if part of the national union agenda had been to discredit the genuine reform efforts of a Republican president with real compassion for students trapped in failing public school systems. Were the blistering attacks on No Child Left Behind by the union leadership less about moral imperatives and more about plain old partisan politics? The report does note that both unions have new leadership that might now steer their organizations in more constructive and conciliatory directions on NCLB.
