"Simply too high a price to pay"

By Locutisprime.

Let's take the way back machine to July 2009 and have a look at how the NEA (National Education Association) outgoing president Bob Chanin viewed education and unions. A prescient commentary on today's battles being waged in Wisconsin.

NEA General Counsel: Union Dues, Not Education, Are Our Top Priority

"This is not to say that the concern of NEA and its affiliates with closing achievement gaps, reducing drop out rates, improving teacher quality, and the like are unimportant or inappropriate. To the contrary these are the goals that guide the work we do. But they need not and must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights, and collective bargaining. That is simply too high a price to pay."

Comments

[tim aka The Godless Heathen]

Nice find, Lo.

I perfect example of why the unions need to be busted, not just their salaries lowered and their benefits/pensions cut, which is a good start, their unions need to be extinguished.

They’ve forgotten who pays their salaries - tax payers, and we’re sick of them, not the least of which is represented by this video.

The gravy train is OVER! The next train just left the station in Wisconsin, it’s called reality and it’s time to get on board.

[RandomThoughts]

As a teacher myself--though I am not, and will never be a union member--I could spend the next year telling stories from the trenches of the upside down attitude toward education which the NEA has created and fostered in public schools. The entire system is driven by union goals, and most teachers are little more than pawns in the system.

The best thing that could happen to public school education, particularly in California, is the end of union control. And the unions are afraid of losing their power, which is why they beat down the proposed voucher system, and are trying to beat back the emergence of charter schools.

It's my fervent hope that Wisconsin is the beginning of a sea change, though I expect that the entire country could shed itself of the unions' control before California would do so.