Posted on 03/01/2011 8:59:36 AM PST by Kaslin
I love teachers. I really do. And I'm sure that most are overworked and underpaid. Certainly, no one is getting rich from teaching kids. I applaud the hardworking teachers across this land.
But, as has happened in Wisconsin, when teachers unions muscle legislators like the Mafia and Democrats abandon their voting posts because they don't like projected outcomes, haven't we abandoned the very foundational principles of our republic? Where were the "be civil" mainstream media police last Friday morning, when union demonstrators screamed at legislators on the floor of the Wisconsin Assembly while they voted?
More proof of union dominance and monopoly came out Feb. 22, when Wisconsin's Government Accountability Board released a report that disclosed the top 10 lobbying groups in the state. Look who is at the top of the list:
1) Wisconsin Education Association Council, 7,239 hours, $1,511,272
2) Wisconsin Insurance Alliance, 1,427 hours, $777,430
3) Forest County Potawatomi Community, 1,492 hours, $756,512
4) Altria Client Services Inc., 1,321 hours, $755,733
5) Wisconsin Hospital Association, 5,126 hours, $605,033
6) Wisconsin Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Store Association, 1,379 hours, $560,544
7) Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, 4,967 hours, $508,023
8) RAI Services Co., 186 hours, $466,253
9) Wisconsin Independent Businesses Inc., 7,939 hours, $458,414
10) Wisconsin Energy Corp., 1,547 hours, $387,222
The Wisconsin Education Association Council leads the pack of lobbyists, spending two times as much and five times the amount of time as its closest lobbying competitor in order to buy, bribe and bamboozle legislators to do as it wants.
What also chaps my hide is that a gigantic chunk of the WEAC's gangster money and time is used to lobby against alternative choices in schools (including charter schools) and against tuition tax credit programs, which aid parents in sending their children to private schools.
The fact is that teachers union-sponsored protests spreading the land are not primarily about the teachers or the students. They are about the unions and feds maintaining their Mafia-style rule over education and our kids and preventing people from choosing educational alternatives.
Or are we naive enough to believe that Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, is stopping by the White House repeatedly for just tea and crumpets even though he admitted this past week: "I'm at the White House a couple times a week. ... I have conversations every day with someone in the White House or in the administration"?
It brings me back to that bully educational manifesto of President Barack Obama's secretary of education, Arne Duncan, who explained in an NPR interview, "I'm a big believer in choice and competition, but I think we can do that within the public-school framework."
There's something that the U.S. government and unions don't want you to know. And it came out a short time ago in a Heritage Foundation report on education. It conveys the general public's increasing dissatisfaction with public education and tells of the rising number of people opting for private education.
The report explains that during the 2007 and 2008 legislative sessions, 44 states introduced school-choice legislation. Forty-four states! And in 2008, choices for private school were enacted into law or expanded in Arizona, Utah, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana and Pennsylvania. And as of 2009, 14 states and Washington, D.C., offered voucher or education tax credit programs.
Despite the growing public preference for private education, however, Congress last year canceled the District of Columbia's Opportunity Scholarship Program, created in 2004 to offer students from low-income families in the nation's capital an opportunity to join the school voucher community. The law provided $14 million in scholarships to help pay tuition at private schools of their choosing. But no longer.
And why did Congress nix the program, especially when studies had shown that students receiving vouchers since the program's inception were academically 18.9 months ahead of their peers? (All of Thurgood Marshall Academy's charter graduates are accepted to colleges.) Why would Congress phase out a program that cost $7,500 per student annually, compared with the $15,000 it costs in Washington's public schools to educate a child?
There's only one reason Congress canceled the program. It's the same reason at the heart of the teachers unions' battle in Wisconsin. It comes down to this: control and educational indoctrination.
I wrote in the paperback expansion of my New York Times best-seller "Black Belt Patriotism: How To Reawaken America": "The reason that government ... (is) cracking down on private instruction has more to do with suppressing alternative education than assuring educational standards. The rationale is quite simple, though rarely if ever stated: control future generations and you control the future. So rather than letting parents be the primary educators of their children -- either directly or by educating their children in the private schools of their choice -- (government wants) to deny parental rights, establish an educational monopoly run by the state, and limit private education options. It is so simple any socialist can understand it. As Joseph Stalin once stated, 'Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.'"
Parents deserve educational choices. Choice is what this country was founded upon.
Want to better U.S. public education? Feed the competition!
NORRIS/ NUGENT 2012!!!!!
My neighbors are getting rich from teaching kids. They live on one of the best streets in town. They have pensions and 401K equivalents that are so massive, they can retire around age 55, never having worked a summer in their lives.
For normal people without those assured salaries, massive pensions, summers off, etc., it would require a nest egg of around $2,000,000 to accomplish the lifestyle they are guaranteed for the rest of their lives.
To me, that's getting rich by teaching kids.
Well said. Otherwise, a good article.
It all depends on one’s perspective: If you were a movie and tv star, a combined salary in the low six figures and a cushy early retirement wouldn’t seem like “getting rich.”
Teachers do pretty well in CNY too. I just have no sympathy for them because imo the curriculum doesn’t teach kids how to think but what to think.
The problem is the salaries and benefits are unsustainable on the wages paid in a service economy.
It’s not the ‘American way’ that the elderly have to sell their cherished homes or get involved in reverse mortgage schemes solely designed to prevent the transfer of wealth to their children.
The police have been corrupted into revenue generators with guns. They’re ordered to avoid areas of intense criminal activity only to make ‘ticket war’ against working white sheep.
Fireman do a good job true but so do soldiers. When you have a thousand people apply for 1 job maybe it’s time to either outsourcing jobs or pay what the market will bear.
Everything got out of hand ONLY because they were unionized. Collective bargaining turned out to be a circus act of collusion, political endorsements and kickbacks.
In the end it they ruined everything they represented...now the Republic teeters over the abyss.
Sounds like my in-laws, too.
But it’s “for the chillrun”.
theres plenty of rank and file slob teachers out there, and theres plenty that are waaay overpaid...
but i also believe theres a large percentage that are caught up in the mess and dont have much say in the whole ordeal, being as tho its mostly big union players that control the situation...
for example, mrs g, as well as a half dozen members of our conservative CHRISTian congregation are simply trying to earna decent living doing what they wanted, which is to be good stewards and give good guidance and opportunities to children...
in this area, the avg salary/bennies are low, the classrooms are large, and the board/principles attempt to control every aspect of their curriculum, so much so, that in 7 yrs, mrs g has been directed to implement no less than 5 different 'programs' to instruct 6 yrs olds in reading...she tries to do the paperwork to keep the powers happy, and teach in a manner that actually works, but its a fine line, and frustrating as well...
yeah its nice having 'summer' off, but its also not so nice to barely get 15 minutes a day of a break, includin lunch, when dealing with 20+ 6 yr olds that she has no authority to dicipline...
public education is a joke today, but not so much for the teachers fault, as the power-players that be...
flames away...
No need to don a flame suit, there is some validity in some of your points.
Many people ARE in the union because they MUST be. And who is going to turn down those money and benefit packages if attained and offered by the unions?
Nobody is saying we shouldn’t pay them at all (Well, okay...there are some who say we shouldn’t even have them...) but what people ARE saying is those benefit packages are exorbitant and unsustainable. And both of those facts are true.
The fact that Public schools are a zoo because many parents couldn’t care less, and in the event of an incident, will side with their child no matter what is also a fact.
But the bottom line is, we are spending huge amounts of money on educating children, the largest parts going to salaries and benefits, and getting little in return. The taxpayer right now has absolutely NO recourse and must bend over on April 15 to fund this, even though their own children may not go to public school.
I say institue voucher programs (to INCLUDE private and religious schools), allow parents to get back the money they paid in taxes to public education if their child is not attending public schools and fund schools on some statistical analysis of student populations for a given window in the immediate past at budget time. If a school is not strong enough to keep kids going there, they get less money.
its disgusting that in this country i should hafta worry about such things...
Wallstreet Journal * FEBRUARY 26, 2011
Wisconsin’s Newest Progressive
The Republican governor wants a new social contract.
By JOHN FUND
Snip:
“I very much want to avoid laying people off,” Mr. Walker says. But his experience as county executive taught him that “not everyone feels that way. During budget crises I would push for a couple of weeks where workers would only put in 35 hours so we didn’t have to cut jobs, but union leaders would say no. It’s reactionary.” He says there’s a gulf between the interests of union leaders and those of their members. “When they say it’s about worker rights, it’s really about big union bosses running their own political dynasties.” That’s why the parts of his plan that most stick in the craw of union leaders are the ones that would limit their power.
Mr. Walker says that the employee rights that people care about are protected by civil-service rules, not collective bargaining. “We have the strongest protections in the country on grievance procedures, merit hiring, and just cause for disciplining and terminating employees,” he says. “None of that changes under my plan.” Mr. Walker notes that the single largest group affected by his proposal are the 30,000 workers at the University of Wisconsin who were only granted collective-bargaining rights in 2009. “If they only got them two years ago, how can you say they’re set in stone?”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704150604576166034245532792.html#printMode
I understand completely the frustration and anger at being lumped in with another group, as the good teachers are with the bad, and the non-union/reluctant union with the hard-core union.
I am from Massachusetts, and I get lumped in all the time with the liberals up here. It makes me angry and frustrated, even though I understand the dynamic of it and why people do it.
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