The very existence of teachers’ unions makes my blood boil. But I approach the breaking point when a union operative calls for sweeping measures and more spending because, after all, it’s “for the children”.
Are their demands for perpetual pay raises for the children? How about the medical benefits, which are the envy of countless other professions? How about the crushing pension obligations? Are those for the kids?
The president of the American Federation of Teachers took up one third of the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion page Thursday morning pleading for a $23 billion federal bailout of the nation’s schools. Care to venture a guess as to her rationale?
When teachers begin losing jobs in cash- and revenue-strapped districts (joining some who’ve already been terminated), writes Randi Weingarten, the resulting trend “could rob an entire generation of students of the well-rounded education they need and deserve.”
And so goes the eternal argument from the entitlement addicted education community, voiced by its unions: If we fail to continue to throw money at public school systems, gushers of cash born of rising property taxes and other taxes, then we forsake our children and imperil our nation’s future.
“The federal government didn’t let Wall Street fail,” Weingarten observes. “Why would we do less for our public schools, which undeniably are too important to fail?”
She’s right about the schools, so let’s cut to the chase about who deserves what in this scenario. If there must be a bail out, the place to drill for crude is not the federal government, which is obviously tapped dry. Let the bail out be orchestrated by the caring teachers and school administrators, the ones who are deeply troubled that our kids won’t get what they deserve. Weingarten’s formula conveniently overlooks the fact that unions are sitting on mountains of pension funds and discretionary lobbying cash, accumulated across years of two-handed grabbing of taxpayer dollars.
As noted by Townhall magazine in an April piece entitled, “Everything But Education”, the National Education Association, the nation’s oldest and largest teachers’ union, “ranked as the nation’s single-biggest contributor to state-level and federal campaigns, political parties and ballot measures between 2007 and 2008, spending more than $56 million.” This is more than the combined contributions of a behemoth holy troika of labor unions — the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters and SEIU (Service Employees International Union).
Considering that there are teachers’ unions in which individuals have embezzled more money than some school boards would need to return to educational solvency and save jobs, it is the height of disingenuous logic to decry the financial crisis in public education without offering to stop it with these treasure troves of union funds.
Meanwhile, don’t think for a minute that school districts have truly considered “cutting into the bone”, as Weingarten contends in the Journal. A March 2010 study published by the Cato Institute found that public schools are spending 93 percent more than the estimated median private school in the five largest metro areas and Washington, D.C.
Writes Cato’s Adam Schaeffer, “Since runaway education spending is a major cause of current and future budget problems, it is the best place to look in state and local budgets for serious savings.”
Teachers discover early in their careers that it’s almost always a mistake to underestimate the children, both in terms of learning potential and b.s. detection.
The time has come for teachers’ unions, administrators, educators and school boards to cease underestimating the taxpaying public and its enormous capacity to see through the myths unions attempt to perpetuate as they dig deeper for our last dollars.
Reduce public school spending and de-fang the bloated unions. Then we can have an honest discussion about who really cares about the children.