Tag Archives: AFT

News

Teacher union memo reveals agenda to undermine parents

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From the Washington Examiner.

Excerpt:

American Federation of Teachers officials have disavowed an internal report after it was posted on the union’s website following its annual conference, embedded on each of its 19 pages with the union’s logo and signed by a union official.

The report, titled “How Connecticut Defused the Parent Trigger,” was replaced on AFT’s website with a note saying “we have received complaints about these materials and have removed them because they do not represent AFT’s position.”

Education activist RiShawn Biddle copied the report before it was removed from the AFT website. The report describes in detail AFT’s strategy for subverting school reform legislation in Connecticut, a strategy that relied greatly on deceiving legislators and interested parents.

The Parent Trigger proposal originated in California and was adopted by education reformers in Connecticut last year. The proposal empowers a majority of parents with children attending a persistently failing school to force education officials to either close it, convert it to a charter school or replace its staff.

The union was blindsided when thousands of minority parents thronged in the Connecticut capitol to support the measure. Many of them expressed concern that their state’s public schools posted the biggest gap in the country on standardized test scores between minority and Caucasian students.

But where California teachers unions lobbied to block the bill in their state legislature and state education department, AFT’s Connecticut affiliate began an offensive that ultimately neutered the bill.

And, according to the now-disavowed report, they succeeded because the proposal’s “name is a misnomer,” since school governance councils “are advisory and do not have true governing authority.”

The bill approved by Connecticut legislators allows the councils of elected community members only to advise school officials rather than empowering them to force needed reforms.

[…]The report also makes clear AFT officials must be hoping Biddle’s discovery does not become more widely known because it destroys the union’s carefully erected image as reform-minded partners who love to “collaborate” with parents and communities.Though the union’s biggest concern is not serving children or parents, it cannot have the public aware of this, or that its strategy includes the “absence of charter school and parent groups from the table” during political shenanigans that simultaneously target lawmakers with lobbying pressure while appearing to “[discuss] shared concerns” with parent and reform groups.

The union says it learned from past “mistakes” to avoid “inflammatory rhetoric” and the appearance of “saying ‘no.'” So, instead, it preaches “collaboration” and “allowing teachers to have a voice,” while working behind the scenes to make sure no one but the union does.

Read the whole thing, and consider homeschooling.

Must-see videos on education policy

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Videos

Chris Christie explains the war between teacher unions and parents

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Awesome video from Hot Air. (H/T Cubachi)

Excerpt:

Governor Chris Christie gives remarks regarding teachers and the teachers Union, the NJEA during a Town Hall Meeting in Robbinsville, NJ.

Christie explained that his fight is not against teachers. It is against the NJEA. Christie cited this stat: a teacher who is in the union, pays $730 a year to join. If a teacher doesn’t want to join the union, they pay 85% of the $730 per year, to not join.

That money raises $130 million a year to pay for lobbyists, to stare down the legislature. They also spend the money, as well as tax payer money from NJ residents from property taxes and other taxes to buy ads attacking the governor.

Here’s the clip:

I found another good 4-minute clip from a different education policy speech at the Heritage Foundation, too.

The full speech from the American Federation for Children Policy Summit is in 4 clips on YouTube:

And you can learn more about how school choice helps students to learn, and parents to get their money’s worth.

I love policy. The quickest way to a man’s heart is tax policy and education policy and foreign policy.

Podcasts

Wayne Grudem explains what the Bible says about parents and schools

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This is a must-listen, especially for any single Christian woman who would like to get married and have children. If you want to marry a Christian man, you should listen to this lecture and also the Dr. Morse lecture on marriage Every Day.

In fact, the only reason why single men play video games and don’t want to marry is because women don’t know how to talk about education policy. We try to talk to you about school choice and you can’t, so we play video games instead. Your fault. Not our fault. We also like talking about tax policy and foreign policy, but education policy first. If a woman doesn’t know what a voucher is, then she might as well be a giant lobster. And men don’t like to talk to lobstrosities.

(I am totally kidding in that last paragraph)

With that introduction, here is the MP3 file on education policy.

And there is a PDF outline for all that.

Note: public schools = government-run schools.

Topics:

  • Does God care whether we people marry and have children?
  • Does God care whether Christian parents raise their children to know him?
  • Should government promote bearing children?
  • What are some effects of declining birth rates in other countries?
  • What are the economic effects of declining birth rates?
  • Who has the right to decide how children are trained: government or parents?
  • What does the Bible say about parents having to raise children to know him?
  • Does the government have the responsibility for training children?
  • What do educational bureaucrats think of parents training children?
  • What do school boards think of parents training children?
  • Should school boards be elected by local, state or federal government?
  • Should Christians be opposed to government-run education? (public schools)
  • How should schools be viewed by parents? As a replacement or as a helper?
  • How are schools viewed by those on the left and in communist countries?
  • How can you measure how supporting a government is of parental rights?
  • How is parental authority viewed in left-wing EU countries like Germany?
  • How is parental authority respected in the United States?
  • Should parents have a choice of where their children go to school?
  • What is a voucher program? How is it related to parental autonomy?
  • How does competition (school choice) in education serve parental needs?
  • Why do public school teachers, unions and educrats oppose competitition?
  • How well do public schools do in educating children to achieve?
  • Does the government-run monopoly of public schools produce results?
  • Does paying more and more money to public schools make them perform?
  • How do teacher unions feel about having to compete in a voucher system?
  • Does the public school monopoly penalize the poorest students?
  • Does the public school monopoly penalize children of certain races?
  • Does the public school monopoly cause racial predujice?
  • What else should parents demand on education policy?
  • Is it good for parents when schools refuse to fire underperforming teachers?

This podcast is just amazing! This is what we need to be teaching in church. Church should be the place where you go to learn and reflect about how to tailor your life plan based on what the Bible says. And I think that this whole notion of free market – of choice and competition benefiting the consumer (parents) – applies to everything that government does, especially education and health care. Go Capitalism!

(Note: I am not a Calvinist! But Grudem is the best theologian!)

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