If only they were as determined to cut spending.  Alas, Congressional Democrats are hell-bent on taking care of their friends in the teachers unions.

The original $23 billion “Education Jobs Fund,” or “public schools bailout,” in the words of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, fizzled, despite earnest lobbying by both the AFT and the larger National Education Association.

That number was trimmed to $10 billion and inserted into the Afghanistan war spending bill in a cynical maneuver cooked up by Big Labor.

While that passed the House, word is emerging that the pork-laden war bill isn’t going anywhere in the Senate.

But Big Labor’s pals aren’t giving up.  They’re a tenacious bunch that will find one way or another to continue spending oodles more on a bloated system that’s underserving America’s children.

(more…)

The original $23 billion in public education stimulus spending has been whittled down to $10 billion and cynically stuffed in a bill to continue funding the war effort in Afghanistan.  While Democrats can hardly be accused of coming up with the idea, it’s a maneuver that we can ill afford right now.

If the Democrats had the courage to continue racking up debt to give handouts to their political supporters, they’d promote the bill on its own. But they don’t, so it’s stuck in a bill that has nothing to do with education and everything to do with a war effort President Obama once said “We need to win.”

Perhaps he should remind his fellow Democrats of that and not allow them to hold the war in Afghanistan  hostage by demanding pork barrel spending to satisfy campaign financiers.

Worse yet, the president and his administration are allowing members of their own party to strip funding away from one of Obama’s signature initiatives, Race to the Top – a $4 billion fund aimed at incentivizing reforms such as performance pay and charter schools.

So Democrats such as Rep. Dave Obey want to take funds away from reform and give them to maintaining a failing status quo.  Is that where the Democratic Party really stands on sensible and much-needed reform?  Apparently when the going gets tough, they revert back to instinct: whatever Big Labor wants, Big Labor gets.  Don Loos exposed a communication on BigGovernment.com showing the firefighters union president explaining it was Big Labor’s idea to attach public works spending to the war bill.

(more…)

The American public education system is going the way of the auto companies and just like the $17.4 billion American taxpayers forked over to bail out outrageous employee contracts and spineless spending decisions of management, labor unions are hoping their allies in Congress will throw them a lifeline.

The difference, of course, is that prior to the bailout, those private sector companies could actually go bankrupt – no one was “too big to fail.”  There was an invisible mechanism that prevented labor from pushing too far because while it’s greedy, even the UAW knew that there would be a limit to the pay and bennies it could extract from the auto manufacturers.  In that instance, the parasite knew when to stop sucking.

Public schools, largely a monopolistic system not held accountable by competition, don’t have that same invisible force keeping labor in check.  Therefore, if the outrageous demands of labor and current spending practices of school districts outpace the money coming into the coffers, they’ll go out and wring their hands, tell sob stories about Johnny having to sit on Georgie’s lap in class because of a lack of desks and demand more “revenue.”  From you, the taxpayer.

This should be a huge issue for the Tea Party movement.  This has been a problem for far too long and we’ve allowed the tax eaters, that is, teachers unions, to fleece the American public into thinking that more spending, which ultimately ends up in their members’ pockets, somehow equates to better outcomes.

(more…)