We have come to appreciate the Occupiers for their fundamental misunderstanding of economics.  We’ve also come to look forward to the latest arrest statistics or video of delusional protesters weeping for their Lost Tent City.

I shudder to think what America would look like if they truly had any decision-making power.

Consider the latest zany idea from one “MrMiller” of Sandy, Utah:

“Here is my proposal for opening up cheaper education to people in our country. It is my opinion that we don’t need to pay professors quite so much money if we go about providing for them in a different way. What if we were to IMMEDIATELY find ways to provide for teachers to live life for free and paid their housing, (or collectively built them new houses, free of charge), gave them free food and also healthcare? If we collectively found a way to eliminate THEIR overhead, then we wouldn’t all have to pay so much for them and this would thus drive down costs for all? I have been thinking about this for a LONG time and have decided that that would be the single greatest step towards reducing the costs of education period if we all worked together to do it. It’s not even a hard thing to imagine. Anyone disagree?”

Um…me?

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Unsurprisingly, one of the few interest groups advocating for the “American Jobs Act” is the American Federation of Teachers. Despite claims that “the money is not for us as teachers,” everyone knows that’s a farce. Nobody suggests teachers shouldn’t be paid, but they shouldn’t patronize taxpayers by suggesting that increased spending on government schools isn’t for the teachers.

The unions and Obama administration have been running the full-court press to gin up enough pressure on Congress to act on the bill. Despite the speeches, advertising campaigns and photo ops, they can’t even get enough Democrats in the Senate to kick it out of that chamber.

Joe Biden has been carrying the water for the administration. In a recent conference call with union leaders, he claimed students in a Baltimore school are “dodging falling ceiling tiles” during their school day.

More recently, AFT President Rhonda “Randi” Weingarten visited a Yonkers school and decried the conditions those students are in. A photo published by the union shows students sitting in a basement with paint peeling off the walls and a large air conditioning system looms directly over head.

“We can hear the rats when they run” through the ventilation system, the union quoted a student as saying.

Across the country, unionists infer that the money for public education has simply vanished. It’s absurd. The reality is America is continuing to spend more per student on education than at any other time in history. So where is it all going? Are the rats carrying bags of money away?

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Ridiculously false choices and rhetoric ruled the evening when the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers hosted a closed-media conference call with Vice President Joe Biden to inform their members about the latest government school and teachers’ union bailout.

In a recording obtained exclusively by PublicSchoolSpending.com, Biden explained the administration is seeking to spend $30 billion to create a “Teacher Layoff Prevention Fund.”  He also said that many schools today are “deciding whether or not to heat the school or keep a teacher.”

Like school stimuli-past, Biden said schools would not be able to bank the money, but would be required to spend it.  “It’s to be able to keep you at work and even rehire teachers,” he told the unions.  So the Obama administration – yet again – is setting up a situation where the problem will be the same next year and the administration will have to propose another bailout or the school sky will fall in and even more kids will graduate unable to read.

Obama’s proposal includes $10 billion for the 100 “largest, high need public school districts” to use for renovations.  So just prior to the election, the administration is proposing to spend $100 million in communities that traditionally vote for Democrats.  Coincidence?

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American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten recently led a delegation of union representatives to Cairo, Egypt to meet with “leaders of Egyptian unions that were instrumental in the recent political and governmental changes there,” according to a news release issued by the union.

Whoa.  Are public sector unions planning a similar “regime change” here in America?

If not, why would Weingarten be cavorting in the Middle East at a time when American public schools are seeing massive dropout rates, budget reductions and reforms that strike at the base of union power?

Details are scant regarding Weingarten’s trip or agenda.  The union didn’t identify her traveling companions, the Egyptian unions they met with, or what action plan may have been devised.

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For the last several months, pension managers, school districts and public officials have been howling about the alarming state of employee pension funds.  They tell us pension systems are dangerously underfunded and taxpayers are on the hook for potentially billions of dollars to make them whole.

U.S. Sen. Bob Casey was even floating a bill that would make the federal government the backstop for pension funds – essentially committing to a bailout if the funds ran dry.

But the brain trust at the AFL-CIO and American Federation of Teachers have come up with a new idea: let’s use the billions of pension dollars set aside for union retirees to fund real estate development.

In other words, they want to use massive sums of money sitting in a (albeit evil) bank somewhere to put union members back to work on construction projects. This from people who said former President George W. Bush was crazy for proposing the investment of Social Security funds into the stock market.

Has Rich Trumka or Randi Weingarten looked at the real estate market lately?  It’s kind of not good.

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Teach for America has been a breath of fresh air in some of America’s worst schools.  The program, founded 20 years ago, recruits the best and brightest college graduates to commit to being teachers for at least two years in dozens of inner city schools around the country.

Studies have shown that students in classes with TFA teachers did demonstrably better on math tests than students in non-TFA classrooms.  Many TFA teachers continue beyond their two year commitment.

TFA teachers, by their very nature, are go-getters. Most were excellent university students who could have gone straight into high-paying careers, but chose to spend some of their early years working with American youth. They do what it takes to get the job done.  They’ll stay beyond the final bell.  They essentially toss the collective bargaining agreement out the window.  It’s that type of drive that gives heartburn to union organizers who want the school to operate according to the contract.

Washington Post columnist George Will called Teach For America “a template for transformation.”

Randi Weingarten recently praised TFA in Education Week, saying:

Teach for America has attracted thousands of highly educated, idealistic young people to undertake one of the toughest jobs out there in some of the most challenging environments.…

Educators are all in this together.  One group should not be pitted against another, when our focus must be on the devastating cuts that threaten great harm to a generation of children.

So consider this skunk at the garden party. Leo Casey, vice president the New York City United Federation of Teachers, seems to believe that TFA is somehow bad because too many of the teachers are white. The film clip of his comments comes from EAGtv:

The teaching force in New York City has become steadily whiter under [Mayor Michael] Bloomberg and [former schools Chancellor Joel] Klein and it is connected I think in significant measure to the use of groups like Teach for America which are significantly whiter than the teaching force.

Yes, at the socialist-organized Left Forum, Casey tossed the race card on the table, accusing Teach For America of “whitening” New York City public schools.

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The Fraternal Order of Police isn’t happy that their union brethren in California recently passed a resolution in support of cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.  Now sitting on death row for executing Philadelphia policeman Daniel J. Faulkner, Mumia has become a rallying point for the left.

On April 14, FOP National President Chuck Canterbury issued a scathing letter to American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.  In part, it read:

I cannot understand why the CFT, which like us represents rank-and-file employees, would support a murderer.  In fact, Abu-Jamal’s victim was a rank-and-file law enforcement officer and a member of F.O.P. Local Lodge #5 in Philadelphia.  I can only assume that the membership did so out of ignorance of the facts or that they were misled by this killer’s propaganda machine.  I want to set the record straight and would respectively, yet urgently, request that you and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) publicly reject this repugnant resolution.

Not likely.  According to PublicSchoolSpending.com, an AFL-CIO spokesperson said the union had no plans to respond to the FOP letter.  The AFT had no comment as of 12:30 pm ET after repeated attempts.

Maybe Canterbury is beginning to understand just how far-left and radical the AFT is.  How sad for the police officers.

The FOP letter ended ominously:

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I believe there is a difference between rank-and-file teachers and the leadership of radical teachers’ unions.  The trouble is, the rank-and-file sits idly by as the radicals embarrass them, time and time again.  Perhaps we’ve reached the point where the rank-and-file can rightfully be accused of being complicit of such behavior.

Why aren’t teachers angrily denouncing a recent resolution passed by the California Federation of Teachers in which the union “reaffirms support for death row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal?”

The American Federation of Teachers, led by Randi Weingarten, has to date issued no statement in opposition to this offensive resolution.

And what does the AFL-CIO, the parent to the AFT think?  More importantly, what do the police members of the AFL-CIO think?  After all, Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing one of their own.

Or don’t they care?

At what point will the teachers’ unions be more concerned with the pitiful state of public education than they are about the fate of a convicted cop killer, or other unrelated issues like gay rights, national health care or American foreign policy?

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Is it the slow-moving nature of bureaucracy or is it politics that has turned a simple Freedom of Information Law request into a 94-day wait?

On December 20, 2010, Education Action Group filed a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request with the New York City Department of Education. The request was for the personnel file of former New York City employee Rhonda (Randi) Weingarten, who is now the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers union.

After missing its first two deadlines, the DOE now says that information will not be available until late March.  It is our plan to post it for America to see at PublicSchoolSpending.com.

On December 27, 2010, one week after EAG’s initial request, we received an e-mail response from the Office of Legal Services of the New York City Department of Education saying that the FOIL request had been received.

“We anticipate providing you with a response by January 26, 2011,” the letter read.

When the first deadline came, EAG received another e-mail saying that “due to the volume and complexity of the requests we receive and process,” more time was needed to answer the FOIL request. “Accordingly, we anticipate a response by February 24, 2011,” the letter read.

Yesterday, EAG received yet another e-mail from the DOE that pushes the response date back another full month.

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After years of obstructing efforts to reform public education, the nation’s teacher unions are using this week’s national education conference in Denver to push for a spirit of “collaboration” among education reformers and teacher unions.

It’s too bad that the unions’ new-found interest in “working together” has not been reflected in very recent teacher union behavior.

In a recent radio interview, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said, “Let’s solve problems for kids rather than making them pawns in an economic austerity budget.”

In a recent press release, Weingarten said, “When collaboration trumps conflict, it helps create the conditions for teachers to teach and students to learn.”

Such happy talk makes for a good press release, but it does not match reality. Across the nation, teachers unions are attacking reformers and have not resisted the temptation of using children as political pawns.

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Former American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker made teachers’ unions what they are today.  He was hard-nosed defender of teachers’ rights, but he also came clean about public school performance.

In the making of “Kids Aren’t Cars,” I unearthed a 25-year old PBS interview with Shanker. His indictment of the public education system was stunning.

“You could do things that are absolutely wrong, you can have huge dropout rates, you can have kids who are leaving without knowing how to read, write, count or anything else and what do you do next year?  Do the same as you did this year and the following year and the following year…”

And when Shanker – again, 25 years ago – rattled off achievement statistics, the host challenged him:

Shanker: When it comes to the highest levels of reading, writing, mathematics or science – that just means being able to read editorials in the New York Times…or write an essay of a few pages…or do a mathematical equation, not calculus…the number of kids who are about to graduate who are able to function at that level, depending on whether you’re talking about reading, writing, math science – 3 percent, 4 percent…

Host: Oh, come on!

Shanker: No! 5 percent. That’s it.

Does anyone honestly believe our education system – which has had billions of dollars more each year dumped into – is better now than it was in 1986?

Anyone??

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American Federation of Teachers’ President Randi Weingarten has been doing her best to make sure Big Labor has a say in education reform.  She wants to drive the train.  The National Education Association, on the other hand, is taking the tact of putting dynamite under the tracks.

While Weingarten says all the right things and uses all the necessary poll-tested phrases, she really wants to maintain the status quo.  No tenure reform.  No need to judge teachers by any measure other than seniority.

But in an interview with Newsweek, she made this curious statement, in response to Bill Gates saying, “We need to measure what they do, and then have incentives for the other teachers to learn those things:”

“Football teams do this all the time,” Weingarten responded. “They look at the tape after every game. Sometimes they do it during the game. They’re constantly deconstructing what is working and what isn’t working. And they’re jettisoning what isn’t working and building up on what is working, and doing it in a team-like approach.”

That’s correct – they do. It’s too bad that public education does not operate more like the NFL.

Here’s an idea. Let’s have the NEA and AFT become the owners of a new NFL franchise. For a lack of a better name, we’ll call the new team the Thugs.

Players on the Thugs’ roster would receive tenure after two years, like they do in New York City Public Schools.

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Apparently oblivious to recent calls for civility, Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and teacher union boss Randi Weingarten (who the union paid more than $600,000 in 2010) gave speeches in front of a “No Justice – No Peace” banner at Al Sharpton’s prayer breakfast.

Weingarten even closed her speech in solidarity with Sharpton’s group “fight.”  Weingarten expressed her desire that the American Federation of Teachers union members become “foot soldiers” in the “fight.”

Again, a Big Labor official proved they are not in tuned with society but focused, to borrow a phrase from Weingarten, “like a laser” on making government bigger.

Weingarten said that “we are often presented with the false choice of being for the children or being for students.”  It is the teachers union itself which creates Weingarten’s false choice.

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Teacher union leaders have been known to bark back when their strongest job protection – tenure – is referred to as a job for life.

“Despite current misconceptions tenure is not ‘given’ by the DOE. The only legal requirement for tenure is actually time; three years for teachers. After a three year period, within license, of being on payroll and the DOE has done nothing to stop the clock, you are automatically granted tenure,” Kaufman writes. “In fact you can be theoretically rated unsatisfactory for each of the three years and still get tenure if the DOE doesn’t fire you or cause you to extend your probation.”

As “Waiting for ‘Superman’” so eloquently points out, the industrial assembly-line model of America’s public schools, created decades ago, isn’t working.  In fact, it’s setting us further and further behind our global competitors.

Today, it is essential that our children graduate high school and college prepared for the fierce competition they will face in the global marketplace.  Their economic survival will be determined by their ability to compete with countries like China, India, and other emerging economies.

This requires that our public schools be innovative and effective.  Instead, our schools are using a failed, one-size-fits-all approach to education that may actually end up hurting our children.

It’s interesting that our slide began in the 1970s.  Just ten years earlier, collective bargaining, the crowning glory of labor unions, took root in our public schools. Coincidence?

Collective bargaining agreements, which carry the weight of law, enshrine such policies as seniority (last hired, first fired), tenure (lifetime job protection in as little as two years) and due process (an extra-legal process outside the court system).  Oh, and automatic yearly raises– not for performance, but simply for logging another year in the system.  In other words, we give teachers raises simply for not dying over the summer.

This is a beautiful system – if you’re a public school employee.  But if you’re a student in the public school system, well, it’s like being drafted by the Detroit Lions.

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The irony would be humorous if it weren’t so sad: The United Federation of Teachers, the New York City branch of the American Federation of Teachers, which pushed ardently for ObamaCare has now requested – and received – a waiver from its mandates.

The UFT is a member of New York State United Teachers (NYSUT).  In September 2009, the NYSUT’s website published “Health care reform: facts vs. myths.” Here’s an excerpt:

• Myth: Health care reform will force you out of your current insurance plan or force you to change doctors.
• Fact: You can keep your existing insurance; reform will expand your medical options, not eliminate them.

ObamaCare was such a great idea at the time - the AFT gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Healthcare for America Now, the leading organization pushing for the government takeover of health care.

It was announced Thursday that the UFT has requested and received an Obamacare-waiver after it discovered their members would end up losing their health insurance plans.  Uh oh.

According to USA Today, “The waivers are effective for a year and were granted to insurance plans and companies (i.e. the union and its affiliated “UFT Welfare Fund”) that showed that employee premiums would rise or that workers would lose coverage without them.”

If the union thought ObamaCare would benefit the country, then why seek a waiver?  And can we now count the union as a partner in the effort to repeal it?

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Now that the final bell has rung on NBC’s week-long Education Nation conference, we can ask the extra credit question: When did school choice go mainstream?

The “summit,” held at NBC’s New York studios at Rockefeller Center, almost felt like a publicity junket for Waiting for Superman, a highly praised new documentary advocating for charter schools. A national TV audience watched as D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee chewed out teachers union honcho Randi Weingarten for spending $1 million in campaign funds to halt Rhee’s reform agenda. Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski took a shot at Weingarten for resisting merit pay for teachers. And what to make of former Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi working to promote National School Choice Week, slated for January 2011?

Will Democrats turn their newfound zeal for school choice into policies that actually banish unions from the classroom and empower parents and students? Reason.tv’s Michael Moynihan went to Education Nation to find out.

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It hasn’t been a good week for American Federation of Teachers’ president Randi Weingarten.

After being on defense the entire time during NBC’s “Education Nation” multi-day event, she was put on a list of “Most Hated People in America,” alongside Osama bin Laden.

Now I know what you may be thinking: what conservative teacher-hater could be so over the top?

Try *Huffington Post* writer Keli Goff, who wrote:

“American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten is about to join Osama bin Laden on the list of Most Despised People in America. And if even one tenth of [Davis] Guggenheim’s film [“Waiting for Superman”] is to be believed, then this distinction is well earned and well deserved.”

Wow!  Randi Weingarten, who has been described as willing to “protect a dead body” in the classroom, is taking heavy fire from the Left.  This is big.

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