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USANews版 - DID OBAMA FORGET ABOUT THE TEACHERS UNION?
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发帖数: 29846
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By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on DickMorris.com
on January 31, 2011
When Obama started to speak about the need to improve education, upgrade our
schools and attract quality teachers, an elephant appeared in the living
rooms of most Americans who were watching. Obama never mentioned the beast,
but most of the country saw clearly the three letters on his back -- AFT.
American Federation of Teachers -- the union that, along with its
counterpart, the NEA, National Education Association, has destroyed public
education in America.
How can we take seriously any proposal to improve schools that does not deal
with the force that has dragged them down -- the teachers union?
Detroit is a great example of the damage they have wrought. Due to the costs
imposed by the union, the public school system has already had to close 59
of its 200 schools, and another 70 are slated for closure. The result will
be eighth-grade classes of 40 children and high school classes predicted to
have more than 60 students.
Why is Detroit in such bad shape? The same reason its car companies are
broke: the unions. Not only do they get high salaries and benefits, but
their union has a monopoly on health insurance coverage for teachers and
marks the coverage up a third higher than private insurance companies with
no better benefits -- and it's all paid by the taxpayer. Detroit will
actually now have to pay teachers more to compensate them for their bigger
class sizes.
In New York, it is almost impossible to fire an incompetent teacher. It took
three years of litigation and $300,000 in legal fees to fire a teacher who
sexually solicited a 16-year-old student.
Governors throughout the country are getting it, even if the president is
not. Rick Scott in Florida, John Kasich in Ohio, Mitch Daniels in Indiana,
Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania and Chris Christie of
New Jersey have all proposed major new initiatives to promote school choice
. (This week is National School Choice Week). They will promote private,
parochial, charter, and virtual schools and home schooling, and provide
vouchers and scholarships to permit the poor and middle class to afford them.
Over the next two years in these states, public schools will face real
competition for students for the first time. Just as our colleges maintain
standards of excellence in order to attract good students, so our lower
schools will have to do the same.
As states grapple with intractable budget problems, the attractiveness of
alternative schools that cost, on average, about one-third less than public
schools will be irresistible. The teachers unions will run afoul of Margaret
Thatcher's dictum that socialism cannot succeed because, sooner or later, "
you run out of other people's money."
Missing from this list of innovative states, conspicuously, is New York
state, where the state government is totally beholden to the teachers union.
No experimentation, no opening of the system seems in the offing, and the
Empire State appears to be content to continue its downward spiral. If they
don't turn things around, they are headed for the same place as Detroit.
The real question is: Can our cities and states free themselves from the
ropes with which the unions have bound them? The problem is that states
cannot abrogate contracts. It's in the Constitution. But a federal
bankruptcy court can. So to free ourselves of the ties that bind, we need
Congress to create a procedure for federal Chapter 9 voluntary bankruptcy
for states. When that initiative is coupled with the school-choice policies
of the new Republican governors, the teachers union will have lost its power
, and then we can have the kind of schools Obama professes to dream about.
But not before.
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