Lloyd Billingsley is right — President Trump should target teacher unions:
Too many failures in the system.
Last year, Milwaukee public school teacher Daniel Buck wrote the article, “7 Reasons to say goodbye to teacher unions.” A year later, with an election coming up in November, that brave effort deserves a report card.
According to Buck, teacher unions are “advocacy groups as much as unions.” He finds teacher union cadres handing out worshipful pamphlets on Hillary Clinton, supporting Black Lives Matter and such. Much of union energy is spent “advocating for various, non-educational political initiatives,” and in the past 28 years, teachers unions have given 96 percent of their funding to Democrats. That is important because teacher unions “have more money in politics than just about everyone.”
Back in 2014, the National Education Association was “the second largest contributor to political campaigns of any individual, corporation or union.” The NEA and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) “gave $64 million in political contributions compared to only $11 million and $28 million by the Koch brothers and George Soros, respectively.” Even so, according to Buck, “their policy ideals won’t cut it.”
He finds that spending does not always correlate with improvement and “until structural reforms are put in place to apply market pressure to the schools, any funding increase will be little more than waste.” Buck cites examples of waste from his own experience and finds that teacher unions “block meaningful reform.”
They oppose school choice, merit-based pay, standardized tests and entrance exams for teachers. For their part, Republicans have advanced merit pay, charter schools and more stringent teacher evaluations, but Buck is concerned that, “after a blue wave, many fear that the growth it has enacted may be at an end.” In the meantime, teacher unions “breed a culture of entitlement.”
In Buck’s experience, teacher unions “denigrate any test that shows stagnant scores or an administrator who questions their efficacy.”
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