The WikiLeaks document dump exposes NEA’s manipulation of its purported democratic process. The WikiLeaks email release, unmasking the Hillary Clinton campaign, has become a daily ritual. A treasure trove of communiqués has exposed Hillary to be just about everything that the right (and even many on the left) has said she is. The emails from...
Dropout Nation recently reported on the American Federation of Teachers’ 2015-2016 financial disclosure to the U.S. Department of Labor. As you would expect, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union spent big on influencing Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her apparatchiks, as well as pouring heavily into what should be like-minded advocacy and nonprofit groups. But AFT’s...
Teachers unions in Chicago and Massachusetts are doing their darndest to stop the spread of charter schools. Amazingly, the Chicago teachers’ strike didn’t come off. Less than 10 minutes before a midnight strike deadline on October 10th, the district and union cobbled together a deal, pending approval by the rank-and-file. One of the more contentious issues was...
AFT continues to use teachers as ATM machines to fund their pet leftist causes. The latest American Federation of Teachers annual financial disclosure has been released (H/T RiShawn Biddle). This year’s LM-2 is filled with goodies that are sure to warm the cockles of leftist teacher union members, but apolitical educators, centrists and certainly those...
National Public Radio’s Sunday morning story last month was a failure of basic journalism. “In Silicon Valley, Where a Teacher Works for Uber to Stay Middle-Class” features Matthew Barry, a high school economics teacher in California’s Morgan Hill Unified School District (MHUSD). He says his $69,000 annual salary is so insufficient to his surroundings in the...
For years, teachers’ unions have tried to kill charter schools—but only on odd-numbered days. On even-numbered days, they tried to organize them. Things lately have become very odd, at least in California; the unions are in full-assault mode. United Teachers of Los Angeles president Alex Caputo-Pearl has long groused about how charter schools don’t play...
Los Angeles school teachers gathered in August in the posh, iconic – and for the group, weirdly ironic – Westin Bonaventure Hotel. They heard their union’s leaders extol their role as revolutionary defenders of the city’s poorest communities against the wealthy. But that’s not how the city’s poor have seen it. The poorer you are,...
Officials of the Orange Unified School District have spent more than $50,000 to support a $288 million bond measure on the November ballot. Expenses include $23,200 for opinion polling and $6,000 per month for campaign consultants, according to documents reviewed by the California Policy Center: School board members authorized the district to spend up to...
The Windy City’s teachers union is on the verge of yet another strike. In 2012, Troy Senik wrote “The Worst Union in America,” a title he bestowed on the California Teachers Association. As a former member and longtime critic of that union, I certainly had no quibble with his selection. But now, CTA is facing...
As the National Education Association embarks on a new PR campaign, some of its affiliates engage in lawsuits and strikes. In July, the National Education Association unearthed its “Strategic Plan and Budget” for 2016-2018. The introduction to the 76-page document includes the notion that the union needs to “win the race to capture the hearts...
As Hillary Clinton cozies up to the teachers unions, Donald Trump seeks to vastly expand school choice opportunities. In November, 2015, Hillary Clinton gave a speech in South Carolina in which she abandoned her prior support for charter schools. Using language straight from the teachers union fact-free playbook, she claimed that charters “don’t take the...
UTLA and CTA’s anti-charter school obsession has reached epidemic proportions. Just weeks after United Teachers of Los Angeles president Alex Caputo-Pearl threw his if-we-don’t get-our-way-we’re-going-to-create-a-state-crisis tantrum, the teachers union has hit the streets with a media campaign. Empowered by a massive dues increase, UTLA is spreading its venom via billboards, bus benches and the media....
In November, we will be asked to reject or approve “The California Children’s Education and Health Care Protection Act of 2016.” If approved by a majority of the voters, this ballot measure, Proposition 55, will extend to December 31, 2030 the “temporary” income tax surcharges on upper income Californians that were authorized in November of...
The state’s teachers’ unions had a good day at the hands of the California Supreme Court yesterday but then so did the state’s taxpayers. The state Supreme Court upheld an Appellate Court decision in the Vergara case, which concerns constitutional protections of students involving teacher tenure, retention and dismissal. Student plaintiffs claimed that they, along...