The entire education system is financially unsustainable and has been for some time. The price of education is so expensive as to make college a poor choice for many who attend, and a downright bad choice for those who go heavily in debt for degrees in little demand. The cost of education keeps rising along with:...
When it comes to obscenity, cheating kids out of a good education is far worse than a salacious dance act. While it is a sad spectacle to watch a gawky 20 year-old stick out her tongue and sex it up in front of millions on national television, the 62 year-old U.S. Attorney General’s act is...
Union bosses do — at the expense of good teachers, children, their parents and taxpayers. In a tribute to Labor Day, the California Teachers Association has put up a slobbering web page as a paean to the labor movement. Its unintentionally humorous title is “Organized Labor – Proud and Free.” Free? Actually, it is very...
Teachers unions’ goals are in direct conflict with those of school boards. Two powerful entities in public education have very different agendas. The teachers unions’ goal is to derive every benefit possible and to protect every last one of its dues paying members no matter how incompetent they are. School boards are governing bodies that...
Teachers union treasurer perpetuates myths about worker freedom. The term “right-to-work” (RTW) very simply means that workers don’t have to pay dues to a union as a condition of employment. In the U.S., there are 24 such states and 26 where paying dues to a union is required in many workplaces. The unions, with all...
Last week, parents in the Southern California desert city of Adelanto celebrated the opening of the first school transformed under the state’s 2010 parent-empowerment law, also known as the parent trigger. After two San Bernardino County Superior Court judges upheld their petition to take control of foundering Desert Trails Elementary School, parents selected a nonprofit charter...
An ill wind blows hot air in the Windy City. Like Detroit, Chicago is a city in dire fiscal straits – it is depopulating and its debt is in the stratosphere. The school system alone, hardly a crown jewel, is dealing with a $1 billion deficit. For a variety of reasons, the city’s student population...
With its 10 campuses, nearly 200,000 staff, and $20 billion annual budget, the University of California system is emblematic of the state government that pays a portion of its bills – enormous, unruly, overly expensive, steeped in politics, dominated by unions and other special-interest groups, and plagued with controversy. California voters in 2010 turned the...
Teachers union makes news with meaningless words and a misleading poll. Norm MacDonald is famous for opening the comedic news segment on Saturday Night Live by introducing himself and telling the audience that it’s time for the “fake news.” I thought of this when, at the recent American Federation of Teachers convention, President Randi Weingarten...
Joining a racially charged situation, largely inflamed by the media, the nation’s teachers unions hypocritically play the civil rights card. To acknowledge the obvious, the February 26, 2012 events in Sanford, FL were tragic. Trayvon Martin is dead and George Zimmerman will be haunted – and very possibly hunted – for the rest of his...
Teachers unions continue to use empty rhetoric to bash promising school privatization efforts. It is a given – and understandable – that teachers unions deplore vouchers or opportunity scholarships, arrangements whereby public monies are used to fund a private school education; it hurts their bottom line. With very few exceptions, private schools are not unionized,...
If the California Teachers Association and its parent, the National Education Association, represent Goliath, then ten teachers and a small union alternative called the Christian Educators Association International are fitting stand-ins for David. They’re taking on the CTA with a lawsuit aimed squarely at California’s “agency-shop” law, which they claim violates public school teachers’ First Amendment rights...
As charter schools have become more popular than ever, teachers unions dither about how to deal with them. Though there are now over 6,000 charter schools in the U.S., including 1,000 in California, it’s not nearly enough to satisfy demand, as parents have awakened to the fact that many traditional public schools aren’t doing the...
But in educational achievement, we are not even close to the top. The National Education Association just came out with a “research” report which should be taken about as seriously as the Tobacco Institute study that denied the link between smoking and lung cancer. The “Rankings of the States 2012 and Estimates of School Statistics...