Unions demand apologies, but refuse to make any themselves. The cover of the November 3rd edition of Time Magazine reads “It’s nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher; some tech millionaires may have found a way to change that.” Accompanying the text is a photo of a judge’s gavel about to pound an apple. The...

The latest chapter in “kill or unionize” sees the unions in organize mode. As I’ve written before, the teachers unions have a constantly shifting relationship with charter schools. When Mercury is in retrograde, the unions want to limit their growth or legislate the publicly-funded schools of choice out of existence. At other times, organizing them...

These days, the teachers unions have landed on the wrong side of judges, teachers, the general public and just about everyone else whose lives they touch. Seems like the teachers unions are getting it from all sides these days. In a Wall Street Journal piece, the writers note that the percentage of elementary and secondary...

A new document shows that CTA is resigned to the fact that membership in its union will ultimately become voluntary. Courtesy of Mike Antonucci, we get to peek behind the curtain at an internal California Teachers Association document which has been “declassified.” “Not if, but when: Living in a world without Fair Share…” is a...

Teacher union political gifting continues to be almost exclusively leftward bound, but teachers don’t have to finance it. Courtesy of campaign-finance tracker Open Secrets, we have a reminder of how lopsided teacher union political spending is. Education Week’s Lauren Camera posted a report Friday which spells out some of the nasty details. In House of...

Teachers unions reside at the corner of Hubris St. and Hypocrisy Ave.  A few days ago, Politico’s Stephanie Simon wrote about a new teachers union get-out-the-vote strategy. Attempting to regain some of their political turf as the midterm elections approach, they’re fighting back by utilizing their most obvious asset: teachers. Backed by tens of millions...

The Vergara decision is three weeks old – and due to the teachers unions’ appeal, nothing has changed. Or has it? Because Judge Rolf Treu has placed a stay on his Vergara ruling pending the outcome of the teachers unions’ appeal, the tenure, seniority and dismissal statutes are still alive and well in California. However,...

By meekly surrendering paycheck deductions on a monthly basis, teachers are complicit in their unions’ policy making and politicking. In a great majority of cases across the country, when teachers get work in a public school, they join the teachers union. Or, more accurately, they join three of them. There’s the “local,” whose responsibility is...

CTA ends 2013 spewing meaningless bromides in an effort to convince us that the union is the victim and the Students Matter lawsuit is the work of a vast corporate conspiracy. On January 27th, the Students Matter (Vergara v. California) case starts in Los Angeles. John Fensterwald explains that the lawsuit … asserts that five...

Not going to happen. If change comes, it will be from the outside. Mike Stryer is a former teacher and co-founder of NewTLA, a union reform group that came into being in 2010. One of its goals was to get the powerful United Teachers of Los Angeles to adopt a sweeping education reform agenda. Now...