If CA becomes a right-to-work state, a seismic political shift may ensue. Last week Mike Antonucci reported that the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the National Education Association’s Badger State affiliate, is down to fewer than 50,000 members (40,000 currently employed) from a high of over 100,000 in 2009. This precipitous loss is a result of...

Union leftists are shocked! shocked! that the teacher union elite did not confer with them before anointing Hillary Clinton as Democratic presidential pick. The education and mainstream media were whooping it up last week after a cadre of teacher union members laid into the American Federation of Teachers for its endorsement of Hillary Clinton as...

Hope remains eternal — at least among those who want Congress to pass a reauthorized version of the No Child Left Behind Act being considered by the Senate this week. Even as the likelihood of passage remains as unlikely as it was back in March, when House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline’s...

The Supreme Court’s decision to hear the Friedrichs case has the unions in a tizzy. On June 30th, the Supreme Court decided to hear Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association et al, a case that could seriously change the way the public employee unions (PEUs) do business. If the plaintiffs are victorious, teachers, nurses, sanitation workers,...

The state known for flashy neon, quickie divorces and Wayne Newton shows is now ground zero for private school choice. On its website, the Nevada State Education Association informs us that vouchers (and other private school options) are unworthy because, among other things, they offer “no real ‘choice’ for the overwhelming majority of students.” This...

The teachers union is determined to purge the Koch brothers from our college campuses. The National Education Association’s mission to drive Charles and David Koch, the two wealthy philanthropist brothers from Kansas, into the sea is showing no signs of slowing down. According to its latest Labor Department filing, the nation’s biggest union gifted $150,000...

Using testing as a backdrop, NEA president promotes 1950s industrial-style education. The American Enterprise Institute’s education policy maven Rick Hess has been traveling around the country promoting his new book The Cage-Busting Teacher. So last week he left his Education Week blog in the hands of National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen García. Interesting choice,...

The competition-phobic teachers unions are still trying to decimate charter schools. As I wrote a couple of years ago, the teachers unions vacillate when it comes to charter schools. On odd days they try to organize them and on even ones they go all out to eviscerate them. But the organizing efforts haven’t gone too...

… and continue to block any and every meaningful reform the California state legislature has to offer. On May Day (how fitting!) the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers filed their appeal of the Vergara decision. In that 2014 ruling, Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu struck down California’s teacher tenure, layoff and...

Other than school choice, no issue riles the teachers unions more than class-size. A couple of weeks ago, Edunomics Lab, a university-based research center that focuses on “exploring and modeling complex education finance decisions,” released a report in which it claims to have figured out a way to pay some teachers more without taking money...