United Teachers Los Angeles supports merit pay “on a cold day in hell”

The Detroit Federation of Teachers shut down city schools to stop 15 charter schools from being built for free

The California Teachers Association has compared school vouchers to child prostitution

The Washington Teachers Union has withheld kids’ college recommendations for parents who didn’t oppose school reform

In Illinois (outside of Chicago), two union-protected teachers out of 95,500 are terminated for incompetence annually

In Illinois (outside of Chicago), it costs $219,504.21 to fire a bad union-protected teacher

In New Jersey, five union-protected teachers out of more than 100,000 are terminated for incompetence annually

In New York State, seventeen union-protected teachers are terminated a year

In New York State, it costs $128,941 to fire a bad union-protected teacher

In New York City, only ten out of 55,000 tenured teachers were terminated in 2006-2007

In Los Angeles, only eleven out of 43,000 union-protected teachers are even considered for termination annually

The National Education Association received $50 million for shaky investment advice in 2004 alone

NEA members are suing over the union’s endorsement of “Valuebuilder,” a plan with over $1 billion of members’ money invested

New York State United Teachers received $3 million for shaky investment advice in 2005

Washington Teachers Union embezzlement tab: $5 million

United Teachers of Dade (Miami) embezzlement tab: $2.5 million

Massachusetts Teachers Association embezzlement tab: $800,000

Michigan teachers unions' embezzlement tab from one thief: $218,000 in bad checks

The NEA’s Philosophy

Rules For Radicals

According to former NEA Uniserv director John Lloyd: “To understand the NEA -- to understand the union -- read Saul Alinsky. If you read Rules for Radicals, you will understand the NEA more profoundly than reading anything else. Because the whole organization was modeled on that kind of behavior which was really begun when NEA used Saul Alinsky as a consultant to train their own staff.”

Rules For Radicals author and self-avowed Marxist Saul Alinsky led a series of training programs for NEA organizers in the early 1970s. Summarizing the lessons, an NEA consultant wrote a pamphlet entitled “Alinsky for Teacher Organizers,” which advocated that education union organizers not let teachers “fraternize with the enemy” because “distance helps you polarize the issue.”

Other advice from “Alinsky for Teacher Organizers”:

The “singleness of purpose” a union organizer must have is “the ability to build a power base.”
“What if teachers don’t want power? Organize the ones who do.”
“Don’t treat all teachers as equals.”
“Alinsky's strategic and tactical essence is built around conflict.”
“[Y]ou must be lucky enough to have your people insulted or assaulted (verbally) by the other side.”
“Generally, the Alinsky advice on tactics is guerrilla war advice. To win, know the enemy, divide the enemy. Know who all the players are, conduct the action on several levels and personalize the conflict.”
“When you are starting with little issues, you can’t afford too many losses. This means you must ‘fix’ the outcome of these fights."

The philosophical heritage running through Alinsky and the NEA isn’t one most people would want influencing public policy -- especially public education. In Rules For Radicals, Alinsky gives an acknowledgement to “the first radical, Lucifer.” In his work for the NEA, he cites the work of Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro as positive examples of leadership.

By 1967, the NEA was formally citing power creation as one of its top principles. That year, former NEA Executive Secretary Sam Lambert said:

NEA will become a political power second to no other special interest … NEA will organize this profession from top to bottom into logical operational units that can move swiftly and effectively and with power unmatched by any other organized group in the nation.

Continue Reading - Information for Teachers