Today’s guest blogger over at Mike Antonucci’s Intercepts, a present AFT member in West Virginia, is a must-read:

In WV we join unions by "choice," not by law. We do not have collective bargaining for school employees. So why join a union at all? Protection. As a teacher, it only takes three words to ruin your career: "They touched me." You don’t have to be guilty. You can be completely exonerated. But you are marked for life. Legal bills can go into six figures in a flash. A union will provide legal aid and insurance.

Without collective bargaining, we have to lobby the legislature and the governor to effect changes in our salary and working conditions. This gets us into the sordid world of politics.

I am a staunchly conservative person, both fiscally and socially. So I have had to sit and stew on many occasions when my union decided to "enter the realm." When I joined the AFT in 1988 the union stayed out of all non-school issues. Their attitude at the time was that members were intelligent enough to make their own decisions concerning personal beliefs and that there was enough room in the AFT for teachers of every political persuasion. The NEA was seen at the time as being the political body that was constantly meddling into matters that didn’t directly pertain to teaching.

But oh, how times have changed. Even at the state level.

His candor is incredible.  Go read. 

One of our colleagues, Matthew Ladner, has thrown down the gauntlet:

The first person in the nation who can send me two random assignment school-choice studies showing significant declines in either academic performance or parental satisfaction will win a steak dinner. I’ll even throw in drinks and dessert — the whole nine yards. You have one month to send the studies to Mladner@goldwaterinstitute.org. Feel free to forward this to your anti-school-choice friends and invite them to play. The more the merrier.

If opponents of school choice can offer no proof to back their assertions, they deserve neither my steak nor anyone’s confidence, leaving everyone to wonder: where’s the beef?

What do you have to lose? 

That’s the ominous opinion from the L.A. Daily News (hat tip: Charter Blog).  Upshot: an LAUSD school looking to go charter is running into a number of procedural obstacles from the district.  But the devil is in the details:

Instead of making Parkman a charter, LAUSD and UTLA (United Teachers of Los Angeles–ed.) brass propose making it a "waiver" school. Although short on specifics, the idea is to keep Parkman under the control of the LAUSD - and with a UTLA-represented staff - but extend it some of the autonomy enjoyed by charter schools.

Union and district officials make no secret that what they do at Parkman might provide the model for how to extinguish the charter movement and block Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s plans for taking over the LAUSD. And that ought to make anyone concerned about the future of public education in Los Angeles nervous.

If what the union and district are proposing is to undermine public enthusiasm for charters by coming up with something even better, well then, by all means, let’s see what they have to offer. That’s the sort of innovation charters are supposed to foster.

But given that both organizations have spent decades fighting reform, it seems they may have something more nefarious up their sleeves, namely, thwarting charters through a combination of bureaucratic obstruction and smoke-and-mirrors PR.

We’re shocked, shocked. 

You gotta hand it to Mike Antonucci–he sure knows how to pick his guest bloggers.  This anonymous writer has nothing nice to say about the NEAAFTAFLCIO merger. 

NEA leaders refuse to organize mass actions of teachers, parents, students, and others over issues that clearly tie them all together: class size, books and libraries, free supplies, a just and fair tax system, etc. Indeed, the necessity of the strike weapon even as a vital bargaining chip simply drifted out of NEA leaders’ minds, to the point that there are very few people in NEA, or anywhere in the labor movement, who actually know how to conduct a strike.

It is clear to me that since the rank and file members of NEA rejected the merger with AFT-AFL-CIO, the NEA bosses have worked hard behind closed doors to achieve what they could not win in the open. I feel very strongly that the democracy that once characterized NEA is vanishing fast.

So, unless a rank and file uprising moves to overturn this maneuver, I can easily see NEA slipping fast into the same irrelevance that characterizes the AFL-CIO, following the United Auto Workers, once the most powerful union in the U.S., now having lost a million members, and doing nothing at all as those members still employed kiss away their wages, health benefits and pensions, while the UAW bosses plan their retirements. Today, the only people the AFL-CIO bosses can beat up are their own members.

The AFL-CIO cannot offer solidarity in labor struggles. It never has. Now, with about 1/3 of its membership gone, it cannot offer numbers. It cannot offer political action aid. It cannot even stop its own members from voting for George Bush.

Clearly, education workers and others are going to have to find new forms of organizations, outside the NEA-AFT-AFL-CIO, that can unite those in the community, teachers, parents, and students, in a common struggle for justice.So, this is my small tear shed for what could have been with NEA, and with that pause, I plunge ahead to see what might be in a new organization, with one toe in, and nine toes out, of the fraudulently termed "organized labor movement."

Read the whole thing.   

Imagine, if you will, the following scenario.  You live in Pasadena, California.  NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which has been running the ongoing exploration of Mars, is right in your backyard.  Your high school junior has a chance to have regular visits from a real, live, currently employed NASA engineer for more instruction in physics and calculus. 

And your friendly neighborhood NEA union local moves to shut the program down. 

This sort of collaboration might sound non-controversial, but it’s not. Teachers’ union leaders are resisting a plan by President Bush to build an “adjunct teacher corps” of 30,000 experienced scientists and mathematicians, like those at Aberdeen, to assist in the nation’s schools. The union leaders say raising teacher pay and improving working conditions, not bring in outside experts, is the way to enhance math and science teaching. (emphasis added)

Those objections miss the larger point. The USA faces a challenge to its technology leadership that can’t be ignored. Although this country was built on innovation, it now risks passing that mantle to international competitors, according to several recent credible reports.

Business and government leaders say retaining a creative edge requires doubling the number of math and technology majors by the year 2015. Meeting that goal requires reaching students early with instruction that is both competent and inspirational.

As it is now, fewer than a third of U.S. fourth- and eighth-grade students score at the proficient level in math. And U.S. students score below the international average on tests of math and science knowledge.

Inadequate instruction is at least part of the reason for those scores. An estimated 38% of math teachers in grades 7-12 lack either a major or minor in math.

Just sit and absorb this situation a minute.  The government is trying to bring in the brightest minds we have to offer to teach in U.S. schools, people whose business is science, math and technology–and the unions are so bloody busy gritching for more money that they see such a move as a threat rather than an opportunity. 

Moral: the spirit of Albert Shanker is alive and well.