Say Anything Blog

It’d be a good thing if they did.  The strangle-hold the teachers’ unions have on the Democrat party, and education policy in general, isn’t good anything but the pocketbooks of the teachers themselves and their union reps.

At an August 24 pre-convention seminar in Denver, a group of high-ranking Democrats came out strongly for charter schools, which are independently managed public schools that families and teachers are free to choose. And they laid the wood to the teacher unions – notably the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers—for trying to sabotage the charter movement.

A liberal magazine, The American Prospect, described one of the Democratic leaders, Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, as having celebrity status at the DNC “as a young African American leader said to have the ear of [Democratic presidential nominee] Barack Obama.” In an August 25 article, The Prospect quoted Booker as telling the seminar that when he advocated choice 10 years ago, “I was literally brought into a broom closet by a union, and told I would never win office if I kept talking about charters.”

The time when all problems with education were met with “Let’s throw money at it” is, thankfully, coming to an end.  The problem with our schools isn’t teacher pay.  If it was, we’d be struggling to find teachers.  The problem with our schools in this country is that they’re a monopoly.  Americans are taxed hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of dollars each year to pay for our schools.  Yet when it comes time to choose which school our kids go to we’re usually limited to the schools that are in whatever district we happen to live.

That’s not right.  I have no problem with America’s citizens paying to subsidize K-12 education, but with that payment should come choice.  Parents need to be able to choose what school is best for their children and not be forced to send their kids to whatever school is closest.  Not only would choice empower parents to find better schools, it would also give teachers and administrators much-needed imperative to do a better job.

I suspect that, ultimately, the Democrats aren’t going to carry the “school choice” ball very far down the fields.  In politics money speaks louder than reason and logic, and the teacher unions have a lot of money.  But it’s nice to see the unions’ grip on the education issue weakening a bit.  Ultimately, the weaker that grip gets the better education will be in this country.