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Jewish World Review Sept. 27, 2010/ 19 Tishrei, 5771 The Unholiest of Unholy Alliances By Arnold Ahlert
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
For years and years, Americans have been told that Republicans are the party of special interest groups and Democrats are the party of the people. This is nonsense on stilts, but it is also something for another column. This column is about one particular special interest group whose allegiance to the Democrat party--and vice versa--is beyond dispute. It is a special interest group which, for all intents and purposes, has done more damage to our nation than any other--and continues to do so, even as Democrats continue to support it. The special interest group to which I am referring? Teachers unions.
Quite simply, teachers unions are a "cartel," one definition of which is a "combination of commercial or industrial enterprises designed to limit competition or fix prices." The "combination of commercial enterprises" are the various state and city unions themselves, virtually all of whom get their marching orders from two of the richest and most powerful lobbying groups in the country, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). They "limit competition" by creating school zones which force parents who live in particular geographical locations to send their children to the schools in those same locations, no matter how bad those schools are.
It is impossible to over-estimate the damage of such an arrangement, and yet that damage apparently eludes most Americans. Imagine if one were forced to shop for food in a supermarket overrun by roaches, with out-of-date, over-priced food on the shelves, run by a bunch of surly customer-be-damned employees--because that market was in your government-mandated "food zone." Imagine if the employees in that store, no matter how incompetent or rude, were virtually un-fireable because the process to remove them took more than two years. Imagine most of those employees being guaranteed a job for life regardless, of their performance.
Imagine that same supermarket blaming its customers for the lousy service and high prices, even as they tell those customers that raising those prices is the only solution, even as previous price hikes have done absolutely nothing to improve the quality of that store in more than fifty years.
Now imagine a political party thoroughly dedicated to maintaining that status quo of that rotten supermarket, come hell or high water.
Take a big city. Any big city in any state across the country where schools are doing a miserable job of educating kids, where the cost per pupil is far higher than the national average, where passing "lemon teachers" from one school to the other is standard operating procedure, where drop-out rates are as high if not higher than graduation rates, and where "passing grades" are little more than euphemisms for disguising substandard work.
Democrat strongholds, one and all.
Ask yourself why, after spending $865 billion on a stimulus package, our Democratically-controlled Congress rammed an additional $26 billion worth of deficit spending down the throats of American tax-payers. Let me give you a hint: maintaining the loyalty of the teachers' cartel doesn't come cheap. This is the same Congress which killed a successful voucher program in Washington, D.C. which served 3,300 low-income children in that same city. Where do those children go now.? Back into the D.C. public school system, one of the worst in the nation.
Screw the kids, we have unions to think about.
There is a new film out, "Waiting for Superman," which documents the travesty most public schools have become. Quite expectantly, the unions and some teachers are hammering it for it "inaccuracies." While they're at it, maybe they' like to hammer a report issued to Congress on September 23rd, which posits that America is on a "perilous path" with respect to our competitiveness in world markets. The report, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm," was originally written in 2005. Five years later, according to National Academy committee members who wrote it, that "storm" has been upgraded to "an approaching Category Five hurricane."
One of the chief culprits? A "dysfunctional educational system."
"China graduated more English-speaking engineers last year than we did," said Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va. "The United States' share of high-tech exports has fallen from 21 to 14 percent, while China's rose from 7 to 20 percent."
Read that first part again. China graduated more English-speaking engineers than the United States of America. From that report: "Though most of the world's top universities are located in the United States, the World Economic Forum ranks the U.S. 48th in math and science education. American test scores in these subjects have changed little over the last 40 years."
Forty years is two generations of dumb-downed American students--courtesy of the Democrat party.
An exaggeration? The aforementioned lobbying groups, the NEA and the AFT, spent $30 million and $26 million respectively to lobby Congress. 90% of the NEA's donations and 98% of the AFT's donations went to Democrats. And what have Democrats and these teachers' unions given America in return?
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan: ". . .our nation faces a dropout crisis. When 25 percent of our students--and almost 40 percent of our black and Hispanic students--fail to graduate high school on time, we know that too many of our schools are failing to offer their students a world-class education."
Ya think?
Unfortunately, little change is likely to occur unless two of the aforementioned groups, blacks and Hispanics, who continue to vote for a party which long ago abandoned their children, wake up and smell the coffee. Little is likely to change until Americans in general get fed up enough to bounce the status quo political hacks who continue to kowtow to unions more than willing to mortgage the future of America for their own self-interest.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: until the American public school system is completely de-unionized, nothing will get better. Absolutely nothing about labor organized to protect and promote its own interests above all else remotely accrues to the well-being of students or their parents.
On the other hand, under-educated Americans definitely accrue to the interests of a Democrat party whose primary measure of success is how many Americans they can get--and keep--dependent on government. Despite all their rhetoric to the contrary, this is a party which thrives on the "soft bigotry of low expectations." If one set out to create system purposefully designed to compromise the future of millions of younger Americans, it is hard to imagine it would be substantially different than the one which exists right now.
One last bit from the above-mentioned report: "Nearly one-third of Americans don't know how long it takes the Earth to revolve around the Sun, according to the National Science Board."
Waiting for Superman? As long as Democrats and unions maintain a steady supply of Kyptonite, expect more of the same.
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© 2010, Arnold Ahlert |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||||
