-By Larry Sand
Despite good intentions, efforts to reform teachers unions and make them partners in education reform will not work.
Last week, the typically sane and sage Andrew Rotherham wrote a provocative article for Time Magazine entitled “Quiet Riot: Insurgents Take On Teachers Unions.” The main thrust of the piece is this:
“But perhaps the biggest strategic pressure for reform is starting to come from teachers themselves, many of whom are trying to change their unions and, by extension, their profession. These renegade groups, composed generally of younger teachers, are trying to accomplish what a generation of education reformers, activists and think tanks have not: forcing the unions to genuinely mend their ways.”
He spotlights three organizations he claims are leading a movement to reform teachers unions and make them partners in an attempt to improve the quality of public education — NewTLA, a dissident faction in the United Teachers of Los Angeles, Educators for Excellence, a reform group in New York started by two young Teach For America graduates, and Teach Plus, an organization that has gained traction in several states, whose goal is to “engage early career teachers in rebuilding their profession to better meet the needs of students and the incoming generation of teachers.”
Reform Unionism: A Wolf by Any Other Name…”
Oh, the union thugs in Wisconsin will certainly try to act as if winning a mere two of the six recall elections of the Republican State Senators in the Cheese State was a big win… but it wasn’t. In fact, this recall nonsense shows that the union issues were a huge failure. After all, they even shied from using the union issues to push the recall efforts after they got going because they were looking like a losing issue.
News has emerged that a Michigan public school illegally used its automatic phone calling system to call the homes of every student to urge parents to join the recall effort against Republican Governor Rick Snyder last month. To imagine that they can illegally use public school facilities for a partisan, left-wing political effort, this is the arrogance of left-wingers in our mis-educational system writ large.
If you needed yet another example of why government employees should never be allowed to join unions, this is it. In Racine, Wisconsin the local fireman’s union got into an imbroglio over a July 4th parade float honoring the fallen first responders of the Sept. 11 attacks, a parade entry that the union supported previously. This time, though, union bosses decided not to support the 9/11 memorial float because one of the firemen on the float opted out of the fireman’s union this year.
Green Bay TV 
As the Daley years wound down, Chicago’s public schools teachers were handed an automatic 4 percent raise across the board that was supposed to take effect next year. However, that largess from the taxpayers has just been rescinded by a unanimous vote of the Chicago Public Schools board.
My friend Mike Chamberlain was a baaad boy last week at the Nevada State Education Association’s annual convention. It seems he was 
It is an amazing amount of money to be spent on a mere state supreme court race but this one was for all the marbles in Wisconsin as far as both sides were concerned, so I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised. 
It wasn’t long ago that Indiana Democrats fled the Hoosier state so that they could avoid doing their job in the state legislature. These Democrats self-righteously claimed that they were doing this “for the people” and insisted that they should be considered as heroes. One Indiana Democrat even claimed that 
I expect a lot of union protest and rallies in the coming month, and I fear that things will get ugly. The unions certainly are active, and protests this week took place from coast to coast, from Times Square to Olympia, WA. Here are some of the highlights of this week’s union protests around the nation:
I guess being the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) means not having to do your own homework. Just ask AFT President Randi Weingarten. 
There is nothing worse than some self-interested politician acting as if his partisan political agenda makes him serving his country just like our brave soldiers at war. But here we have it from Indiana’s 69th District Democrat Dave Cheatham, one of the Hoosier State Reps that ran off to Illinois to avoid doing his job at the state capitol.
Michigan’s union thugs have found a new way to hide their on-the-job union activism from the prying eyes of public transparency — or at least they think they have. Activist school teachers are using their state-sponsored email accounts to discuss their strike ideas, their union work slow down ideas and other illegal activities but are claiming that these emails are “personal” and therefore should not be open to Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests by the state’s budget hawks, government transparency advocates, and the news media.