In her recent address to the National Education Association Representative Assembly, NEA President Becky Pringle minced no words about her plans for school choice programs around the country.
“We will fight privatization, vouchers, and any other scheme to drain resources from our public schools.”
The irony of an NEA representative denouncing schemes to “drain resources from our public schools” should not be lost on anyone with a shred of integrity. The NEA and its affiliates leech money from public education with unparalleled gusto, and funnel it directly into leftist politics that have little to do with educating students.
Becky Pringle wants parents to know that union dues from teachers in local public schools will be directly used to attack school choice options.
The NEA doesn’t care if a school choice program is helping low-income students, or students with special needs. If school choice threatens their total control of the education system, the teacher unions will work to eradicate it.
Despite lengthy legislative battles in some states, hunger for meaningful options in education continues to grow among parents. As we have noted previously, even lawmakers who would have once shunned the idea of crossing the public education establishment have had to grudgingly come on board with the idea of school choice. The fear of alienating the growing parental rights activists simply grew to outweigh the fear of phone calls from local school boards or union representatives.
That same momentum is building against teacher unions. Once parents begin to see just how brazenly teacher unions have manipulated public education against the best interests of students (not to mention taxpayers), the tide is going to turn. The unions have been too shameless, too corrupt, and too destructive for parents to ignore them much longer.
State legislatures would do well to see the writing on the wall, and take steps to break the power of the unaccountable, unelected teacher unions in their backyard, before groups like the NEA redouble their efforts to undermine the school choice programs lawmakers worked so hard to provide.