Now, further evidence of a labor union moving starkly to the left of our President has emerged from the very “red” state of Idaho. While the Governor and Superintendent of Public Instruction have embarked on a effort to completely revolutionize public education in their state, the Idaho Education Association (the statewide chapter of the NEA) seems to have been caught flat-footed, and some of its members seem to have succumbed to brazenly Marxist responses.
On January 10th, Idaho Governor Butch Otter delivered the annual “State of the State” address, and on education funding he promised “a fundamental shift in emphasis from the adults who oversee the process and administration to the best interests of our students.” Two days later on January 12th, Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna addressed the state legislature announcing his “Students Come First” initiatives, a plan that would established what he refers to as “customer driven education.”
It’s an outrage that in the milieu of American public education, students often do not “come first” and that decisions are frequently made that serve the interests of employees and not the “customers.” Similarly, “success” is frequently defined by public education bureaucrats in terms of how much taxpayer money is spent (“per pupil spending” is the buzzword of choice), rather than by what is produced with those expenditures.
So in a state that is bound by its own constitution to balance its own budget, Superintendent Luna has vowed that public schools in Idaho will teach “more students at a higher level with limited resources.” To achieve this he proposes that school activity should “not be limited by walls, bell schedules, school calendars and geography,” but rather that students should be issued laptop computers with access to online, on-demand instructional content (Luna has already connected high school students this way with Idaho’s state colleges and universities). He also wants to incentivize more productivity from teachers by offering bonus pay opportunities and wants “full transparency” for how taxpayer money is spent (Luna has uncovered evidence of local school districts paying fulltime salaries to “teachers” who do nothing but organize union activity).
Responses from unionized teachers have been swift and visceral. Most noticeable is the opposition to the “bonus pay” proposals, with cries that it would simply be “unfair” if some received a bonus while others did not (note to teachers: Karl Marx would be thrilled with this “everybody deserves the same amount of everything” economic reasoning – but it’s not a “bonus” if everybody gets one). And while the private sector thrives in a world of online conferencing and “webinars” every day, some of Idaho’s public school teachers insist that such technology has no place in their profession.
It’s sad to see college-educated adult professionals clinging to such simplistic and selfish thinking, and it’s infuriating that children are held hostage to it. But for the moment it’s coming from “big labor” – and not so much from “big government.”