There she goes again. Karen Lewis just can’t help herself.
The Chicago Teachers Union president appeared before the New York Collective of Radical Educators March 16 to give the keynote address at the group’s annual conference.
In an encore to her controversial address to teachers on the west coast in 2011 – in which she mocked U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s speech impediment, talked about smoking pot and sitting a prison toilet – Lewis derided her arch enemy, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Lewis impersonated Emanuel, claimed he was as “mad as a wet hen” at her for taking the city to the Labor Relations Board over more teacher pay for a longer school day, and said she knew he was “stamping his little feet” over it.
Reminiscing over a foul-mouthed exchange with Emanuel, Lewis said she told the mayor, “I don’t work for you!”
That exchange, perhaps, best personifies the dysfunction within the public education system. Instead of working together, top officials are at each other’s throats. How is that in the best interest of children?