Maybe it's because I just saw Interstellar last week, but after a weekend-long Twitter battle with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and her defenders, I can't help but think that some of them are living in an alternate universe. For those who haven't heard, teachers unions are outraged at this Time Magazine cover story last month by Haley Sweetland Edwards. It wasn't so much the story as the cover that many public union supporters just couldn't get past. The magazine even pulled the story out from behind its paywall so the distraught union tweeters could do more than judge the magazine by the cover, but to no avail. Weeks later, the howls of outrage continue unabated.
I’d mostly ignored the story until this point, but I couldn’t help but respond to Weingarten’s assertion over the weekend that “@TIME’s ‘rotten apples’ cover was a personal attack on educators.” First, it seemed contradictory that the cover could be a “personal” attack on educators generally, but the bigger question was why exactly this was so threatening and outrageous? Michelle Malkin’s Twitchy site did a solid job of covering the blow-by-blow from there, but now that the Twitter armies have moved on to other matters, the question remains: Why does the AFT seem so determined to keep this phony controversy alive?
Now, it’s important to recognize that this is mostly just Left Wing Politics 101. After all, in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, Rule #12 reads, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” It’s also a great way to build your organization’s email list for when fights of any real-life significance eventually emerge. This was the obvious goal behind AFT’s successful petition drive which, according to the union, has netted them more than 120,000 sets of full names, email addresses, and zip codes.
It’s also clearly a union priority to protect the very generous job security that most public school teachers enjoy. But even though this issue—and the recent court cases surrounding it—were the topic of the Time story in question and a ton of other press for years now, some are still in denial.
Many union defenders refuse to believe it’s really all that difficult to get rid of even the worst teachers. I’d imagine nearly any public school principal or school board member would be able to attest to this, but there are also frequent examples in the popular press of teachers who looked at pornography at work, engaged in sexual misconduct, and more only to be kept around, sent to another school, or fired only after lengthy and expensive court battles. Even when some acknowledged that these incidents occurred, they put the bulk of the blame on the districts, not the offenders or the policies that protected them.
Still, despite all the evidence to the contrary, tweeters argued that the cover “rehashes a lie about tenure,” that “lifetime employment is a buzzword [with] no relation to reality,” and that anyone saying different is engaging in “naive fear mongering.” One person even asserted that surely I “must get an extra $1000 every time [I] spout this nonsense.” Now we’re talking!
As bizarre as many of those claims are, they essentially amount to near-anonymous shouting in cyberspace. The real question is, why are Randi Weingarten and the AFT claiming to be so upset? According to the union president herself, there are a couple of different reasons.
First, she took offense on behalf of teachers everywhere by claiming that “no other profession is bashed so much,” to which others wondered about the reputations of lawyers, cops, and politicians. And, indeed, a recent Pew survey found teachers were viewed more positively than any other profession save members of the military.
Later she acknowledged that “if some1 can't teach,they shldnt be there.” She also admitted that no one actually thought Time was intentionally going after teachers. But that didn’t mean she was off her fixation on the cover, and union-friendly blogs continue to drum up outrage.
We finally got to the bottom of the mystery on Sunday, when Weingarten agreed with my Fordham colleague Mike Petrilli’s assertion that “every profession has bad apples,” but only before adding that “the @TIME cover was abt to hammer a beautiful apple.”
Here’s what’s getting hammered: teachers unions. The AFT and NEA poured a combined $60 million of their members’ dues into federal, state, and local elections and reaped a bitter harvest of defeat across the country, where union-backed candidates were defeated soundly by Republicans. It’s a lot easier to gin up phony outrage over magazine covers than reckon with the question of why voters are no longer buying what you’re selling.
