Responding to Checker's and my argument that the NEA and AFT were not essential to Obama's sweeping victory, Fred Klonksy, president of the Park Ridge Education Association, writes,
The four million members of the teacher unions were not essential to Obama's victory? These two don't have a clue.Tell the thousands of union teachers from solid blue states like New York and Illinois that spent their weekends in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin and turned those swing states blue how they weren't essential.
Wonkers like Finn and Petrilli still don't get it that key to this election was what the pols call the ground game. We in Chicago know it wins elections: canvassing, identifying plusses and minuses, getting out the plusses on election day. A grass-roots movement won this election. And the NEA/AFT were in it, from the one in ten delegates at the Democratic convention, to the millions of dollars that were raised and contributed to union PACs, to the teachers in Park Ridge, a suburb of Chicago that has voted Republican for a 100 years, but that went for Obama on Tuesday.
Go ask the Obama people if he's "so inclined" to ignore union teachers.
Wow, if that's not a depressing way to start a Monday, I'm not sure what is. Thanks for the reminder, Mr. Klonksy, of the teachers unions' corrosive power in American education.
But Team Obama: we're asking. Are you going to side with Mr. Klonksy and his friends? Or are you going to deliver change we can believe in--including in k-12 education reform?
