Addressing Charlie’s question.
Early in this year’s Illinois legislative session the IEA had a pretty clear agenda.
When asked, IEA President Ken Swanson promised that any legislator that failed to vote the right way on the IEA platform would be held accountable.
Was this ever a promise Ken could keep?
By the final hours of the session we did pretty well on pensions and pretty badly on funding.
Now the legislature must go into special session. Any new budget will require Republican votes to pass. Word is that any bill for a tax increase will need to include what they call pension reform.
Two-tier is alive and well in Springfield.
Here’s my friend Charlie McBarron on the IEA website the other day:
It’s possible there will be a single vote on a legislative package that includes both the tax increase the state needs and the “pension reforms” IEA worked so hard to defeat. This is a standard tactic with tax hike bills that ensures there is some political cover provided along with a vote for a tax increase.
Legislative supporters of IEA goals would likely find such a package attractive. He/she might say to you, “You have been asking me to raise taxes to help schools for decades. The state will go bankrupt unless we act now. Here is legislation that fixes our finances, will help education and protect your pensions without hurting any of your current members.
“Do you really want me to vote ‘no’?”
How would you respond?
If this is a standard tactic, then we can’t be surprised by it. Why make promises we can’t keep? This is the kind of stuff that creates the impression of political impotence and ineptness.
We rarely hold legislators accountable. If the incumbent has voted with the IEA on our score-card issues then they are assured of endorsement. Under this failed “education party” approach to endorsements, a whole bunch of conservative right-wingers, unreliable friends of the IEA, have received our IPACE money which helps them win re-election.
I’ve written frequently on Congressman Mark Kirk’s IEA endorsement as an example of this failed approach.
As in the case of Kirk, few of their views reflect the views of our organization or the majority of our members.
Now some may argue that we are an education organization and other issues are only a diversion and will cause disunity within our ranks.
Some may have made that argument when the NEA was one of the first unions in the country to stand with Dr. Martin Luther King during the Civil Right Movement. Who today would say that our stand in support of civil rights was wrong because it wasn’t an education issue?
Not all non-education issues are non-education issues.
Should anyone be surprised that these politicians who are reactionary on so much else become unreliable allies when public education is what is at stake?
More on IEA’s electoral approach in another post.
