The return of Ben Velderman.
Last week it was the crazy group of standardized test critics who jubilantly predicted the death of teacher unions. These are not your typical testing critics, since millions of the wisest critics are members of the teacher unions.
This week it is my old stalker from the right-wing, Ben Velderman of the Education Action Group.
You remember Ben. He’s the one who filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year for all my work emails and for my personnel file.
Predicting and rooting for the death of teacher unions is nothing new. What’s interesting is the broad political spectrum it now includes.
Ben bases his prediction on the decline in union membership.
He gives Wisconsin as an example.
This is like the old joke about the guy who murders his parents and then asks for mercy from the judge because he is an orphan.
EAG’s favorite Governor, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, destroys union collective bargaining. He slashes wages and benefits. Teachers leave the profession in droves. And Velderman claims this is a result of teacher rejection of unions.
It makes no more sense than what we heard last week from the opters.
Fred Klonsky 
Walker got his inspiration from what Obama did to teachers with RTTT. Before RTTT, teachers could collectively bargain to keep test scores out of administrators’ hands and out of evaluations. RTTT changed all that, and weakened the collective bargaining rights of teachers’ unions all over the nation. Walker just took it the next step.
And of course this is why it is so ironic that the NEA is losing its membership. Last summer, the NEA gave a no-strings-attached early endorsement to the nation’s most powerful proponent of replacing public schools with nonunion charters, the same guy who gave Walker the impetus to attack public unions so viciously. The natural consequence of Obama’s education policy is the decimation of unionized public school teachers. If the leadership of the NEA wants to know how this all happened, they need to do some serious self-evaluation.