ALEC calls teacher unions Nazis.
As state after state rewrites their education laws in line with the mandates from Race to the Top and the NCLB waiver process, the teaching profession is being redefined. Teachers will now pay the price – be declared successes or failures, depending on the rise or fall of their students’ test scores. Under NCLB it was schools that were declared failures. In states being granted waivers to NCLB, it is teachers who will be subjected to this ignominy. Of course we will still be required to label the bottom 5% of our schools as failures, but if the Department of Education has its way, soon every single teacher in the profession will be at risk for the label.
This revelation came to me as I read the Score Card on Education prepared by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), authored by Dr. Matthew Ladner and Dan Lips. This is a remarkable document. It provides their report on where each of the states stands on the education “reform” that has become the hallmark of corporate philanthropies, the Obama administration and governors across the nation.
It begins with a histrionic comparison between the struggle over our schools and the Battle of Britain in the Second World War. The authors write:
Britain’s enemies overreached, invading the Soviet Union and attacking the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Finally, British forces defeated the German army in Egypt, securing their hold over the strategically vital Suez Canal. Prime Minister Churchill recognized the turning point:
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Henceforth Hitler’s Nazis will meet equally well armed and perhaps better armed troops. Hence forth they will have to face in many theatres of war that superiority in the air which they have so often used without mercy against others, of which they boasted all round the world, and which they intended to use as an instrument for convincing all other peoples that all resistance to them was hopeless.
We mean to hold our own.
In 2011, America’s struggle for education reform may have also reached a turning point–an end of the beginning.
Cody adds:
In case you missed it, in this analogy, the teacher unions represent the Nazis, while the forces for corporate reform represent the doughty British and their allies.
I do not think teachers in many states quite understand how the profession is being transformed.And our unions are, in some cases, negotiating these agreements into place.
That is certainly the case here in Illinois, where the IEA leadership has been instrumental in bargaining away teacher rights and instituting unproven teacher evaluation schemes.
Fred Klonsky 
In looking over the “Scorecard on Education”(as if it were to really mean anything at all), I find it highly irregular that in all the sub categories under “Teacher Quality and Policies”, that virtually every area targeted to support quality teaching and teacher development gets a grade of D+ or worse, while the only category to receive a high mark “Exiting Ineffective Teachers” get a grade of B-. Clear evidence of the aim of the reformers coupled with the incompetence of a state union leadership that claims to be knowing what they are doing in fighting to maintaing quality teachers in our state.
Click to access Illinois.pdf
Reblogged this on teachingtothecheapseats and commented:
Hacking at the Education system from the bottom up is still hacking at the Education system.