Joe Kline (hardly a card-carrying conservative) has an editorial in Time decrying the way in which teacher’s unions sabotaged a $200 million gift to Detroit’s inner city schools. The way in which the teacher’s unions are deliberately harming the interests of teachers in favor of lining their own pockets is nothing less than sickening. As Klein’s piece notes:
This was thinly veiled racial politics. “You’ve got a lot of poison in the air,” Mayor Kilpatrick told me. “People here are sensitive about white people bossing them around.” Kilpatrick insisted he wasn’t opposed to more charter schools; his own children go to one. And he was not pleased by the union’s role, even though he’s a former teacher. “The teachers’ union once was a progressive force, but that day has passed,” he says. “And it’s not coming back until the union realizes that we’re going to have to make dramatic changes to improve education here.”
The teacher’s unions cannot hide their greed and corruption forever, and the more people who see how they are willing to sacrfice the futures of millions of children to keep themselves in power the more people are going to realize that they are an obstacle to quality education.
The irony here is that the same free market hacks who now suggest they’re out to save children from teachers unions are quietly hiding behind the agenda Milton Friedman outlined in “Free to Choose” more than two decades ago, where he said that education of children of any age should be optional, not mandatory.
Many voucher supporters undoubtedly see “optional education” as an endgame to breaking the back of public education through vouchers. A scenario where education is optional and the relentless “anything goes for business” attitude continues to grow would enable homegrown sweatshops to fill their floors with the warm bodies of “underperforming” school-age children just like their Third World counterparts where education is also “optional” and free from those oppressive teachers unions.
Yes, and the liberal Democratic educational establishment wants to create a permanent black underclass in inner cities expressly for the purpose of having people that are entirely dependent on Democratic social programs and can be harvested for Democratic votes.
150 years ago they called that system “slavery”.
Oh, you say, that’s a completely gratituous partisan slur that is completely unsupported by evidence!
Which is exactly what your little moonbat conspiracy story amounts to…
Gratuitous partisan slurs from the right have become so commonplace that few phase me anymore, especially the hairbrained one you mentioned…which would have been much easier to make in 1995. I guess you hadn’t heard the safety net has been cut. You should be celebrating, but you still need to figure out a way to make the Democrats bogeyman for lending a helping hand, as opposed to kicking, those who are down….even if there’s a rigid and unrealistic time limit on that helping hand.
The difference between my “gratuitous partisan slur” and yours is that Milton Friedman, one of vouchers early cheerleaders, actively sold the premise of vouchers and optional education at all grade levels when drafting “preferred educational policy” in “Free to Choose”. Just goes to prove that nothing tastes better to most conservatives than their own foot.
Yes, and he proposed those policies as a way of making the educational system better and more responsive. Of course, when you’re willing to invent stories out of whole cloth the facts don’t matter, do they?
Invent stories? What have I invented? You just conceded yourself that Milton and Rose Friedman endorsed the said position about optional education that is commonplace throughout the Third World. I realize it’s hard to effectively paint yourself as a savior for inner-city ten-year-olds when you’re simultaneously approving of their decision to drop out of the fourth grade at their discretion, but I was hoping to at least see something more imaginative than telling me I’m inventing stories after you grudgingly admitted that everything I stated was a fact in the previous sentence.
That quote is completely bullshit. You’re simply inventing some paranoid conspiracy theory to justify your hysterical anti-market worldview.
In order to prove your point you’d have to prove that Mayor Kilpatrick is a devotee of Friedman (he’s a liberal Democrat) and even if you accept that idiotic conspiracy story of yours it doesn’t prove that instituting the charter school system has anything to do with Friedman’s ideology. For example, by your logic because Hitler had a massive public campaign to stop smoking in the Third Reich one would have to deduce that all supporters of limiting smoking are Nazis. That is simply idiotic on a prima facia basis and is a grossly false analogy.
In other words your entire argument is a complete non sequitor that has nothing to do with the shameful actions of the teacher’s union in this case.