Teachers Union President: School Choice ‘Taking Our Children from Us’

Louisiana teachers union president complains about parents choosing non-unionized schools for their children

La. Teachers’ Union President: School Choice ‘Taking Our Children From Us’ (National Review)

Amidst a controversy over the widespread education-reform project Governor Bobby Jindal has begun in Louisiana, the head of the state’s largest teachers’ union has essentially claimed that children belong to teachers’ unions as much as they do their parents. Criticizing the program in an interview on April 29 with Baton Rouge’s WBRZ, she said ”There isn’t anything fair about using something like that only against the public schools and then taking our children from us, and sending us where we don’t know what they’re getting.”

Jindal’s education-reform program for Louisiana, which I wrote about for NRO last year, is one of the nation’s most comprehensive efforts to offer parents the greatest choice possible in their children’s education. It will extend vouchers for private and religious schools to hundreds of thousands of Louisiana students who attend poor-quality schools, though the exact extent of the program is still being considered in court. Haynes’s group, the Lousiana Association of Educators, is well aware that that such a sweeping measure will be harmful to its interests, since it would lead to a significant number of students’ leaving the state’s public schools (a shift that already occurred, into charter schools, in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina) — and the radically left-wing notion that children belong to an entire community as much as they do their own parents (this is, of course, not the first time teachers’ unions paid more attention to far-left ideas and interests than the parents and children they are employed to serve).

Admittedly, Jinald’s reform does choice in terms of unionized public-school teachers’ choices, by eliminating the option to have automatic salary increases every year unrelated to merit, and the option to secure lifetime tenure after three years of teaching.

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