From the Chicago teachers’ strike to the debut of a controversial anti-teacher’s union film, education has been getting national attention ahead of an important election.

But the biggest news might be that although teachers unions have typically been critical supporters of the Democrat Party, a growing number of Democrats are willing to back conservative education reforms.

“You have your old guard teachers’ union members who have been longtime supporters of the Democrat Party, and then you have a new generation of education reformers coming out of a lot of big cities and coming up from the states that have real world on the ground experience,” said Michael McShane, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, in an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“There is definitely a struggle within the Democrat Party, and it’s not entirely clear at this moment who is going to win.”

The unions’ vast financial resources, as well as the ability to mobilize members for protest and strikes, have given them a loud voice in the Democrat Party for decades. Still, McShane said that may be changing.

“The teachers’ unions have money, lots of it, and this huge membership -- they are extremely powerful,” he said. “But these younger generations appear to be really good at organizing and messaging and getting their point across, so I think the momentum is swinging in their direction”...

One of the most prominent school choice advocates in the country is in fact another Democrat: Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of Washington, D.C. schools. Rhee has thrown her support behind programs that give parents more choice over their children’s schooling, such as charter school vouchers and teacher accountability reforms.

“I think that the vast majority of Democrats out there understand that this country is not going to be able to regain its position in the global marketplace until we fix our public education system,” said Rhee, in an interview with Public Radio International. “They have to be willing to challenge the teachers’ unions on the things that are not working.”

Rhee even endorsed a controversial new film, “Won’t Back Down,” which depicts one parent’s efforts to liberate her daughter’s school from the clutches of a frustrating and bureaucratic teachers’ union.

The film’s anti-union message earned it predictable criticism from public school teachers, but also strong condemnation from left-leaning movie critics who branded it “propaganda”...

Jonathan Bucher, education director for the Goldwater Institute in Arizona, said the critics’ comments only revealed their biases...Bucher rejects that the movie is propaganda. He said that it was largely fair to teachers’ unions, especially given their recent demands during strikes and protests.

“We had this play out in Chicago,” he said, noting that the actions of the teachers’ union in the film mirror real-life teacher protests, both against the film during its New York premiere, and during the recent strike in Chicago. “Suddenly when we put it up on screen and say here’s what’s going on, there are places in American with failing schools and a deeply imbedded set of interests that don’t want radical change … they only want to change things so that more of the same is the solution.”

Bucher agreed that some Democrats were leading the way on education reform, but he also warned that the teachers’ unions were still quite powerful -- and fighting school choice across the country.

READ FULL SOURCE ARTICLE

Editor's Note: And well they should. The teachers unions have come out publicly to state that they do not work for the good of the children, but rather to the benefit of the teachers and their contracts. Teachers unions routinely collude with local administrative operatives (who used to be teachers in an overwhelming number of cases) to stack the deck against teachers who do not run in lockstep with the Progressive ideology; making it impossible for good teachers with differing political beliefs to advance or, in many cases, keep their jobs. The system is absolutely broken and the teachers unions are the main -- and perhaps sole -- reason why.


The BasicsProject.org informational and educational pamphlet series is now available for Kindle and iPad. Click here to find out more...

The New Media Journal and BasicsProject.org are not funded by outside sources. We exist exclusively on tax deductible donations from our readers and contributors. Please make a tax deductible donation today.