Every profession has good and bad practitioners. The majority will be somewhere in the middle, but the best will be superb and the worst, very bad. This is true of doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc.
Whether you attended a public, private or parochial school, you undoubtedly can cite at least one teacher who made an unforgettable impression, sparking in you a love of learning and a desire to excel at something. You also may recall a few who were utterly incompetent or exceedingly unpleasant, but you probably won’t remember the names of all the rest: the ones who seemed to have taught you nothing, who seemed not to have any aptitude for teaching and were just there to collect a paycheck.
Members of this unmemorable majority often belong to teachers unions and ritually repeat the manifest untruth that their sole concern is for the welfare of the children who aren’t learning anything from them.
Knowing this fact helps explain the opposition of the West Virginia Education Association to education reform efforts, such as the bill passed last month by our state Legislature, which the union is now threatening to file suit over.
You’d think an “education association” would support education reform efforts, what with “education” being part of its name and all, but the WVEA is not really an education association. It’s a teachers union and it only cares about teachers, not students.
“The WVEA does not want your local and state elected officials to set policy for education,” says state Sen. Eric Tarr (R-Putnam). “The WVEA wants to set the policy. The lawsuit put forth by the WVEA is no surprise. In fact, it is consistent with their attempts to preserve their power that has been part and parcel to an antiquated education system surpassed by at least 82 percent of the rest of the country. They are much more concerned about their power than your child’s education.”
If the only thing you learned in school is that teachers unions care about teachers, not students, you learned a valuable lesson.
