WHY NEA SELLS OUT ON THE NCLB
A Rouge Forum Broadside
July 4 2006
NEA will not challenge the NCLB. The NEA will support it, as will every other bogus liberal effort to reform it. NEA leaders will ask to get paid more to implement it, and perhaps implement it more gently (on teachers, not kids) but they will support the NCLB. Why?
Liberals and labor bosses pave the way for fascism by urging working people, like school workers, to ally with their national bosses, to choose one lesser evil after the next, until real evil is ratified. They deny the sharp class struggle, an international war of the rich on the poor, that is going on all over the world. In their current representative assembly, about 9,000 assembled NEA leaders voted NOT TO DISCUSS the war on Iraq by a vote of three or four to one. Not to discuss the war--- this from a group of educators who witness the military recruiters all over their schools, demanding fodder for the oil war.
The union leaders divide working people, teachers from students, parents, community people, and even from other school workers, like bus drivers or cafeteria workers, usually putting "support personnel" in separate groupings, sometimes refusing to admit them at all, when it is easy to see that control of the work place --power--depends on uniting people.
NEA and AFT leaders objectively seek to maintain the apartheid nature of a teaching force that is 90%-plus, white, by tacking on more and more costly requirements for teacher certification in education schools where racism, ignorance, opportunism and fear drive programs and policies.
Why?
Because many liberals and labor bosses profit from betraying the people they claim to represent, as does the leadership of NEA, the AFT, and the rest of the labor aristocracy in the US.
There is a direct line from the profits of imperialism (as the Iraq, Caspian, and Venezuelan oil wars demonstrate) and the relatively big money earned by NEA bosses, in a few cases more than $400,000 a year. That salary is a bribe for betrayal, and the NEA bosses know it. They betray rank and file school workers, and they betray working people all over the world, at the same time.
The NEA leadership now meeting in Orlando really has nothing to do, because they have no plan to oppose racist wars (that will eat up the children now in school, kids taught nationalism as if they, and Bill Gates, had something real in common). They have no plan to oppose racist high stakes testing. No plan to fight for free national health care. No plan to even defend the most rudimentary of educational projects. They have no plan because they are on the other side.
The only interesting news to come out of the NEA representative assembly is who is sleeping with who (which at NEA ra's is always interesting).
NEA (and AFT) leaders only plan is to lure school workers into supporting causes that will only harm those same school workers. They deserve to be treated, not as misguided fools, nor as potential allies, and certainly not as leaders---but enemies.
Here is what is really happening with the NEA's support for the NCLB (NEA backed it from the beginning, and the AFT not only backed it, Al Shanker, AFT's overlord, initiated it) http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2006607030374
Merit pay base on student test performance.
The more teachers administer these Big Tests, which any thinking person can easily see are forms of child abuse, the more teachers coil the noose for their own hangings. Classroom school workers who, wittingly or unwittingly, take the bribe from imperialism to betray the best interests of their students will not get the bribe for long.
As the Rouge Forum news said in 1997, wages will be linked to test results.
Those teachers in poor, superexploited, immigrant and black districts will get hit first, losing wages and benefits.
Then, with the school worker force materially divided, suburban teacher wages will be cut as well, following a pattern industrial workers lived through thirty years ago.
For a longer examination of the role of union leaders, and others, see this on the death of the UAW
There are better ways to organize and fight back
Happy 4th
and up the rebels.
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