Man Bites Dog: Obama Bashes Teachers

Well, perhaps not in so many words.  But certainly for all intents and purposes.  It happened a few months ago (his remarks may have somewhat preceded my notes of July 5) when he noted that for every non-technical job opening there were at least four applicants and went on to observe that the situation was reversed in the technical job market—that is to say, four job openings for every qualified applicant.  Without having seen a video of the speech, I would assume Obama expressed it with his usual aplomb portraying nary a hint of the shame the admission warranted.  The only clue listeners might have had that this was not a savory topic to dwell on was the speed with which he went on to other less painful matters.  Normally never at a loss for words, the President did not, in this case, elaborate on his startling observation.

As it turned out, an August 18th segment of the NBC Nightly News helped fill in the details Obama left unsaid.  It reported that Siemens, one of the world’s largest manufacturing companies, was having difficulty filling 3,400 jobs in one of its US based plants.  Eric Spiegel, its CEO, explained why:

“The environment we’re in today requires a lot more in depth math skills and computer skills.  Digital manufacturing many people call it.  Also IT skills.  Almost everything we make has some kind of software associated with it…These jobs are much more demanding than they were ten or  twenty years ago.  There are job opportunities but right now there’s a skill mismatch.  We need to fill that mismatch for training.  By the way, the US will have more jobs because there will be more companies wanting to invest in the United States if they see that skill base…in place.”

When one multiplies this isolated example by the number of companies throughout the US struggling to stay competitive in an ever-more technical environment, one begins to recognize the damage being done to the employment situation by the inability of  the US labor force to take on the work being offered.  But that’s just part of the picture.  To comprehend the full story, one has to add the jobs lost by the exodus of companies from the US motivated, in part, by their requirement for more skilled workers.  Nor can one neglect the intangible number of jobs withheld from our shores altogether by the reluctance of international companies to cope with our untrained—and, from a practical standpoint, largely untrainable—work force.  Granted it is impossible to express the sum total of these lost job opportunities in hard numbers, but its overall impact is both all too quantifiable and brutally clear: nine-plus per cent unemployment among those seeking work and sixteen-plus if discouraged workers are factored in.  All told, twenty-five million Americans either unemployed or forced to work part time.

THE COMPACT

How did this freefall in the American workers’ ability to compete in the world happen?  If one had only President Obama’s July’s truncated comment to go by, one would assume that our under-educated work force was a fixture of the American scene as natural and as homegrown as, let’s say, Yellowstone’s Old Faithful’s routine eruptions.  Certainly, neither he nor the political party he heads had anything to do with it.  But another of his telling comments suggests otherwise.  Steven Brill in his recent book, “Class Warfare” reports that, early on in his administration, the President ended an Oval Office conference on education reform with “Just make sure we don’t poke the unions in the eye with this”—a remark that can only be interpreted as “Don’t do anything to release the stranglehold the unions have on public education.”

The fact is America’s misfortune did not arise out of the blue.  The President may well harbor a sincere desire to see the American worker as the best trained in the world and our children among the best educated.  But, as he inadvertently illuminated in his poke-in-the-eye comment, his hands are tied.  For all his proverbial commitment to change, Obama can’t change a thing in this area without upsetting the applecart.  All he can do is enforce the terms of an apparently unbreakable, not to say notorious, compact between his party and the teachers unions.  Stripped of its political obfuscations, the compact provides for the Democrats’ sale of public education to the unions in exchange for the unions’ grant of political power to the party.   More particularly, the compact gained the Democratic party four-million deliverable teacher robo-votes, the unions’ enormous political clout with the general public, and, last but by no means least, millions in political donations.  Together the NEA and the NFT spent $67 million on political races from 1989 to 2019.  And millions more were spent by their local and regional affiliates.

For their part, the unions gained authority over 98,817 public schools and their state and local school boards.  And, unfortunately, the age-old expression, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” proved as applicable as ever.  Once the unions got the unfettered right to do with K-12 education what they willed, they transmogrified its primary function into a huge automatic teller machine dispensing boatloads of cash and perks to union officials and their minions.  The antiquated notion that schools were for kids became a delusion fostered by the unions’ powerful propaganda machine upon a naïve public sentimentally fixated on the pious image of the underpaid, hard-working, devoted teacher.  The 555 staff members of the NEA, wielding a $307 million annual budget, knows better and continues doing what they’re paid to do: bulking up union membership, raking in union dues (as much as $900 per teacher per year), and catering to teacher demands at the expense of our childrens’ education.

Step back for a moment from the terms of the compact and consider its broader ramifications.  Whereas at first glance it would seem to evenly blanket K-12 education throughout the United States, its impact is disparate.  One way or another, children from well-to-do families can deflect the worst of its influence—better teachers in suburbia, private schools, outside tutoring, university catch-up classes, and so on.  And, to a lesser extent, kids from middle-class families, too, have a decent chance of at least partly shrugging off the handicap of a public education in the good old USA.  Many will find their way to a decent university and others, with any ambition, can benefit from courses offered by community colleges.  But when it comes to poor kids, it’s a different story.  We’re pushing them out into the world without any of the buffers available to their better off piers.  Educationwise, they’re virtually helpless.  That’s a terrible thing to do to children.  You might as well send them across a busy street blindfolded.

To my mind, you’d have to go back to Hitler’s and Stalin’s partition of Poland to find an agreement as debased as that between the Democratic Party and the teachers unions.  And what makes it all the more contemptible is the posturing of the compact’s beneficiaries as defenders of the downtrodden.  Downtrodden, right.  Look who’s doing the trodden!

CRITICISM

There has been nothing secret about the embrace of the Democratic Party and the teachers  unions and its consequences.  Indeed, it would have been unnatural if the bludgeoning of our schools by thugs in broad daylight had escaped notice.  The fact that it had not been overlooked is evidenced by these revealing book titles:

“Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can’t Read, Write, or Add” by Charles Sykes, 1996

“Conflicting Missions? Teachers Unions and Educational Reform” by Tom Loveless (2000)

“The Teacher Unions: How They Sabotage Educational Reform and Why” by Myron Lieberman, (2000)

“It’s the Teacher, Stupid! Thoughts on Restructuring Education in the United States” by Pierson Melcher (2006)

“The Deserved Collapse of Public Schools: How We Have Been Hornswoggled and Bamboozled. Even Flummoxed and Hoodwinked by Entrenched Educrats” by Richard Neal (2006)

“The War Against Hope: How Teachers’ Unions Hurt Children, Hinder Teachers, and Endanger Public Education” by Rod Page (2007)

“Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union” by Clarence Taylor (2011)

“Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools” by Terry Moe (2011)

 Nor has the entertainment industry ignored the crisis in education.  A cursory check of the Internet found these five documentaries all strongly critical of the teachers unions:

“Crisis in the Classroom” (TV, 1996)

 “Race to Nowhere” (2009)

“The Lottery” (2010)

“Waiting for Superman” (2010)

“The Cartel, Education plus Politics Equals Cash” (2010)

FROM PERIODICALS

Additionally, a long string of articles have, for many years, appeared in media outlets such as the New Yorker Magazine, Reason, Time, and the Wall Street Journal.  Together they constitute a rapsheet on the teachers unions from which I have arbitrarily selected a handful of illustrative quotes and organized them for the reader’s convenience:

DESPOTISM:

Mr. Moe’s thesis is that the unions ability to protect the interests of their members is virtually unmatched in American society…[they are] the nation’s top contributors to federal elections. (The Wall Street Journal, Learning the Hard Way, August 20, 2011)

[Moe] describes the unions’ influence in every political arena and their constant efforts to shore up their power.  For example, the teachers unions make sure that school-board elections are scheduled when there will be low voter turnout, making it easy to control the outcome with the votes and resources the union can supply.  School board members elected with  union support, in turn, are just the kind of “management” that unions like on the other side of the bargaining table when contract negotiations begin.  In Mr. Moe’s view, this kind of rigged process helps to embed anti-student policies such as teacher tenure, seniority preferences, and lock-step pay. (The Wall Street Journal, Learning the Hard Way, August 20, 2011)

Substantial criticism has been leveled against the NEA and other teacher  unions for allegedly putting the interest of teachers ahead of students and consistently opposing changes that critics claim would help students but harm union interests.  The NEA has often opposed measures such as merit pay, school vouchers, weakening of teacher tenure, certain curricular changes, the No Child Left Behind Act, and many accountability reforms. (Wikipedia, article on National Education Association)

For years, union leaders have lambasted as antiteacher pretty much every proposal to expand charter schools, improve teacher evaluation, and turn around low-performing schools. (Time Magazine, Quiet Riot: Insurgents Take On Teachers’ Unions, August 11, 2011)

Former top officers at the National Education Association Kansas and Nebraska state chapters summarized their union’s stance on reform…”The NEA has been the single biggest obstacle to education reform in this country.  We know because we worked for the NEA.” (TeachersUnionExposed.com, Teachers Unions Oppose Educational Reform)

CRIMINALITY:

In March, 2001, a secretary in the Port Charlotte, Florida embezzled $66,000.  In October of the same year, long-time Broward Teachers Union president, Toni Gentile was arrested on child pornography charges.  The local union paid him a goldern parachute valued at $140,000…And in April 2003, the FBI and Miami police raided the headquarters of the United Teachers of Dade after receiving a tip that president Pat Tornillo has embezzled or misspent millions of dollars in union dues.  Critics charge that the scandals are symbolic of deeper organizational biases and problems within the NEA. (Wikipedia, article on National Education Association)

Shame and outrage over the Atlantic Public Schools last week as a big state investigation laid out findings of massive, systemic cheating—by teachers.  Teachers changing student scores on standardized tests to make their schools look better than they were.  Not subtle cheating, but gross, flagrant, eraser-on-the-page cheating.  Weekend pizza parties where teachers went through stacks of standardized tests, erasing wrong answers, filling in right ones.  And there’s evidence this hasn’t only happened in Atlanta. (National Public Radio, “On Point with Tom Ashbrook, July 11, 2011)

DISFUNCTION:

David Frum has correlated the drop in student achievement since the 1960’s with a simultaneous increase in teacher pay and recruitment of less-qualified teachers, beginning in the 1970’s…The inept and lazy gained a huge increment in job security.  Assignments would be distributed by seniority rather than skill. (Wikipedia, article on National Education Association)

The regulations are so onerous that principals rarely even try to fire a teacher.  Most just put the bad ones in pretend-work jobs, or sucker another school into taking them…The city payrolls include hundreds of teachers who have been deemed incompetent, violent, or guilty of sexual misconduct.  Since the schools are afraid to let them teach, they put them in so-called “rubber rooms” instead.  There they read magazines, play cards, and chat, at a cost to New York taxpayers of $20 million a year. (Reason Magazine, How to Fire an Incompetent Teacher, 2006)

Or look at Chicago.  In a school district that has by any measure failed its students—only 28.5 percent of 11^th graders met or exceeded expectations on that state’s standardized tests—Newsweek reported that only 0.1 percent of teachers were dismissed for performance-related reasons between 2005 and 2008. (TeachersUnionExposed.com, Protecting Bad Teachers)

INCOMPETENCE:

Since 1970, America has more than doubled the real dollars spent on K-12 education.  We have increased the number of teachers by more than a third, created legions of nonteaching staff, and raised salaries and benefits across the board.  Yet fewer than 40% of the students who graduate from high school are ready for college.  At the same time, students from other countries are moving ahead of us, scoring higher—often much higher—on international tests of reading, math, and science skills. (The Wall Street Journal, Learning the Hard Way, August 20, 2011)

Several decades ago American students were at the top of every subject; we’re now below average of developed countries and even several developing nations…Looking at all countries assessed, the United States ranks 35^th in math literacy [below Spain, Russia, Azerbaijan, etc.] and 29^th in scientific literacy [below Estonia, Hungary, Croatia, Latvia etc].  When it comes to reading, our rank is better at 18^th   [but still below Canada, Australia, Poland, etc].  Needless to add, China outranked us in each of these categories. (TeachersUnionExposed.com, International Competitiveness)

What can the President do to “get these kids educated?” Should we spend more money?  If you look at spending per primary school student by country, the United States ranks fourth worldwide. #1 Denmark, $6,713; #2 Switzerland, $6,470; #3 Austria, $6,065; #4 United States, $6,043; …#12 France, $3,752; #13 Germany, $3,531, #14 United Kingdom, $3,329. (dailyplunge.com)

STUPIDITY:

The author briefly refers to the now-infamous “rubber rooms,” the reassignment centers he first described in the New Yorker magazine in 2009, where teachers with especially bad records, whom it takes years to fire, were sent to kill time instead of, as before, being given make-work chores at schools. (The Wall Street Journal, Learning the Hard Way, August 20, 2011)

The NEA was criticized in August 2002 for the appearance of a lesson plan…that encouraged teachers to remove all references to Muslim terrorists  [related to the] September 11^th attacks. (Wikipedia, National Education Association)

…policies that seem to lack common sense…Here are some examples of how the zero tolerance hatchet is wielded in public schools…In Hurst, Texas, a 16-year-old honor student was expelled from high school after a security guard found a butter knife in the bed of his pickup truck parked on the school grounds.  The knife apparently fell out of a box of household items  he and his father had transported the previous day from his grandmother’s home to a local Goodwill store. (ourcivilization.com/dumb)

FADDISHNESS:

“Why Johnny Can’t Add: The Failure of the New Math” by Morris Kline] is a cogent and viciously sharp reading of the problems the author saw in 1972 that has been exacerbated up to today.  It is [a] must for teachers and administrators if there is going to be any profound changes in education.  The frustration level is so high in education today there might be hope if the people in the position to make changes will listen, unlike in ‘1972’.  It would be irresponsible to the educators’ profession and the students who are served not to read this book. (book review on Amazon.com)

Why can’t Johnny Read?  Because he’s being taught in the wrong way, says Flesch, and he’s right.  I know.  I was being taught that way in 1959, and I couldn’t learn to read either.  What can you do about it?  Well, if its your own child, teach them yourself, using phonics…But if the question is, what can you do about the failure of our schools, the answer is “Nothing.”…The book was published in 1955.  After 44 years, the situation has only gotten worse.  This is because the people running the public school system want it this way, and the country’s parents won’t fire them all.  Sad but true. (book review on Amazon.com of “Why Johnny Can’t Read” by Rudolf Flesch, 1900)

A two-year study of first and second-graders in California’s Inglewood Unified School District compared phonics to whole language instruction.  By the end of the second grade, phonics students scored more than a year above grade level in word recognition, passage recognition and vocabulary.  In the ability to sound out and pronounce new words, these students scored almost four years above grade level. (B. C. Bruns on bcbruns.tripod.com)

“Faddishness” deserves an afterword.  No sooner has one unsupported notion proven totally unproductive; the education establishment seems compelled to latch onto another with equal single-minded vigor. (witness whole language, new math, zero tolerance, bilingual education, set theory, etc) It’s latest craze is “learning styles”—the supposition that children learn, and therefore must be taught, in different ways. Presumably, this too will pass when proven invalid, but, of course, not without the unpardonable cost in money and distraction that have accompanied every other idiotic fad that has captured the fancy of education’s hierarchy with too much time on their hands and too little sense to occupy it constructively.

POLITICAL REACTION

Why hasn’t this overwhelming case against the teacher unions and their protectors translated thus far into political action of the intensity needed to instigate major change?  For one thing, nothing can be expected from the Democrats for obvious reasons.  On the other hand, one might have expected the Republican Party, supposedly in opposition, to pick up the banner of school reform and make it a key plank in their platform.  That has not happened.  Rather than pitching in to right the evident wrongs in education, they have taken a pass.  To my knowledge, none of the Republican candidates for presidential nomination has made education reform a central talking point in their campaign.  After all, why invite controversy when votes can be won by assuming the ennobling posture of simply not being Democrats?

Nor, for that matter, has any other political party exactly covered itself with glory in this matter.  I would have thought the issue might fit nicely within the Tea Party’s anti-establishment agenda, but, their criticism of the public school system seems largely limited to its failure to turn out students who are sufficiently patriotic and/or religious.

The Libertarians at least have had the good sense to advocate the abolishment of the Department of Education.  And, of course, they are dead right in this regard.  Until the accession of Arne Duncan as its head (more on this later) the department’s only function has been to demonstrate the Democrats’ fealty to education by dumping wheelbarrows full of cash down its rat hole.  But, like the Tea Partiers, the Libertarians have ducked education’s central issue.

Finally, this list of dishonorable mentions would be incomplete without the inclusion of the academics who inhabit our institutions of higher learning.  No group has had a better opportunity to evaluate the injuries inflicted upon the nations’ youth by the teachers unions, yet whatever disapproval they’ve expressed has been untargeted.  It’s as though the grossly unprepared students sent to them were another of those facts of life about which nothing specific could be done—another manifestation of the Old-Faithful phenomenon.  One can’t help being reminded of the failure of the 1930’s  liberals to condemn the outrages committed by their erstwhile exemplars in the USSR.

TUG OF WAR

Admittedly in the last few years, the country has gradually bestired itself regarding education reform.  The shift in sentiment has prompted several states— Indiana, Utah, Wisconsin, Ohio, and New Jersey among them—to summon the courage to face down the unions on at least some issues. Even Obama seems to have somewhat relaxed his protective stance.  My guess is that he would now reword his original demand to, “just make sure we don’t poke out both eyes of the unions with this.”  His appointment to head the Department of Education, Arne Duncan, has initiated a “Race to the Top” program that seeks to dismiss ineffective teachers, institute merit pay, expand the number of charter schools, and encourage states to make schools accountable based on standardized testing.  Whereas the program has encouraged a number of states to make school choice more available and to undertake other “R2T” reforms, its rewards pale in comparison with the $800 billion the federal government doles out routinely for education regardless of performance.

The fact is that the attempts to change the system—school vouchers, the creation of charter schools, the formation of reform-minded organizations, the initiation of government programs, and so on—are merely jabs here and there at the union beast that no doubt annoy it but do little more.  Essentially, it remains as powerful as ever and capable of striking back when sufficiently provoked.  For example, earlier this year the unions were successful in removing Michelle Rhee from her position as Chancellor of the Washington DC School District.  During the three and a half years Ms Rhee was on the job, she had taken on the  unions to rapidly introduce the steps she felt necessary to turn around perhaps the worst school system in the country.  She closed 23 schools, fired 36 principals, cut 121 office jobs, and instituted gifted-child programs. Obviously, such an effective activist reformer posed an intolerable threat, so the unions threw millions of dollars at her removal.

Counterattacking on other fronts, the unions were successful in reducing Wisconsin’s funding for its model Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and cutting back on Pennsylvania’s tax credits for private donations to its Educational Improvement Credit thereby reducing by 6,000 the number of scholarships provided under the program.  Then, as recently as this August, the unions managed to convince a New York State Supreme Court judge to throw out a new provision in the state’s regulations that enabled authorities to fire teachers whose student test scores were markedly below average.  The union’s argument was that student performance was an insufficient indicator of a teacher’s competence.

A scoreboard displaying the net result of this tug of war between the teachers unions and their would-be reformers would look like this:  according to the Center for Education Reform, in 2010 the number of charter schools grew by 9% to 5,453 and now serve more than 1.7 million students.  Hurray for the home team!  But they are playing in the minor leagues.  When compared to the reality of 98,817 public school with their 49,266,000 enrollment, the achievements of the decades-old charter school movement look rather anemic.  And somewhat overstated besides when taking into account the limitations with which most of them are encumbered by union-inspired state regulations.

 GENUINE REFORM

The reality is the country continues to endure the teachers union predations.  Tragically the great majority of students in our public schools march into the world with only a smattering of the knowledge they need to compete in it.  Furthermore, the harm done by the teacher unions extends far beyond the education field itself; it has created a sense of defeatism in the American psyche.  The average America instinctively recognizes that we are no longer the smartest kid on the block.  That much of the air has leaked out of our innovation balloon.  That we are in danger of surrendering our first place standing in technology or perhaps have already done so.  That scientific progress the worldover is rushing forward and we are being nudged to the sidelines where we can only watch in dumb wonderment.  That China will soon overtake our manufacturing sector.  And that our kids know less about geography, American and world history, and the fundamentals of freedom and democracy than their counterparts a generation ago.

For all these reasons, it should be clear that the recapture of our public schools is of vital importance.  Indeed, more important than many of the emotionally-charged issues that galvanize our attention.  America will survive intact whether or not the word “God” is inserted in the National Anthem, whether or not the abortion rights or the prolife advocates triumph, and whether or not gay couples marry.  America will not survive in its present form if the education gap is allowed to continue intact and we sink to the level of an underdeveloped country dependent of our agriculture and mining industries.  It’s bad enough that we’re saddling each of our kids with tens of thousands of dollars of national debt, but to deprive them of the means to overcome it is truly unconscionable.

So what is to be done?  A letter-writing campaign?  A march on Washington?  Raising Cain at school board meetings.  No doubt all of these traditional exercises of democracy would be of some help, but to my mind, the educational crisis requires stronger action.  Look at it this way.  Would any of the multitude of reform measures be necessary if it were not for the teachers unions?  In the absence of the unions, would we need charter schools, school vouchers, and all the rest?  Obviously, not.  The solution to the dilemma we face in education thus speaks for itself.  Seldom has our nation faced a major dilemma in which the solution was so self evident.

Get rid of the unions and we get rid of the bulk of education’s structural problems.  And once this cloud hanging over our schools has been lifted, we can begin to undertake real improvement in the educational process in an unbiased, rational manner.

BELLING THE CAT

The only question that remains is how?  Three approaches come to mind:

One:  A great deal of money is already being donated by charitable individuals, corporations, and non-profits.  Why not channel those funds where they could do the most good—that is, provide start-up financing for the rank and file of teachers willing to organize a new union that genuinely represents them.  Certainly they would have plenty of reasons for doing so.  Their declaration of independence could include freedom from the drudgery of endless paperwork, opportunity to exercise their individual teaching skills, less emphasis on standardized testing, an end to experimental methodologies, a return to teaching fundamentals, better enforcement of discipline, authority to expel trouble makers, revised textbooks less concerned with social objectives and more concerned with facts, and greatly reduced unions dues thanks to a more frugal administration and the elimination of political activity. Surely enough teachers would subscribe to these changes to form an invigorated group eager to take the helm.  In addition the new slate could count on the return of a goodly number of former teachers who left the profession on account of the present conditions in the classroom.

In fact, the uprising has already begun.  Quietly and diplomatically, to be sure, as befits the profession, but noticeable nonetheless.  In Los Angeles, the recently formed NewTLA is already posing a credible challenge to the mighty United Teachers of Los Angeles on such issues as teacher seniority.  Meanwhile, at the other end of the continent in New York City, 3,500 teachers joined the Educators for Excellence (E4E) to lobby for “an elevated profession of teachers who want to be accountable.”  And in six chapters in major cities across the country, Teach Plus is recruiting dedicated, effective teachers to create reforms from within.  These fledgling groups don’t all have precisely the same objectives nor the same approach to implementing them, but they do share the same general frustration and the same determination to reform the system.  The teachers unions may not hear them yet, but the drums are beating.

Two: Politicians are known by the company they keep, and if the company is shown to be as unpopular as the teachers unions have become, the Democrats might well question the viability of their compact with their erstwhile friends.  After all, do they really want to be seen standing side-by-side with the ghosts of Orval Faubus and George Wallace at schoolhouse door barring a better education for America’s children?  Would not a safer course be to whisper a few words in the ears of their AFL-CIO comrades suggesting that its time they clean house.  And once the parent union no longer shelters the renegade teachers union under its umbrella, it would be free to welcome their squeaky-clean replacements.

Three: I’m no attorney, but it seems to me a number of legal channels could be pursued against the  officials of the teacher unions.  To begin with, a convincing case can be made by the government against them on the grounds they knowingly deceived the public and, in so doing, caused it immeasurable harm.  After all, if the attorney general can find reason to initiate legal action against a few alleged perpetrators in the financial industry for occasionally lying to their investors, how much stronger a case can be made against union officials who purposely and maliciously misled the public for decades on end?  Should not the fate of our children take precedence over the fate of our portfolios?  As a separate matter, having sabotaged our economic system as determinedly—and certainly more effectively—than U.S. based terrorists, union officials should be investigated on charges of sedition.  If they did not take kickbacks from Chinese manufacturers, they left money on the table.  Moreover, parents would be well justified in filing civil cases against the unions.  Penalties due parents could be readily calculated by taking the lifelong earnings of a professional engineer, subtracting from them the earnings of a part time parking lot attendant, then adding the collateral damages stemming from the pain and suffering inflicted upon parents by their live-in scion.  Throw in dereliction of duty charges by the teachers themselves, and it’s safe to say union officials will have enough on their hands defending themselves to voluntarily surrender their present position of power.

By whichever of these means are used to oust the teacher unions, the bottom line is that our patience is at an end.  We’ve had enough of their foot dragging, enough of their pontificating, enough of their duplicity, enough of their arrogance, enough of their callousness, enough of their posturing, enough of their asininity, and enough of their veniality.  Both eyes, Mr. President!  Throw the bums out!