Even Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt rejected the thought of unionized public servants such as teachers and police, while approving unions in private industry. Since then, unions have strong-armed themselves into organizing public servants, and following suit the Washington bureaucracy has established a huge Department of Education taking power and funds from states and localities where it belonged.
The increasingly negative effect of these developments became obvious to President Ronald Reagan when he attempted to abolish the federal Department of Education in the 1980s with the help of most Republicans in Congress. The move was stopped by union-dominated Democrats. Yet Reagan did fire the air traffic controllers when they went on strike and disrupted public commerce.
Some self-serving national teachers unions and other spineless public servants have let public education drift down in the United States to No. 16 out of 21 industrialized countries while spending nearly 50 percent more money per student with no SAT improvements in 40 years, according to the Haskins Report.
Many teachers tell me that bureaucratic rules and restrictions have overloaded their time to educate our children. So don’t blame the teachers; if freed from their overload, they would meet the challenge.
It would also help for parents to send a more disciplined child to school.
S.G. von Schweinitz