Why Teachers Unions Are Fed Up with Obama

This is a couple days old, but it's worth paying attention to. The two most powerful teachers' unions blasted the President and his education policies
at their annual conventions. In particular, they decried the veto
threat the President offered on the war supplemental if the House
passed legislation keeping teachers in their jobs, partially offset by
cuts to the Race to the Top fund:

In a skirmish last week over federal
education financing, the administration and the teachers' unions were
bitterly at odds. Last year, Congress approved $100 billion in
education stimulus funds, about half of it to help states avoid school
layoffs.

With that money now running out, House Democrats proposed spending
$10 billion more to shore up school district budgets, paying for it, in
part, with $800 million in cuts to Race to the Top and two other
competitive grant programs Mr. Duncan created to spur his initiatives.
Mr. Duncan and the White House supported the $10 billion in new
spending, but objected to trimming the grant programs, infuriating
union leaders.

"For the Department of Education to say, 'Everybody else has to
sacrifice, but our pet programs must be spared'- that makes me so angry
I don't even know how to say it," said Randi Weingarten, president of
the American Federation of Teachers, which has often been more
supportive of administration initiatives than the National Education
Association.

The cuts to Race to the Top would constitute a small percentage -
under 20% - of their total funding. But Arne Duncan clearly values
bribing states to change their education policies in directions that
have not been fully tested, rather than saving teachers and keeping
class sizes low, policies which have been rigorously tested and show
results. Students perform better when they have a teacher than when
they don't, to simplify this debate as much as possible. It makes no
sense to hoard money for competitive grants when teachers face layoffs.
But clearly the White House and the Education Department doesn't see it
that way. In fact, despite the grassroots action from the teacher
community, they fully expect the funding to be restored:

E-mail messages pleading for the jobs
measure rained down on Congress from thousands of union teachers, and
despite a veto threat by the White House, Democrats in the House voted
overwhelmingly on Thursday to create the $10 billion school jobs fund
and to trim Mr. Duncan's grant programs. The bill must be reworked by
the Senate. On Friday, Mr. Duncan shrugged off what appeared to be an
administration setback, expressing confidence that lawmakers would
eventually find a way to spare Race to the Top.

I'm sure he's quite confident. But that full funding of Race to the
Top will most likely come at the expense of up to 140,000 school
personnel.

Education leaders have been told by this Administration at every
turn that they must bend, shake up their entrenched system and change
the status quo. They must sacrifice by changing teacher pay policies,
or tenure policies, or charter school policies. But absolutely no such
sacrifice must come from the White House on this front. They don't have
to meet anyone halfway. They don't have to give up even a sliver of
this reform to save teacher jobs. At the base level, that's why teacher
unions, which have gone extremely far in the direction of the reformers
thus far, are so angry.