Finn-esse
Chester Finn has more listings on his C.V. than there are plankton sucked into the megamouth of a feeding whale shark. Although he is an education policy adviser and erstwhile academic, he is not an educator.
He’s the president of the non-profit (in the sense of potential intellectual gain) Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Reportedly he’s a likeable chap ( likes to be called “Checker,” perhaps because he’s partial to board games as much as board rooms), and not at all brash. His murderous animus for teacher unions is conveyed with old-boy elegance and charm. (The eye is not malevolent when it winks like a pixie. With a twinkle he assures teachers that they have nothing to fear from disembowelment.)
In a recent post on the Education Next blog he draws a sharp distinction between the virtue of teachers and the vices of their unions. He practically says that teachers and their unions should be mortal enemies. They would