NJEA, AFT: How about a robo-call apology for backing Cory Booker?
The New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) spends a fortune of members’ dues money on what loosely could be called “communications”–advertising, promotion, public relations, marketing, and other methods of getting its message out. And, last year, it put a lot of that effort behind the election of Cory Booker as United States senator despite Booker’s embrace of ultra-conservative educational policies, including vouchers. You’d think that, this year, it would use the same approach to correct that awful mistake–but it hasn’t.
Nearly two years ago, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, stopped by Newark long enough to help seal a hare-brained, privately-financed merit pay deal between its Newark Teachers Union and Cami Anderson, the dictator personally selected by Booker to make Newark the “charter school capital” of the country. Anderson has used the pact to weaken the NTU and other unions. You’d think that, this year, the NTU would try to recover lost ground to the union-busters–but it hasn’t.
Both unions have ways of communicating to its members the sense of its leaders on educational issues. In the past, I have received lectures on bureaucratic procedures aimed at explaining why the NJEA, for example, had to make this decision or that about its views.
“We’re a membership organization,” I’ve been told. “We can’t be far ahead of our NJEA, AFT: How about a robo-call apology for backing Cory Booker? | Bob Braun's Ledger: