Guest post by Tim Daly, President, The New Teacher Project
The hunt has intensified recently for a shadowy menace: the “blame-the-teacher crowd.” Everyone seems to be on the case, from
major magazinesto
pundits on Twitter. This anti-teacher cabal has grown so powerful that it took center stage at the conventions of the national teachers’ unions last month. AFT president Randi Weingarten
spoke of being “shaken to the core” at witnessing “so few attack so many, so harshly, for doing so much.” NEA president Dennis Van Roekel
warned of an effort to “blame teachers and our unions for every problem in a school.”
Strangely, nobody can credibly identify any members of this nefarious crowd. We know who’s
not in the group. Not Barack Obama, who
has made clear that he is “110 percent behind our teachers,” and made good on it by supporting tens of
billions of dollars to save