Why Does NEA Really Support NCLB?

If NEA was serious about real stories about NCLB, they would allow members to post directly to an online bulletin board that all could read.

NEA's bosses did that for a few weeks about seven years ago, but they shut down the bulletin board when people began to organize against the NEA's top leadership on the bb. Those people were trying to build a base of opposition to the NCLB, which the NEA and AFT not only supported, but  their leaders joined with the US Chambers of Commerce, The Broad Foundation, the Business Roundtable, and others, in demanding the creation of the NCLB. AFT's Al Shanker was pivotal in creating the foundations of what became the NCLB.

Other AFT top leaders, like the fellow who Education Week called the godfather of New Unionism (the unity of corporations, government, and unions, in the national interest, ie, the old base of the corporate state) also joined in leading the way to the NCLB. Pat Tornillo, though, is in jail now for stealing his Florida NEA members money. And his pal just up the freeway, the boss of the big Broward County AFT-NEA, who also was pivotal in negotiating for the NCLB is in jail too, for molesting kids. They join the goon who was the head of the AFT in Washington DC, also in prison for looting the treasury of the union that represents teachers in one of the worst, and most impoverished, school districts in the USA. Notice a pattern here?

NEA is not going to oppose the NCLB because its top leadership (who make well over $300,000 a year) is in support of the NCLB, and only wants a few fixes applied to it, remarkably like the line of the Democratic Party which was equally a part of creating the bipartisan attack on education.

Why would a school workers' union support NCLB? Because the leaders of the unions are on the side of those who benefit from the social relations that required the NCLB, a systematic effort to regulate what youth learn and how they come to learn in, in a nation promising the world endless imperialist war.

How do the union leaders benefit from imperialism? They exist because of imperialism. It is the superprofits that imperialism wins from the cheap labor, raw materials, markets, and limitless warfare, that allow the union leaders to live very well, much unlike the vast majority of school workers. The union bosses (for bosses they are)  know their role, betray the cause they claim to support, and serve as toadies for war, racism,  segregation,  and the attack on reason that the NCLB represents.

Their sham opposition to NCLB, especially their calls to fund it (if they pay teachers to become missionaries for fascism, is that ok?), just deepen the swindle the NEA leaders are conducting against members who pay them mightily for defense on the job, when the NEA and AFT have no plan for power on the job whatsoever.

If they did, they would focus their activity on organizing for control of the workplaces and communities. That is where the power of people who must work to live lies.

But, in every process that NEA and AFT engage, they lure school workers farther and farther from their source of power. In this instance, NEA and AFT want to locate power inside the benevolence of multimillionaire politicians, within a congress so corrupt that Marx's claim that capitalist governments are merely executive committees of the ruling class, weapons of the rich, needs no further proof. Indeed, the burden is now on those who say that is not true.

Here is what NEA says the purpose of telling your story to the hacks who work for the NEA bosses:

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Make sure that politicians in Washington hear your voice by sharing your first-hand experiences about the impacts of NCLB with NEA and congressional leaders. Close quote.  (from their www site)

The politicians in Washington are eager to hear your support for the NCLB, and more than willing to hear suggestions on how to fix it, just as the dealer only wants you to start the game of three card monte. Once you are in, you lose. The more you do it, the more you lose.

There is no repairing the NCLB. There is no need for more research to demonstrate its links to capitalism in decay, imperialism, racism, regulations on curriculum and instruction, and war. That work is done. What is needed is agitation and organization to shut it down.

And the NEA will never have anything to do with that.

Kids will. Kids played important leadership roles in shutting down schools and conducting much higher forms of educational activity around the immigrant rights struggles, and the massive May Day actions, the biggest demonstrations in the US in the last 30 years or more. Those activist kids deserve support, as do activist teachers who encourage them.

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