The Education Wars: More Teacher Union Trashing

and shilling for the Obama administration's destructive Race to the Top nonsense. Naturally a know-nothing about education gets paid to write something he knows nothing about.

A remarkable thing happened in New York recently: the state legislature, in effect, turned down the chance to win $700 million in federal money. No one does that, except extremely conservative Southern governors (who inevitably relent and take the money) — oh, and occasionally teachers' unions. A few years ago, I wrote here about the Detroit union that forced the local government to reject a $200 million philanthropic gift to build 15 charter schools using a model that was already succeeding in the city. And now we have New York's United Federation of Teachers (UFT), a storied crew, thwarting the state's attempt to file an application that might have won $700 million in Race to the Top education funds — and again the issue is charter schools, with a substantial dollop of teacher accountability thrown in.