At the high point of the NEA’s annual conference, the teachers’ union has decided enough is enough on NCLB:
An overwhelming majority of delegates from the nation’s largest education union approved a plan this week to aggressively lobby Congress for reform of the No Child Left Behind Act.
The National Education Association has fought to change the measure since its beginnings in 2001, but this is the union’s most organized effort to date, said Joel Packer, the NEA’s policy manager on the act.
They’ve been on the "reform NCLB" bandwagon since 2001? That led Mike Antonucci, who forced himself to sit through the whole conference, to suggest that the AP was reduced to recycling news. In predictable calls for higher pay, the union also called for a national minimum wage of $40,000. That drew criticism from one teacher; after pointing out some obvious problems with differences in cost of living, he had this to say:
Has NEA taken into account what districts will have to do to pay first-year-teachers $40,000 a year? It will cause less advancement in pay for teachers in general. The best and most experienced teachers will have to make less to pay more to the teachers who barely know what they’re doing. Ultimately nobody will end up making as much money because of this.
It simply makes no sense.