Captain's Quarters reports on the National Education Association's agenda for its July 7th assembly. The agenda, Captain Ed notes, "lists all the new action items under consideration and the action taken on each. How long does one have to read down the list before the NEA actually addresses an issue having directly to do with educating students? The first item? Third? Fifth? How about ... fifteenth?"
Here's what comes ahead of education at the National Education Association:
1. [Defeated, no description]
2. Fighting Wal-Mart
3. Investigating the positions of financial firms regarding Social Security privatization
4. Adding "multiethnic" and "other" as options on ethnicity questions
5. Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the NEA and ATA
6. Forming coalitions to "protect" Social Security
7. Explaining the difference between two different pension plans
8. Requesting an article for their newsletter on "health problems from exposure to fragrance chemicals".
9. Getting outside funding to allow 25 more people to attent the EPA Tools for Schools Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) Symposium
10. Creating a workgroup on health care
11. Sponsoring "political training" for Congressional candidates friendly to NEA priorities (see above!)
12. [Defeated, no description]
13. Opposing "billionaire Eli Broad and any other entities to remove elected school boards from cities"
14. Repealing the Social Security offset and explaining the differences between states' approach to Social Security for teachers who move
Five of the top 20 have to do with Social Security politics. Only two items in the top 30 have anything directly to do with educating children. As Michelle Malkin points out, however, they made room during their efforts to demand a withdrawal from Iraq (number 61), oppose CAFTA, (number 63), and support the boycott of Gallo Wines (number 47).
No doubt the items which were defeated were motions to support some policy or other favored by the Bush administration. One reason education is in trouble in this country is that the people and organizations into whose hands it has been entrusted are too concerned with advancing a liberal political and social agenda and only secondarily concerned with maximizing educational excellence.
