LaborPains.org

This morning’s Chicago Tribune features a lengthy article profiling our “Ten Worst Union-Protected Teachers in America” contest, which the Club for Growth called “brilliant” this morning as well. Here’s an excerpt from the article, which interviews Center for Union Facts executive director Richard Berman:

Buying off bad teachers is part of his effort to improve education, Berman said.

“What I really want to do is jump-start a conversation,” Berman said. “There are lots of kids who can’t read or do math and are well behind in science. … I’ve interviewed teachers who say their colleagues are not competent to teach kids.“

The Center for Union Facts will offer the ten worst union-protected teachers in America $10,000 apiece to leave teaching forever, since it is often too difficult for them to be fired, thanks in large part to teachers unions. Click here to see some previous nominations, and click here to submit yours!

With a $75,000 settlement in hand, Stan Mims certainly got his money’s worth for membership in the Alabama Education Association. The Birmingham school board wanted to fire him, but his AEA-paid lawyer’s threatened lawsuit against the board produced an agreement whereby he would resign instead of being fired and would also receive five months of severance pay.

By the way: Mims wasn’t a teacher. He was superintendent of the school district.

It was my understanding that administrators had been driven out of the National Education Association and its affiliates when the NEA underwent its transformation from a professional association to a labor union. That still seems to be the case in general, but there are exceptions like Mims. The Birmingham News raised some important questions over the fact that Mims was part of the same union as the school personnel under him:

A skeptical person might ask whether this is the norm for school bosses across this state. And, if so, how that might impact their decisions on firings, promotions, transfers and disciplinary actions. Do they come down hard on their fellow AEA members? Or are they all in it, so to speak, together? Could this help explain AEA’s seemingly lopsided advantage in personnel disputes?

Maybe so. Maybe not. But it’s a strange world when you look at labor and management, and find they’re both wearing the union label.

At TeachersUnionExposed.com, the nominations keep rolling in for our “Ten Worst Union-Protected Teachers” contest. Here is this week’s highlighted nomination, sent in by a concerned parent:

Two years ago [nominee] was caught in an internet chatroom, sitting at her desk, while the children were left to do whatever they wanted. The only punishment for this offense was to be moved from teaching one grade to a lower grade. One year ago angry parents paid a surprise to [nominee’s] class; she was playing solitaire on a laptop while the students were wandering around the classroom with no guidance. Her punishment was to be moved again into a lower grade. This year, [nominee’s] students began telling their parents that all they had to study for their tests was THE ANSWER KEY that [nominee] gave them!! Instead of teaching the kid anything about the questions and what the correct answers to the question are she was making them memorize the answer key (A,D,D,B,A,C… etc).

Click here to read the nomination for the Drunk Gunman, last week’s featured nomination, or click here to read more stories.

In case our mobile billboard wasn’t enough, the Center for Union Facts has also unveiled an enormous seven-story billboard in Times Square. The billboard tells New Yorkers and tourists about the “Ten Worst Union-Protected Teachers” contest we’re running (click here to read about some pretty egregious New York City examples). We’ve already received some pretty scary nominations (such as yesterday’s Nominee of the Week, the Drunk Gunman), but with this board reaching so many eyeballs, we expect to receive a lot more. Click here, here, here, and here to see more photos.

As nominations for our “Ten Worst Union-Protected Teachers” contest continue to roll in, we’ll be blogging some of the highlights. (Click here to see some previously featured entries.)

This week’s featured nominee pulled up, drunk, to the drive-thru window of a fast-food restaurant. After ordering, he became angry that he wasn’t getting his food fast enough, so he took out a gun and started waving it at restaurant employees. After his arrest, he pled nolo contendere to all charges and was sent to jail. His students, meanwhile, were told he was caring for an ill family member; now out of jail, he’s back in the classroom with his job intact.

In case the labor bosses over at the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers missed our full-page ad in today’s New York Times, we also have a mobile billboard doing a circuit between their well-appointed central offices here in Washington, D.C.

This morning the Center for Union Facts landed an op-ed in the pages of the Washington Examiner laying out the reasons why we’ve launched TeachersUnionExposed.com and our “Ten Worst Union-Protected Teachers” contest. Here’s an excerpt from the piece, signed by CUF Executive Director Richard Berman:

Who would support an education system that cripples America’s ability to compete in the global marketplace? The National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and their thousands of affiliated unions. They have vested interests in maintaining the educational status quo. Even if it makes us lag behind Azerbaijan.

To find out just how and why the United States lags behind Azerbaijan, click here and read the whole thing.

We’ve received more than three hundred nominations since our “Ten Worst Union-Protected Teachers” contest launched at TeachersUnionExposed.com on Tuesday. Just to give you a hint of what’s been coming our way, here are a few of the entries we’ve received so far (edited for privacy and clarity, of course):

• Music teacher. Takes personal cell phone calls and answers e-mail while kids are in the room waiting to be taught. She yells at them if they start to talk because she can’t hear. Doesn’t really teach anyways. Plays sing-along videos while she naps. Worst teacher I’ve ever seen.
• She can be heard shouting at her FIRST grade students all the way to the end of the hall. She threw a book at a student last year. She kicked a student the year before. She told my son he was too stupid to ever be anything. She also told him he’d never be smart enough to do anything but be an idiot. To this day, he’s a 4th grade homeschool student, he believes he’s too stupid to do anything. She deserves the nomination because she’s EARNED IT.
• [Nominee] is an raging alcoholic. He drinks Scope and spits wherever he feels. He doesn’t know what an iron or ironing board looks like. He sleeps on the job in his office and repeatedly comes to class late because his inner alarm clock never rings. I don’t even know if he is a good teacher or a bad one but the icing on the cake is the fact that recently he has been urinating in a bottle and leaving it on the floor of his office because he is too lazy to actually walk to the men’s room.

Do you have a bad union-protected teacher you’d like to nominate? Visit TeachersUnionExposed.com to submit your entry.