An Associated Press report from the Northwest this Saturday can’t quite match Oakland’s recent “What is cheating?” story, but the Washington Education Association is never one to skimp on drama. AP political reporter David Ammons writes:
Terry Bergeson served in the top leadership of the Washington Education Association for eight long years before becoming the state’s education reform czar and the state school chief.So why is the teachers’ union ready to dump their old colleague in the next election – and hoping to pressure her into not even running again? Why are they airing their dirty laundry in public, protesting outside her Olympia office, publishing stinging rebukes and calling her a hopeless cause?
Bergeson’s problem, it seems, is that she’d rather fight for school reform than for pouring ever more money into a broken system. And that makes the WEA mad:
Her old colleagues at the 80,000-member teachers’ union cooled on her when she didn’t advocate enough for money and spent much of her time implementing ed reform, including the test that many students failed.
