By Joe Williams, DFER Executive Director
Like many of you, we too were a bit stumped by what Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was up to with his push to crush the collective bargaining rights of public school teachers in Badgerland. (Read our blog post from Feb. 2011 here.)
But now we have seen the light.
In remarks last week to the right-wing Manhattan Institute, Gov. Walker finally allowed us to peek behind the curtain to discover what he was REALLY trying to accomplish by using the nuclear option on the Wisconsin Education Association Council. By curbing collective bargaining for public school teachers, Walker told the crowd, public schools in the land of Fighting Bob LaFollette were able to drastically reduce their costs so that they could…get ready for this one…hire a boatload of more teachers in order to significantly reduce class sizes!
Seriously. (Read this.)
This would seem to suggest one of two possibilities about what went down in Mad Town earlier this year:
1) Gov. Walker, at his core, is really one of those softy, surbanite, tee-ball dads who truly believes in his heart of heart that all we have to do is reduce class sizes and all of a sudden children of all races and socioeconomic backgrounds will start speaking with Finnish accents and score off the charts on all the important international comparisons, Lake Wobegon, blah, blah, blah, or…
2) Even Gov. Walker has come to understand that his was such a profound and potentially reform-killing overreach that he now feels a need to pander to teachers and soccer moms – even when he is addressing the old guys in tweed jackets at the Manhattan Institute. Under that thinking, if you have to go down in flames in a recall election, at least give yourself credit for having been on the smaller class size bandwagon?
For #1 to be true, it would mean that Walker also chose to employ some of the most screwed-up tactics in the history of mankind to achieve his lofty goal of a smaller class for every child. Does that mean it is #2???
Bizarre.
Does this mean Wisconsin is back in play as a state where pragmatic, progressive reform can be expected?