By Joe Williams, DFER’s Executive Director
Today’s NY Times covers the teachers’ unions latest attacks on Students First NY because their bi-partisan board has a couple of big backers of Mitt Romney’s Republican presidential campaign.
We have well-documented concerns about what a Romney presidency would do for education reform – see here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here. We have also raised alarms about what Romney’s Republican friends in Congress are up to in this regard. (And we have offered our own unsolicited advice to the Republican Party about how to reconnect with the mainstream as well as our arguments for why Obama is simply the best man for the job of education reformer in chief and also must be re-elected.)
So we, too, are perplexed as to how some of the Students First NY board members could be so personally misguided in their choice of a presidential candidate. (It’s not too late to see the light, folks.)
That said, however, it doesn’t seem like the union’s “gotcha” is all that interesting/compelling here, considering teachers unions in NY State, themselves, end up being deep-pocketed supporters of the Republican Party.
Click on this link, then use your ‘find’ function to search for “senate repub” and “republican state” and you’ll find about $1 million in teacher union moolah right there alone. Throw in individual Republican candidates on that list and the numbers go through the roof. At least it explains why NY Republicans always look like they are in the teachers union’s pocket. Are they going to put out a report on that?