The teacher tenure language in the new state budget for New York continues to get a lot of attention – as does the argument that the New York Legislature is bought and paid for by the teachers union.
Eduwonkette writes that the union is being treated like a pinata. The NY Post, a day behind the NY Times and NY Daily News, wonders why legislative leaders aren’t being brought up on bribery charges, and notes that the problem here isn’t that the union threw so much cash at the legislature, but that the politicians allowed themselves to get bought in such a way that they dealt a serious blow to attempts to save public education for the students who desperately need it to be saved.
Meanwhile, Blair Horner of the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) notes that the $3 million that the teachers unions spent lobbying in the capitol last year makes it the “King Kong” of all of the political gorillas in Albany. (Interesting use of the gorilla thing. I made a similar claim in a previous blog life that NYSUT was the ‘Big Freaking Macho Gorilla’ in the statehouse.