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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (565565)	5/11/2010 11:00:21 AM
From: one_less	2 Recommendations Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1577883

I've often wondered why the NEA gets away with their practices. They take dues from most teachers using a combination of heavy handed peer pressure and the assurances the teachers will be protected if they should ever need legal assistance. Most people enter the teaching profession with rather conservative naive personalities and as first year teachers want the acceptance and support of the senior staff, which they will need to get tenure...the socialization into left wing thinking, soon to follow. Once new teachers have signed off to have their dues garnished, most are pretty much members for life and rarely receive any kind of tangible benefits. The Lawyers at the State and National offices pick exemplary cases only, any routine problems are at your own expense. Usually a teacher receiving legal support would have been charged with something seriously news worthy, a precedent case like sex or violence crime, before they will take the case and even then not the typical one like a coach being aggressive with an athlete. A big portion of the NEA money is used to support the campaigns of politicians, who often have less interest in education than their rivals. I called one of our senators once and asked why there aren't any bills to put more funding into programs for high achieving students in public education. Our local 'gifted student' program was completely unfunded. The response from the conservative politician shocked me. The spokesperson said, we think that is what private schools are for. I tried to make a case over the phone for them to be more responsible wrt our tax money going into publicly funded education but I could tell their goal was simply to end the call as quickly as possible. At the end of the day the pot of gold handed over to left wing politicians is huge, with little or no input from the donors at the local level, and that just seems like one of the biggest corruptions ever. Even more shocking is the lack of active interest shown from conservative camps to achieve some sort of balance...just a lot of whining about education being driven by left wing propaganda. I've seen people give that lip service, like I just did, but I've never seen a serious investigation or challenge to it.