The National Education Association's Top Priority Is Not Education

Michelle Malkin brings news from the education front:

Last week, I showed you how the SEIU and other union thugs have routinely engaged in brass-knuckle tactics to intimidate volunteers who threaten their power.

Here’s another example to add to the Big Labor Bully file — straight outta Chicago:

We watched an interesting YouTube video the other day. It was brought to our attention by state Sen. James Meeks, the Chicago Democrat who is also pastor of Salem Baptist Church on the South Side. We think our readers should check out the video. It’ll open your eyes.

Meeks, who chairs the Illinois Senate Education Committee, has been in a war with the Chicago Teachers Union since he had some tough things to say about public education in a Tribune essay and in a speech at Rainbow Push.

The CTU responded with a vow not to give him another dime in campaign money until he apologized. Meeks promptly wrote a check for $4,000, giving back every dime the union had already given him.

No apology.

Good for him. Meeks, who has engaged in some rather unsavory racial demagoguery in the past, made headlines recently by likening the Chicago teachers’ union to a street gang and openly embracing private vouchers to help poor minority students escape from the city’s violence-plagued government school system. I hope it’s a sincere change of heart and that he is re-thinking the entire Democrat culture of dependency on government and public-sector unions.

Michelle also has the video of the National Education Association’s retiring top lawyer, Bob Chanin, speaking at the NEA’s annual meeting in July in which he openly admits that educating our children is not the top priority for the teacher's union:

This is not to say that the concern of NEA and its affiliates with closing achievement gaps, reducing dropout rates, improving teacher quality and the like are unimportant or inappropriate. To the contrary. These are the goals that guide the work we do. But they need not and must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights and collective bargaining. That simply is too high a price to pay. (The emphasis is mine.)

Plainly put, it is more important to the teacher's union to keep an incompetent teacher on the job then to ensure that a proper education for our children.

The rest of the story.