ACORN Helps Teachers Union Protests

It has been noted that as economic times are getting tougher even politicians from both parties are beginning to attack government unions.  Public employee unions are becoming the new whipping boys.  The local, state, and federal governments have for too long given the unions everything they wanted.  The well is running dry and politicians always need a scapegoat to blame.

A new group now too is turning on the government unions.  Hollywood, who has long been an ally of teachers unions (witness the 1998 Rob Reiner funded Proposition 10), is also beginning to notice. Over the past year, three new documentaries The Cartel, Waiting for Superman, and The Lottery have all taken critical looks at our nation’s public school system and produced damning indictments of teachers unions.

The Wall Street Journal recently interviewed Madeleine Sackler, the director of The Lottery:

Her initial aim was simple. “Going into the film I was excited just to tell a story,” she says. “A vérité film, a really beautiful, independent story about four families that you wouldn’t know otherwise” in the months leading up to the lottery for the Harlem Success Academy.

But on the way to making the film she imagined, she “stumbled on this political mayhem—really like a turf war about the future of public education.” Or more accurately, she happened upon a raucous protest outside of a failing public school in which Harlem Success, already filled to capacity, had requested space.

“We drove by that protest,” Ms. Sackler recalls. “We were on our way to another interview and we jumped out of the van and started filming.” There she discovered that the majority of those protesting the proliferation of charter schools were not even from the neighborhood. They’d come from the Bronx and Queens.

“They all said ‘We’re not allowed to talk to you. We’re just here to support the parents.’” But there were only two parents there, says Ms. Sackler, and both were members of ACORN. And so, “after not a lot of digging,” she discovered that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) had paid ACORN, the controversial community organizing group, “half a million dollars for the year.” (It cost less to make the film.)

And in Waiting for Superman, Davis Guggenheim, who directed and produced An Inconvenient Truth is “is harsh on teachers’ unions, board of education bureaucrats and politicians who give lip service to change.”

The public employee unions and teachers unions are bankrupting cities, states, and our federal government.  It’s impossible for the government entities to give the wages, benefits, and retirement plans that they promised these unions.  They entered into the agreements knowing that future leaders and Americans would be holding the bag for the votes they bought making these union agreements.  Now the unions are pressuring the government to give what isn’t there.

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