Economist Mark Perry on School Choice and Teacher Unions
I am pleased to present Economist Mark Perry’s comments on Randi Weingarten’s school choice bashing. and reminds us of Steve Jobs’ putdown of teacher unions from 1995. Once again, teacher union officials treat parents and students the same way they treat teachers – with scorn for any personal preferences. As they force teachers to pay up or join they leave students and parents no choice but to attend or pay. Mark J. Perry is concurrently a scholar at AEI and a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus. He is best known as the creator and editor of the popular economics blog Carpe Diem. At AEI, Perry writes about economic and financial issues for American.com and the AEIdeas blog.
Exhibit A: In a speech to her union’s convention last Thursday, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten asserted that “The real pioneers of private school choice were the white politicians who resisted school integration.” She called school-choice programs the “only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” She compared Betsy DeVos, the U.S. secretary of education, to climate-change deniers for supporting school-voucher programs. And she exhorted the crowd to resist school-choice advocates’ “decades-long campaign to protect the economic and political power of the few against the rights of the many.”