Unions
A major theme currently peppering my news feed from across the country is suburban parents being arrested while speaking out at school committee meetings. John DePetro has video of one such man, Jeremy Palmer, at a school committee meeting in the Chariho district. Another parent in that district, Kelly Sullivan, describes the multiracial opposition to…
Something about the way labor unions are acting in the United States these days reminds me of the Catholic Church during a phase when it was ripe for criticism. From a Stephen Moore essay in The Epoch Times in April: Last week, the United Mine Workers of America union endorsed Biden’s energy policies. Yes, you read…
Revelations about the source of student information for a political mailer in South Kingstown give hints of the statewide machine taxpayers have to resist.
The headline from an Australia-focused article in The Epoch Times, by Rebecca Zhu, carries a lesson: “Increased School Funding Does Not Lead to Better Performance: Education Minister.” Here’s the evidence Zhu provides: Over the last 10 years, the UK has cut spending, while achieving better results in reading, maths, and science. “In the past decade, the…
Most people who pay attention to these sorts of things know that the South Kingstown school department has the dubious distinction of having as one of its governing school committee members, Sarah Markey, an actual organizer from the National Education Association of Rhode Island (NEA-RI), which is the state-level union representing the district’s teachers. That…
I’m with Rhode Island Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green in believing that negotiating teacher contracts should be a professional endeavor of well-meaning parties and that professional union organizers prevent that from being the case when they aren’t getting their way. Indeed, from the early months after her arrival in the state, I’ve been saying Infante-Green was…
Workaday Rhode Island taxpayers are in a vulnerable position right now. Progressive legislators are surging. The replacement of former House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello with Joseph Shekarchi (thanks to the electoral victory of quickly-proving-herself-a-far-left-progressive Republican Barbara Ann Fenton-Fung) is teaching Rhode Island too late that Mattiello really was a firewall against bad leftist policies. And newly…
The featured image of this post, which is one of several paid ads that the Providence Student Union has placed around Providence, according to Steve Ahlquist on Uprise RI, illustrates how off base the demands of progressive ideology have thrown young activists. The full list of 23 asserted rights isn’t much better. Note to students: Your…
For this week’s conversation, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss the complete lack of will to fix education for Rhode Island kids or reduce abuse for Rhode Island taxpayers.
Not a lot of time is required to understand how collective bargaining is supposed to work. In the private sector, management has incentive to increase profits and squeeze savings out of workers, so employees coordinate their efforts so they have leverage as a group to protect their own interests. Given that they are bound together…