From the NEA: Van Roekel's Keynote Dodges the Obama Question

[Catshrink]

Van Roekel's Keynote Dodges the Obama Question

The NEA president's keynote address is always the highlight of the first day of the National Education Association's Representative Assembly.

This year's has got to have been a particularly difficult one to put together. A lot of delegates clearly have an ax to grind with Barack Obama, and NEA President Dennis Van Roekel needed to address that. After all, it's important to show your members that their dues are going toward something.

But while it's easy enough to get delegates fired up against a Republican president, it's an order of magnitude riskier to do so when it involves a Democratic president whose ear you need to keep.

As a result, the keynote address this year had Van Roekel twisting himself into a bit of a rhetorical pretzel, widely criticizing Obama administration policies (and Congress in general) with some barn-burning lines, but treading lightly with the man himself.

Take this piece, for instance. Van Roekel pointed out that Race to the Top focuses heavily on test scores for measuring student and teacher performance, while during the campaign, Obama had complained about fill-in-the-bubble tests. In doing so, Van Roekel hit the message home while not actually calling the U.S. president out for this apparent contradiction.

More:

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2010/07/van_roekels_keynote_dodges_the.html

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. Our union leaders need to speak up and speak on behalf of the membership

If they polled us, you know membership in both unions would overwhelmingly be opposed to the Obama administration's education policies. I'd bet my yearly salary on that.

There is also a lesson our leadership needs to learn from what just happened in Chicago. And Detroit is next.