Leftover turkey. Rod Paige, Mike Pompeo and the teachers' unions.
My art is on Instagram @klonskyart.
Remember Rod Paige?
Paige was Secretary of Education in the George W. Bush administration.
It was during the Bush administration that the No Child Left Behind Act passed with broad bipartisan support.
NCLB, as it was known, was a terrible education law that pushed states to test more, prescribe classroom curriculum more, privatize more, charter more and voucher more.
Aside from being supported in Congress by Republicans and Democrats, the two national teacher unions - the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association - neither supported or opposed the law when it was being debated in Congress.
As time went on, the NEA in particular with Reg Weaver as union president, began to issue some specific criticisms of the law.
Me and former NEA president Reg Weaver.
Weaver’s criticisms caused Education Secretary Rod Paige to go bonkers.
Rod Paige reacted to Weaver’s almost mild criticisms by saying that the National Education Association was like ''a terrorist organization'' for opposing anything in NCLB.
His initial remark was described by four governors and confirmed by the Education Department. ''The secretary was responding to a question,'' said Susan Aspey, a spokeswoman for Mr. Paige. ''He said he considered the N.E.A. to be a terrorist organization.''
In a later interview Reg Weaver said: ''Secretary Paige's comments were pathetic and morally repugnant. They are no laughing matter. When our members learn of his comments, they will be outraged, and even more determined to make changes in the law.''
The Rod Paige story all came back to me this past week as rumored Republican presidential candidate Mike Pompeo accused a teachers union as being the greatest domestic threat to the United States.
This time it was American Federation of Teachers union president Randi Weingarten and her union.
Pompeo was director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Donald Trump from January 2017 to April 2018. He was secretary of state for nearly three year after that.
It appears that Pompeo is making noise as if he will challenge Trump in the 2024 primaries.
Echoing Rod Paige from 2004, the former CIA director and Secretary of State now says that the union teachers in this country represent the chief terrorist threat.
In an interview with Semafor, Pompeo explained:
It’s not a close call. If you ask, “Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?” It would be the teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids, and the fact that they don’t know math and reading or writing. These are the things that candidates should speak to in a way that says, “Here’s the problem. Here’s a proposal for how to solve it. And if given the opportunity, these are the things I will go work on to try and deliver that outcome that fixes that problem.”
Like Paige, Pompeo is just an opportunist using teachers as a scapegoat.
As I show, he’s not the first.
He won’t be the last.
Some days I wish our teacher union leaders were more deserving of the attacks.