AFT Apologists Defend the Indefensible

A couple of comments from readers about my take on CTU's betrayal of teachers are worth noting.  The first from edblisa:

Lois has a point. No, it's not ideal that the CTU is offering worker protection to unqualified teachers, but these are young people that were told a lie to get them to join into the TFA scheme. These are people who needed a job so that they could support themselves and family. They are people who have tried to do right by children even if they didn't go about it the right way. They still need some protection from abuse. There has got to be some kind of compromise to help these people.

The young privileged millennial resume builders who enlist in TFA for their two years of service to the corporate elimination of the teaching profession and bolster the staff of dehumanizing charter schools could have been, yes, duped when they signed up. However, if one joins the Nazi Party thinking it is an innocent patriotic enterprise, one does not continue as a Nazi when when one finds out what one has done out of naivete or stupidity.  Just following orders is not an excuse, just as needing a job to pay back school loans is not an excuse, just like resume building for law school is not an excuse.

There can be no protection for those engaged in morally reprehensible acts, which are socially unjust to the core, even if Weingarten would like to sign up charter "teachers" counteract the cratering of AFT membership that is resulting from real teachers who are appalled at AFT's self-serving compromises.

The other comment is from Michael Fiorillo:

I loathe charter schools and look forward to the day when the last one has a stake driven through its heart. However, workers deserve the right to unionize, period. And if enough charter schools unionize, they will then cease to be the teacher union-busting panacea the Overclass wishes them to be. At that point, should it arrive, there might be hope to integrate some of them into the public school system.

First, Michael assumes that workers, regardless of the the job, deserve to unionize.  And I suppose they do.  That fact, however, does not require AFT of NEA to offer affiliation to teachers working in sweat shop charters that are abusing children and exploiting female workers on a daily basis through draconian discipline systems and cultural sterilization practices and authoritarian management schemes. If charter workers were real teachers, rather than alt-cert know nothings, they could exercise the option to work in humane schools, either private or public.  Since they are not teachers, however, real schools don't want them.  Sorry about that.

Hoping to "integrate" some the charter reform schools into the public system will require the public systems to accept the unacceptable and to embrace the morally reprehensible.  School boards, I hope, will resist such an atrocity, even if AFT and NEA and NPE have no such reservations.