Life isn’t fair: The teachers’ union boss’ teachable moment

by Dan Proft I stand corrected. The teachers’ unions do have the ability to educate. New Jersey Education Association Executive Director Vincent Giordano recently provided, however inadvertently, the greatest teachable moment in public education since American Federation of Teachers President Al Shanker said, “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the...

by Dan Proft

I stand corrected. The teachers’ unions do have the ability to educate.

New Jersey Education Association Executive Director Vincent Giordano recently provided, however inadvertently, the greatest teachable moment in public education since American Federation of Teachers President Al Shanker said, “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.”

This was the exchange between an interviewer and Mr. Giordano as to the matter of children from low-income families relegated to failing schools with no identifiable way out:

Host: They can’t afford to pay, you know that. Some of these parents can’t afford to take their child out of these schools.

Giordano: Life’s not always fair and I’m sorry about that.

Much of the reaction to Giordano’s comments including the call for his resignation by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has been presented through the conventional class-envy prism through which the Progressive-Old Media complex funnels all public policy matters. Let’s see how much Giordano makes. $500,000? Oh, well, isn’t it easy for him to dismiss the lack of choice for poor families when he has all the choices in the world thanks to his generous salary – and arguments to that effect.

Interpreting the political rhetoric of teachers’ union bosses is like deriving the meaning of poetry. If you get sidetracked by the literal you miss the important underlying meaning.

The critical takeaway from Mr. Giordano’s words (and attitude) is his implicit concession that the schools he is paid to defend are, in fact, inferior.

His back-of-the-hand “life’s not always fair” sop to the status quo is nothing less than an admission that the schools he wants to salvage do not provide the same opportunity as the schools to which families would send their children if they were able.

Pundits on both the right and the left should dispense with the cheap moral indignation and ask the next obvious question,“Should K-12 education be centered on propping up a system, the defenders of which agree is inferior, because it serves the adults?”

Mr. Giordano’s tacit “hey, the world needs ditch diggers too” acknowledgement of the inferiority of the schools over which he presides reveals an even deeper tenet of modern liberalism: the belief that inferior circumstances are the lot of inferior people.

The truth is liberals are betting against the very “less thans” whose interests they purport to represent.

You say you want to send your child to a better school? The Regressive Left doesn’t buy it.

“How could you understand the choice well enough to make an informed decision even if you had one?”

“So many parents do not care and would not take advantage of the choice.”

If these arguments sound familiar, they should. They are as ubiquitous as they are unmoored from both fact and logic. These arguments are not founded on well-intentioned concern but rather on a belief that you cannot achieve the life you want for yourself.

When President Obama talks of everyone having a “fair shot” that shot is to be determined for you not by you.

The Regressive Left seeks to socialize the “less thans” to accept their place. The “less thans” shall be patient as the Regressive Left “works on it” so they don’t have to because they can’t.

The Regressive Left practices a sort of secular predestination whereby they condition people for failure and then feign fatalism in the face of dependence. Well, what do you expect from “those people”?

This is why Mr. Giordano is “sorry” about life “not always being fair.” The self-congratulatory Regressive Left does not wish people of lesser means had better opportunities; they wish people of lesser means were not lesser people.

Don’t you get it? You could never be Mr. Giordano.

On the other hand, what if children from poor families could access, based on merit, the same educational opportunities as those from wealthy families?

If not for the institutional advantages of Regressive Leftists who propagate closed systems, it might turn out that that those who are supposed to benefit from life not being fair find out just unfair they have been.

Dan Proft is a Senior Fellow with the Illinois Policy Institute.