Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

Go to the American Federation of Teachers web site and you’ll find the following claim:

The AFT has more than 3,000 local affiliates nationwide, 43 state affiliates, and more than 1.4 million members.

Getting to 1.4 million members requires some creative math, but we’ll put that aside for now. More to the point is that the union’s Labor Department disclosure report claims fewer than 725,000 full-time members.

Some of these folks aren’t teachers; they are nurses, health care professionals, state employees, education support workers, guidance counselors, etc. Some of them are teachers, but aren’t currently working as teachers, including those who have office jobs or are union officers on release time.

And now media outlets have begun to notice that some of them are teachers, but they aren’t teaching, including those in rubber rooms, teacher jails, and graveyards.

It would be an informative exercise to take those 1.4 million members and see how many are in the nation’s classrooms each and every day, teaching children full-time. Since the current AFT president reportedly had only one semester of full-time teaching experience, it may be time for the American Federation of Teachers to consider a new name.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 10:39 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.