You could not find someone more supportive teachers. I have been one, having taught at the pre-school, high school and college levels. My husband taught for over four decades. So I have immense respect for what teachers do, how hard most of them work, compassion for those who lose ground in endless school cutbacks, and anger at the endless mind-numbing demand do “do more with less.” You cannot continue to do more with less after years and years of cuts. You especially cannot do more with less when public schools are under attack for annihilation by the likes of Bill Gates, Jeb Bush, Michele Rhee, Tony Tata and other privateers who are feeding the 1% ambition to gobble up our entire infrastructure and take over any value of a system the US taxpayers paid for. I support education with every single vote I make. I have never voted against a school bond, ever, which is probably more than some VEA members can say. When it comes to elections, candidate choice matters. What on earth would it electioneer against their interests? How else to describe the completely nuts Virginia Education Association (VEA) endorsements of delegates who will never be on their side. No matter Yost’s claims to the contrary and a single vote or two, he will never be VEA’s or teachers’ supporters. I submit that, in their {endorsement http://blogs.roanoke.com/thebu… of Joseph Yost and Nick Rush, cowardice, insanity, or utter stupidity underlie their move. I think the VEA was afraid to endorse the Democratic challengers in these races because they were assuming inevitability of the two unfriends of the 99%.
We’ve all met them, the teachers who would vote against their own and their students’ interests. You know whom I’m talking about. They vote against school bonds and wonder why they have too many students in their classrooms. They even want to use vouchers for their own children to go to the school of their “choice.” And yet they get angry when they get furlough notices, as if there aren’t downside to the kill-public education GOP vouchers. Time and again, these same teachers undermine the very profession which puts dinner on their tables. And their organization, the VEA, is worse. It knows there is nothing whatsoever to be gained by supporting Yost and Rush. Have they ever studied Rush’s behavior on the Montgomery County Board of Supervisors?
Joseph Yost is a McCrory kind of guy. He talks a good game and then, when push comes to shove, he sides with the Tea Party. Does not VEA remember who paid the largest portion of Yost’s campaign fund? Does the word T-Bob mean anything to you? The same for Nick Rush. As this website shows, Yost will go with the wingnut Cuccinelli wing of the Republican (Tea) Party nearly every time. I wonder how VEA members will feel when they no longer have clean drinking water and Yost was part of the problem. Women can’t even have an equal rights amendment, but Yost wants to give a fetus the ights of “personhood.” Does this largely female teaching workforce really think Yost has their best interests at heart when he would do such a thing. Even Mississipi citizens thought such a personhood amendment was too extreme. But not Joseph Yost.
Time and again, voters fall for the kind of deception of candidates like Yost who came heavily funded by some of the most conservative Republicans in America. You can almost hear the stupidity as they utter empty slogans about his “bipartisanship.” Well, no, he’s not bipartisan. Destroying all 21st Century accomplishments is not bipartisanship. Going backwards is not bipartisanship. It is extremism, no matter how ‘nice” the VEA thinks the characters are.
It is beyond shameful that the VEA, whose teachers have been targeted by the entire Republican establishment for extinction, could possibly lend their support to two of the GOP’s young pretenders.
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