Customer Reviews

The Teachers' Unions : How the NEA and AFT Sabotage Reform and Hold Students, Parents, Teachers, and Taxpayers Hostage to Bureaucracy

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Ever wondered what happens to your union dues? Ever thought about standing up to the union if you disagree with a policy? Are you a reluctant member of a teacher union? Are you a parent tired of hearing about all the horrible thing happening in schools? If so, this is a book you must read. Mr. Lieberman discusses all aspects of the union lifestyle; Their powerful role in politcics, their strongarm tactics in the legislature, and their legalized extortion of members and parents. This is a must read for every teacher and parent. And a wake-up call for every union head across the country.

I fought the California Teachers Association in my district and watched as every position they took was against the interests of education and my two kids. I am a teacher in another district. Lieberman is saying what many, many parents rightfully say: the unions are corrupt and immoral. The CTA leadership should be in jail for fraud, lying to parents, lying to its own membership, and single-handedly bringing the state of California to its financial knees. They are crooks.
Roger S. Peterson, Rocklin, California

This book is a must read for anyone concerned about the state of education in AMerica. Mr Lieberman speaks from years of experience as a teacher and an insider in the teachers unions. I highly recommend it!

I was looking for this book on Amazon's marketplace. I ordered a used book that was described as "very good condition".
The book that arrived was IN MINT CONDITION, (I could have thought it was new), and it arrived within less then a week from the day I ordered it.
This is what I expect for service, and as long as you can maintain the quality of the products you sell, and the prompt and curtious services you provide, it will be my pleasure to continue to do buisness with you.

Early in his professional career Mike Lieberman was an advocate for teachers and of teacher unionism. He even ran for president of the American Federation of Teachers.

His platform, in his run for AFT president, was merger with the much larger National Education Assn.

Failing to win even 10 percent of the vote, Lieberman returned to academia looking for a more lucrative vocation. He created the Teacher Leadership Institute. Teacher union leaders paid hefty tuitions to attend and be trained by Lieberman and associates. Most of the attendees were from NEA affiliates.

Then, in 1972, came the merger agreement of the New York State NEA and AFT affiliates. Given his earlier advocacy of AFT-NEA merger, Lieberman was asked to lend his name to a "Teacher Unity Commission," a list of people whose prestige would encourage members of the New York State Teachers Assn/NEA to vote for the merger agreement.

"I can't do that," Lieberman said, "because I think NEA is opposed to the merger." In other words, his principled advocacy of merger had to give way to his money-grubbing.

Later Lieberman relocated to California and made his money consulting with school boards as to how they might thwart the demands of teachers for better working conditions, salaries, and benefits. He even ran for State Superintendent of Public Instruction, though he won well less than five (5) percent of the vote.

This book, one of his several diatribes against teacher unions, should be read in the context of a man who has no principles, whose only interest is making as much money as he can.

It should be clearly evident to anyone who is not a member of a teacher's union that, in today's world, the teacher's unions do indeed seem to do more harm than good. The iniquities of teacher's unions aren't unfixable, but there is much work to be done. What this book brings to light are some of the crucial issues that badly need to be addressed.

For me, this book hits home, as I am close friends with many high school teachers. In speaking with them, I've come to understand that teacher pay has emerged as a crucial issue in education. Quality teachers are universally considered the key to producing high-performing students, but Florida has struggled to attract teachers enticed by high salaries elsewhere. Florida pays about $5,000 less a year than the national average.

In Broward County, the School Board will contribute 3 percent more money into the payroll pot for the current school year. Last year, the figure was 5 1/2 percent. The new scale pays beginning teachers $32,700 and tops out with a base salary of $61,411 for those who have been teaching for twenty-five or thirty years (these figures are very low relative to the cost of living in Florida).

But about three-quarters of that money funds a pay ladder, which rewards teachers for their years of experience--called a step increase. The rest, about a half-percent, is what many teachers consider raises; and the money is not applied evenly. Teachers at the bottom of the scale receive $100 for the entire year; a third of a percent. That works out to 6 cents an hour. Someone halfway up the salary scale with about 10 years experience would earn 54 cents more each hour. In the end, benefits every one except the teachers. As my wife will now get a marginal increase of 3%, administration, union members, and school board officials will receive a 10% pay increase; so much for the integrity of America's education system.

It is completely absurd and incomprehensible to me that the people who are educating our children are being treated and paid like second-class citizens. What an embarrassment it is that our teachers receive not reverence but contempt from the powers that be. When all of these factors are honestly considered, it is easy to see why it is becoming difficult to encourage our collegiate population to become teachers; and the problem has only been intensified with the nation facing a teacher shortage and the Florida class size reduction amendment requiring thousands more teachers than in previous years.

Teachers should be getting the kind of wages that can compete with other fields in the career marketplace. Instead, today's teachers are struggling more than ever to survive on low wages and ever-rising costs of living. But today's teacher's unions are either too weak or too corrupt to make any kind of reform a reality; and it's truly a shame. More and more teachers are feeling like they got sold down the river by the very unions that are supposed to be looking out for them.

My county's school district is the second largest employer in Florida and the $600 million-plus payroll is the largest single expense in the district's $3 billion operating budget. But the people who deserve at least an equal share of that money, the teachers, will be left high-and-dry. So it begs the question: what will it take to get Teacher's Unions to focus back on the REAL needs of teachers instead of their own? I'll tell you what: outrage and action by all of us who give a hoot.

Not for weak kneed teachers to read. How can they dispute the contents so well documented by one of their own (and how!). We need more americans to be aware of the contents of this book. The evil march of teacher unions will lead to fiscal disaster in the next century.

Lieberman offers little that is new. So what if the unions pay their staffs generously-they are still earning far less than the hired guns that management uses to fight the unions. Of course the unions have more staff than political parties-so does McDonalds-This book is nothing but an anti labor diatribe by a man who failed in his attempts to lead one of the teacher unions.

I'd give the book less than one star if I could. As a former teacher union member, all I can say is thank God for my union. No one else seemed to care about school safety, or that the buildings were falling apart or that we had seven more kids in a class than other districts in the state or that we didn't have computer access at work for lesson planning and record keeping. None of this grassroots unionism is in his book, a major sin of omission. Instead he concentrates on salaries of officials, union lobbying activities,and dues. If the union sometimes took a stand on things I didn't agree with, well its a democratic organization, that's to be expected. If they didn't always do as well as I would have liked, they were the only ones with any clout on the right side of most issues. If there are union staff that made more than I did as a teacher, so what? As long as they were good at representing members'interests, which includes helping our kids, I'm not going to quibble. I want the best staff my dues money can buy. As for the bonanza from privatization that the unions are preventing, the Pentagon's bad experience with contracting out isn't mentioned once. It won't end up being a bonanza for kids, but for corporations. There's nothing there about superintendants leaving office to take cushy jobs with corporations, or other backroom deals on the corporate side. Why single out the unions? Judging by the other titles he's authored Lieberman makes his living by claiming that he has the scoop on unions and lazy teachers. I'll bet the worse he makes it sound, the more speaking engagments he gets. This is a sensationalist diatribe, but it does offer an interesting perspective on the way you can stack the deck so as to demonize anything.

Anyone who can claim to write a book on the teacher's unions and ignore the many decades of their fighting for students' and teachers' benefit is clearly only on a political hatchet mission and the truth be damned. So if your mind is already made up and you don't want reality to intrude on your pre-conceived ideas, buy this book- you'll love it.