Are Public Schools More Segregated Than Ever?

Robert Engler reports:

fifty years of public education in Chicago under the direction of the urban Democrats has done little to assimilate minorities nor has it advanced integration in the city. Even with the anniversary of the celebrated U. S. Supreme Court decision, Brown v. The Board of Education, Chicago's schools are as segregated as ever. The schools have gone from being separate but equal to being separate and unequal.

Nor is it in the interest of teacher's unions to educate students. Consider the NEA (National Education Association) that represents teachers and adjunct faculty at some schools and colleges in the Chicago area. When the average adjunct professor makes less than $2,500 teaching one course, and the president of the NEA, Reg Weaver, with an office in Washington, D. C. makes more than $365,000 a year in salary and combined benefits, it is obvious that teacher's unions are not set up to further education, but simply to further the life-style of the bureaucrats who run the unions.

In an era of copy machines, computers and the Internet, is there any reason why a union executive has to make such a salary? These union leaders should make no more than the average teacher makes if they are to truly understand how teachers live, and then represent those teachers. The NEA could be run out of a Washington, D. C. office with a few computers, a couple of secretaries and a bank of phones. There is no good reason why a union president has to rent a yacht to entertain politicians.

The purpose of public education is not to educate students but to extract tax dollars for those on the public payroll.