The teachers’ unions have once again been caught red-handed. A manual distributed by the Michigan Education Association has come to light, and its contents are troubling.

The manual revels in the illegality of striking, comparing the unions’ efforts to drain more taxpayer dollars to the work of Gandhi. Strikes hurt children, of course, by depriving them of a stable school environment (it’s why they’re illegal, after all), but that argument would probably be unpersuasive to the teachers’ unions — they are unashamed about using children as political props:

“In terms of a bargaining message, the public responds most positively when we talk about children, quality in the classroom and the future,” the MEA manual states. “There may come a time when it’s appropriate to talk about money and benefits, but lay the groundwork first.”

The manual even suggests one slogan that it claims has worked for other locals: “It’s not about dollars and cents; it’s about our children.”

In other words: use the kids for political cover, and don’t let the public latch onto what we’re really after: “money and benefits.” Anyone who opposes using more taxpayer dollars to fund unions is “against children.”

Image via Wikipedia

The tactics come straight from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (an intriguing, oft-misunderstood book, one should note): the manual states, practically verbatim from Alinsky’s text, that union activists should “Pick a target—personalize—and polarize the opposition.” Who wants to be against children? It’s a delightfully deceptive piece of demagoguery.

Debate has raged on the right as to whether teachers’ unions are motivated by simple naivety or pure greed. Manuals like this lend credence to the latter view. (Albert Shanker, former head of the American Federation of Teachers, is reported to have remarked that “when school children start paying union dues, then I’ll start representing the interests of school children.”)

How our children benefit from teachers demanding a raise while everyone else has to tighten their belts — actually, at the expense of everyone else already tightening their belts — remains unexplained; it is simply taken for granted. Contrary to the unions’ suggested propaganda slogans, it is actually completely about dollars and cents; the handbook itself makes it quite clear that children are mere tools to aid in procuring more money and benefits to pad teachers’ pockets.

Teachers are not underpaid. The average high school teacher makes over $43,000 a year for roughly 200 days of work. Most teachers can additionally expect tenure, as well as full coverage for medical, dental, and psychiatric care. Teachers in my own county — Washington County, Maryland — receive a fourth of the day off for “planning,” and are able to “bank” unused sick days, saving them up for the future. Teachers around the country receive lavish pensions after just a few decades of work. Not only is this exponentially more exorbitant than what the vast majority of private-sector workers are used to — it’s funded at their expense. The image of the struggling schoolteacher making intense sacrifices so that she may teach inner-city children how to read is utter fantasy.

A recent political cartoon depicts two men at a bar. The first complains that evil Republican governors like Chris Christie and Scott Walker are trying to cut his pension benefits. The second turns to the first and says “What’s a pension?”

All of teachers’ outlandish, unsustainable benefits are funded completely at the expense of the taxpayer. The unions don’t care about the nation’s fiscal stability, let alone the children. While leftist protesters rage against “corporate greed,” they miss the astonishing avarice taking place every day amongst teachers’ unions and their cronies — as long as they can make out like bandits, the taxpayers — and their children — are just pawns in the game.

-Alex Knepper