While the Republican effort to break Tennessee's teachers unions appears to be going swimmingly, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is running into more push back than he probably anticipated. Walker cleverly omitted police and firefighters from his push to break public sector unions, focusing instead on the weakest and [for some reason] more reviled public employees. However, it turns out that those unions joined in solidarity with teachers and other public sector employees yesterday in large demonstrations across the state. Of course, in Beckistan, this is seen as another sign of the "coming insurrection"... if only...

More to the point, I'd like to take this opportunity to offer an example of why teachers need the due process that is provided by union protection.

Imagine Inc. is one of those intentionally ambiguous charter school organizations that seems to be able to bill itself as both a non-profit and for-profit entity depending on the regulatory infrastructure of the school districts in which it operates. Like the majority of charter organizations, they are very anti-union, and the result is that Imagine teachers have no due process protection.

Once upon a time, teachers personal lives were not their own. They were told how to behave and dress, whether they could have children and [by proxy] if they could be sexually active, and their ability to participate in the politics of the public sphere was severely circumscribed. It was through union organizing that teachers were able to break out of these strictures. If you think that such craziness is relegated to the past, I'd like to introduce you to an old friend of mine who became the victim of a local church rumor mill and was dropped prior to her tenure review despite having an exemplary record of performance evaluations.