Mike Hubbard: AEA's response display of political misdirection

When a Republican gubernatorial candidate recently questioned several actions, goals and initiatives of the Alabama Education Association, the group’s leadership hollered loudly and cried foul. I, personally, believe the response was an elaborate display of political misdirection in which the group flailed its right arm wildly in order to avert attention from what its left arm was doing.

The AEA has used the tactic quite successfully time and time again in the past, but the question of how much longer it will work remains.

AEA Executive Secretary Paul Hubbert and his second-in-command, Joe Reed, claim the group is nothing more than a “professional development association” dedicated to the improvement of education for children and teachers alike. Because the group includes the word “Education” in its name, some members of the public tacitly accept this claim.

In reality, AEA operates as a very politically active labor union dedicated solely to amassing lucrative employment benefits for its members and the election of Democratic candidates throughout state government. Its two leaders, Hubbert and Reed, serve as vice-chairs of the Alabama Democratic Party, and the list of candidates receiving contributions from the association’s political action committee reads like a who’s who of Alabama’s left-leaning politicos and public officials.

Let me be clear that any criticism being levied is not aimed at the public school teachers, administrators and other support personnel who work every day to provide our children with a quality education. I, and the Alabama Republican Party, deeply appreciate their efforts and sacrifice.

My critiques lie, instead, with the AEA leadership, who routinely block any and all efforts to institute reforms in our public education system, including those that would improve the lives and working conditions of the teachers who belong to and pay dues to the group.

As an example, I introduced a bill called the Teacher Protection Act, which would require the state to provide each public school instructor with free liability insurance in order to shield them from lawsuits filed as a result of carrying out their job duties. Providing teachers with this insurance would relieve them of both financial strain and the worry that comes with doing their jobs in a litigious era.

Sounds like a bill that AEA would easily support, right? Wrong.

Many new AEA members, mostly rookie teachers in their first year, are recruited by bullying union reps who frighten them with tales of classroom lawsuits and administrative reviews. Teachers’ only hope of survival, they say, is joining the AEA and taking part in the liability insurance it provides in return for several hundred dollars in yearly union dues.

Allowing the state to provide free insurance would remove one of the union’s biggest selling points and most successful recruiting tactics, so, of course, Hubbert and his team killed the bill – a move that was good for the union bosses but bad for public school teachers.

Performance-based pay is another idea that has been consistently proposed by education reformers and consistently opposed by AEA. Under one suggested plan, teachers who consistently excel and apply themselves would be paid bonuses based upon their reviews and successes, a form of incentive that has worked very well in the private sector world. Despite the fact that many teachers would benefit from such a fair and reasonable bonus plan, AEA, in a fit of twisted logic, believes that rewarding good teachers is somehow inherently unfair to bad teachers. Thus, all teachers lose.

From their choices for chancellor to the implementation of ethics requirements, AEA has consistently opposed most of the efforts by Gov. Riley and the State Board of Education to clean up the waste, mismanagement and corruption in the two-year college system. The group has also battled ferociously to protect double-dipping legislators who draw two state paychecks despite the many ethical questions and conflicts of interest the situation raises.

Tax cuts, charter schools, tenure reform and dozens of other issues are additional examples of much needed, common sense proposals killed time and time again by the group.

As long as the AEA continues to operate as a partisan political labor union working to put its own interests before the best interests of the state and our school children, it will continue to draw criticism from Republicans and those on the conservative end of the spectrum.

Rep. Mike Hubbard (R-Auburn) represents District 79 in the Alabama House of Representatives and is the House Minority Leader. He also serves as Chairman of the Alabama Republican Party.