The last round of Education Minnesota (the state’s biggest teachers’ union) TV ads includes one with an older guy (I can’t find the video online – perhaps EdMinn knows we’re lurking?) saying – paraphrasing closely here:

I support education.  Even though my kids aren’t in school anymore.  Even if I don’t have a lot of money for other things…this state built a great education system because people sacrificed…!

That’s a pretty slinky bit of rhetoric, there.  Ingeniously manipulative.

Of course, the public school systems have never had more money – the Republicans have added plenty of money over the past two years, by the way, although with what result I can’t tell, and either can anyone else.  And we do no have a great education system, not anymore.  We have an adequate one, very good in some places, rotten to the core in others.

But what EdMinn is asking is for you, Joe Schlub Public, is to dig deep and sacrifice, for…

…for what?

For better schools?

The Teachers Union has very little to do with how your kids are actually educated.  That’s between you and your school board.  No, the teachers union pretty much exists to protect teachers from capricious firing and lousy work conditions (not a bad thing in and of itself) and keep adding to, or at least prevent subtraction from, the pay and benefits the unions have already exacted from the politicians they helped elect in the first  place.  They don’t write curricula.  They don’t set education policy (directly).

What the ad is really telling Minnesotans is “we need you to sacrifice – like, work until you’re 70 – so that we can keep retiring with near-full-pay at 50”.

So pony up, all you lazy private sector serfs!  Er, taxpayers!