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Bob Davidson
When I think of the AFT and union teachers, I remember a charter I drove in the 1970s when I was a UT shuttle bus driver and going to graduate school in linguistics and literature. There was some brouhaha about a proposal for competence testing of public school teachers that the legistlature was considering, and some teachers were outraged. Several of us deluded little Austin-poisoned airhead bus drivers volunteered to drive them back and forth from their headquarters to the state capitol for a demonstration one pleasant Saturday. We donated our meagre wages for the charter to help out what we considered a righteous cause -- those evil conservative state reps treating our state's sainted educators as something less than the highly educated professionals that they were. We drivers were rewarded with professionally printed tshirts with some slogan -- I don't remember exactly what it said, but it sounded very righteous.
My friend Sherry Winnette, Ward's late wife (Ward Winnette is the brother of our classmate Miles -- he graduated a year ahead of us) was a fairly new AISD special ed teacher at the time and one of the outraged educators. Sherry rode over on my bus and sat behind directly me with one of her friends -- they were happy about letting the world know how they felt. Everyone was excited, there were TV trucks and liberal politicians all around, and it was like a festival on the capitol grounds.
I didn't see the actual rally since I was hauling bodies there in miserable traffic and maneuvering a large bus through narrow passages full of obstacles, but I could tell it was exuberant. We had to park in the AFL-CIO buliding parking lot until it was over, then hauled the tired teachers back to their union office.
The thing that stands out in my mind was the signs and placards the teachers were carrying. Many of them were printed ones from their union, full of catchy slogans -- I wish I could remember some, but the general attitude was "test politicians not teachers." The only one I remember was "If you can read this, thank a teacher."
Sherry and her friend rode back with me and were obviously upset so I invited them to join me and the other drivers at a bar we frequented after we returned our buses.
When we met up, over a pitcher and nachos, we drivers were feeling full of virtue. The teachers were highly pissed -- they felt humilliated being part of a demonstration where the homemade signs were full of gross grammatical errors and misspelled words. We drivers hadn't noticed. The local news on the bar TV covered the demonstration, and the reporters seemed to enjoy focusing on the more egregious signs. The two teachers insisted that their professional compatriots had convinced them that competency testing of teachers was absolutely necessary and they both were quitting the teachers' union.
We brain-addled drivers were all graduate students or on hiatus from school and full of leftwing indoctrination so we were sure that our friends were over-reacting to a few outliers among their cohorts.
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