February 17, 2015
Late last month, Wisconsin Gov.Scott Walker told an Iowa audience that the state’s “outstanding teacher of the year” in 2010-11 had been laid off because union seniority rules. He was lying. The woman he mentioned had won a very obscure award for first-year teachers—and on Feb. 9, the woman who actually was Wisconsin’s high-school teacher of the year denounced him in an open letter.
Instead of blaming the seniority system for the younger teacher’s layoff, Claudia Klein Felske wrote, Walker should have blamed his own “systematic defunding of public education to the tune of $2.6 billion.” Noting that Walker had tried to delete legal language stating that the University of Wisconsin system’s purpose “is the search for truth,” she added, “Hmm… I guess I shouldn’t be surprised about that one.”
