Our children don’t deserve to be sold out

Last week, the biggest loser wasn’t Massachusetts Senate candidate Martha Coakley or the Democratic Party or President Obama.

The biggest losers were New York schoolchildren, who were sold out by the state Legislature in favor of the tremendously powerful teachers unions.

On both a state and federal level, labor unions are proving to have more influence over our lawmakers than I ever could have imagined. Last week, the Supreme Court overturned two decades of law and much of the work of McCain-Feingold and issued a ruling in favor of corporations and labor unions.

The two are now free to spend unlimited amounts of money on advertisements to persuade voters to support or oppose specific candidates, as long as they don’t coordinate their efforts with campaigns.

Let’s not forget Obama’s backroom deal to exempt union workers from the “Cadillac tax” on their health insurance plans while the rest of us have to pay.

Now our state is once again being held captive by labor interests. Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, through a program they’ve called Race to the Top, are using a $4.3 billion pot to entice states to implement education reforms and boost student achievement. The criteria for earning the money is quite simple: States have to increase caps on charter schools, have more rigorous assessments and remove laws that disallow student test scores as a basis to evaluate teacher performance.

But of course, nothing is that easy. State law now allows only 200 charter schools. The state has already opened almost that many; in fact, New York City alone has 99. This restriction has forced 36,000 students to remain on waiting lists for city charter schools.

The guidelines for Race to the Top give each state a new number for a cap. New York has to increase its cap from 200 to 460, a number both Governor Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg support.