Pedro Colon, Stooge for Thugs

...picking up where we left off last night...

The Teachers' Union (WEAC) knows they are in a bind. They cannot mount a direct, frontal assault on Choice schools such as St. Marcus, Messmer, Notre Dame Middle School, St. Joan Antida, or St. Anthony's without looking like thugs. And they don't want to look like fools by attacking these eminently successful organizations.

But we all know that WEAC is an organization which will employ thuggery. They have fought School Choice from the very beginning. They have employed deception, outright lying, and every regulatory and governmental trick they could find.

So they need to find a fool who will work as their stooge.

And they did. His name is Pedro Colon. (He's not the only stooge; the other one sits in the Governor's Mansion when he's not standing in the schoolhouse door.)

It was Colon's turn to screw the Choice schools as a member of Joint Finance (Motto: "Smoke a joint, do finance!!")

McIlheran allows Pedro to make it clear that Pedro is a fool and that he is WEAC's stooge-du-jour.

Lawmakers included this paragraph: "Choice program - Bilingual education. Require a choice school with an enrollment of more than 10% limited-English proficient pupils to have a bilingual-bicultural education program, beginning in the 2010-11 school year."

Meaning what? The man who wrote the provision, state Rep. Pedro Colón (D-Milwaukee), told me he did not have any particulars in mind. He said he simply felt sympathy as someone who learned English in school and that "there's been a concern in the bilingual teacher community" in Milwaukee Public Schools about what private schools might or might not be doing.

"I don't know what they do over there," he said of private schools, nor does he know what the rule, once drafted into law, should actually require, though he said the mandate is "a fairly minor one."

Stooges never really know what they're doing--that's the first sign, folks...

For what schools should do, said Colón, ask Ramón Cruz, the man who was his childhood principal. "He can tell you," said Colón.

Stooges are stupid. Seems that StoogePedro never covered his ass...

So I asked. Cruz, as it happens, now is principal of St. Anthony's School, where nearly all of the 1,000 students come from Spanish-speaking homes.

"That will create a problem for us," said Cruz of the mandate. He knows what bilingual programs involve, having run them at MPS.

I'm SHOCKED! Shocked, I say!!

Bilingual programs put that fluency off for years, said Cruz. If parents want them, such programs are freely available at neighboring MPS schools. They cannot get immersion, however, at MPS.

(Unless you actually want children to be educated in a language--such as German, or French. But that's only allowed for upper-middle-class folks, you see...)

Stooges generally work for racketeers. That's the third sign.

The mandate not only screws up the curriculum ...it means the school would have to replace something like 10% to 15% of its faculty. While most of the teachers speak some Spanish, a bilingual program would require ones with different licenses. Such teachers are hard to hire these days -...and St. Anthony's can't just add extra staff "or we'll go bankrupt," said school President Terry Brown.

We need not mention who (cough cough...WEAC) controls "licensing" in the Wisconsin Public Instruction monopoly. Racketeering 101: first, you control the commodity's availability. Then you force your victim to purchase the commodity.

Pedro, you stooge! You think your masters will stand up for you?

Fool.