WI Magazine: Serving whose interests? When teachers are elected to school boards, they have two conflicting masters

Mike Ford:

Jeff Ziegler is a "teacher leader" in the Madison Metropolitan School District who has never made any secret of his disdain for Gov. Scott Walker. Openly critical of the budget-repair bill that virtually eliminated collective bargaining, he didn't just sign the recall petition against the governor. He circulated it and spoke up publicly at a school board meeting in his hometown of Marshall during the height of the protests in March 2011.

"I'd just like to say I do not support what the governor's doing, with this motion to eliminate collective bargaining of public employees," he was quoted as saying. "I am very disappointed in the WASB, the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, for initially coming out and supporting this and characterizing it as, I believe they said, it balanced the negotiations.

"I don't see how you could characterize giving one side total control and the other side nothing and calling that balanced," he said.

Both the protests and the recall, of course, fell short. And chances are the effort of the union to which he belongs, Madison Teachers Inc., to nullify the law in the courts will fail, too. But that doesn't mean Ziegler, who said he was speaking only on behalf of himself that night, has no influence over how his local school board in Dane County -- which he suggested has too much power -- makes decisions.

Quite the opposite.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 6, 2012 4:52 AM
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