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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Chicago Teachers Union President Mocks Arne Duncan, Jokes About Smoking Pot
-- With Kids in the Audience
By Susan Jones
November 15, 2011
(CNSNews.com) - The head of the Chicago Teachers Union -- addressing a
teachers' conference in Seattle last month -- joked about spending her
college years "smoking lots of weed" and "self-medicating" -- then
apologized because "there are kids here."
"I wasn't supposed to say that, right? Too late," Karen Lewis says in a
YouTube video that was picked up by an education blogger and Chicago
newspapers.
The Chicago Sun-Times noted that Lewis is a former standup comedian. In the
YouTube video, she also makes fun of U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan's
lisp, and wonders if he was "self-medicating" at Harvard University:
"He was an athlete, so he might not have been self-medicating, but I wouldn'
t count on it," Lewis says. "You know he went to private school," she says
at another point, "because if he’d have gone to public school, he’d have
had that lisp fixed. I know, that was ugly, wasn’t it? I’m sorry.”
The Chicago Teachers Union, in a statement on its website, says the “edited
” Lewis YouTube video is being promoted by “right-wing, anti-public
education advocates.”
“Karen Lewis has always been candid and outspoken when discussing the
personalities and policies that have adversely impacted public education in
our nation,” the CTU said in Lewis’s defense. “The observations she made
about herself and other public figures were an attempt at humor and candor
before a live audience. Though these comments were made more than a month
ago, today they are being presented out of context in order to shift the
focus from bad public policy decisions in education to attacks on her
character.”
CTU said Lewis was trying to “lighten the mood during a long and serious
discussion about the on-going campaign to blame and vilify teachers for
everything wrong with public education.”
"As a classroom teacher with more than two decades of experience and now as
a leader of the third largest teachers union in the country, this teaches me
that I can never let frustrations get in the way of carrying out my
responsibilities as a leader," the CTU quoted Lewis as saying.
The Chicago Sun-Times quoted a spokesman for Duncan as saying that Lewis has
apologized for her remarks about him. "She apologized, he accepted it, and
he's moving forward," Duncan's spokesman was quoted as saying.
Tuesday's Miami Herald reports that another teachers’ union leader is being
investigated for allegedly using union dues to reimburse employees, board
members and others for their political contributions.
Four of the union’s executive board members are calling for Broward
Teachers Union President Pat Santeramo to step down. |
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