Tag Archives: interns

The last few days have been relatively quiet on the education news front, which means we don’t have a lot of really heavy stuff to discuss. That’s probably a good thing after yesterday’s enormous post on some recent voucher research finding negative academic impacts for participating students. Still, we should never let a good blog post go to waste. There’s always good policy meat to chew on. And as it turns out, the Independence Institute Education Policy Center has been plenty busy doing exactly that despite the summer doldrums. Today we’ll play a little catch up and cover some fantastic work on the part of one of the Institute’s summer interns, who decided to tackle a critical but often ignored aspect of education policy in Colorado: financial transparency.

I’m pretty jaded for a five-year-old. Not much surprises me when it comes to edu-news. But sometimes, just sometimes, I see a headline that really catches my eye. Usually, that moment is followed by me checking the calendar for dangerous dates (remember April Fools’ Day?) and ensuring that I’m not looking at something like The Onion. That’s exactly what I did when I read the Daily Caller headline that the American Federation of Teachers’ paid interns are unionizing. Fortunately for us, it turns out that the article is genuine. I love fun Friday posts, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Apparently, there is a high level of intern disgruntlement in the United States. The Daily Caller article links to a study covering some of the issues with unpaid internships. (Full disclosure: I have not read and likely will never read this study.) AFT interns do not work on an unpaid basis. But, they have apparently grown weary of being underpaid, overworked, and receiving Spartan benefits. In other words, they are tired of being exploited by their employer. Beautifully, their employer in this case is a massive political organization that claims to be focused on protecting folks from exploitation.