This New York Post editorial caught my eye (emphasis added):

As Carl Campanile reported in Monday’s Post, the city teachers union is spending more furiously than a drunken sailor: In the year ending last June 30, the UFT upped outlays by $13 million over the year before, to $182.1 million. That equals the entire budget for the city of Albany.

It helped that the union collected an extra $7 million in dues (to $151 million total), thanks to 7,000 new teachers hired under Mayor de Blasio’s Universal Pre-K program.

UFT boss Michael Mulgrew’s smug justification for it all? “Defending public education is increasingly expensive.”

As the push from the governor and the General Assembly for more unionized “universal pre-K” offerings from Rhode Island’s bank-breaking government schools continues, with talk of how it increases equity and all that, remember this central motivation.  Some of those union outlays go politicians, after all.  It certainly isn’t clear that such programs actually benefit children.

Of course, in Rhode Island, we’re a long, long way from putting our children before powerful special interests.