Teachers' union leader: "They're ready to do whatever it takes."/"It's going to get down and dirty."

John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., says:

School Board member Maya Cole criticized Matthews for harboring an "us against them" mentality at a time when the district needs more cooperation than ever to successfully educate students. "His behavior has become problematic," Cole said. "In his mind he is doing the right thing. But he doesn't see that in the political process, he's preventing good people from coming forward and running for office for the right reasons."

Board member Ed Hughes recently wrote on his blog that teachers unions "aren't all that necessary" because the district isn't "running a sweatshop." "It may be that John Matthews' ramped-up rhetoric is best understood not as a protest against school district over-reaching in bargaining, since that did not happen, but as a cry against the possibility of his own impending irrelevance," Hughes wrote.