The harm they’ve caused should never be forgotten or forgiven.
The harm they’ve caused should never be forgotten or forgiven.
A s the school year draws to a close, many of the people who spent the past year inflicting needless harm on America’s children are seeking to rehabilitate their images and turn the page. Union-backed school boards did everything in their power to keep schools closed, but now they pretend like they wanted full-time in-person learning all along.
One reason is that many public schools, such as those in Fairfax County, Va., have suffered a dramatic drop in enrollment, and they need to persuade families to come back. Many families won’t. Another reason is that many families actually listened to unions’ anti-science rationale for keeping schools closed and are now hesitant to return, causing logistical, administrative, and financial problems for the fall.
However, the most egregious whitewashing is coming from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who announced yesterday that she wants schools to reopen fully this coming fall. But nobody has done more over the past year to inflict harm on children than Weingarten, National Education Association President Becky Pringle, and their fellow union bosses. The intentional damage they’ve caused to the health, emotional and physical wellness, and education of our nation’s children should never be forgotten or forgiven.
Weingarten’s attempts to change the narrative are coming in the form of speeches and television appearances to advocate full-time school . . . next fall. Nobody should buy it. First, even for next year, her full-time posture includes several anti-science preconditions, such as distancing and smaller classes. These are the same excuses teachers’ unions leaned on this year to keep the school doors locked. But it’s mostly an attempt to conceal the role they played over the past year in advocating against the needs of kids.
Documents acquired by the watchdog group Americans for Public Trust this month showed the intimate level of involvement that powerful teachers’ unions had in approving scientific guidance on school reopenings just this February. A flood of emails and phone calls between the Biden White House, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and union bosses demonstrated exactly who was approving scientific guidance. It wasn’t scientists or public-health experts.
At a time when the American Academy of Pediatrics and countless epidemiologists and medical experts were publicly begging authorities to issue guidance that would permit apprehensive districts to open their doors, our health leaders were relying on major political donors such as Weingarten instead. The unions helped write the guidance and then used it as an excuse to keep schools closed.
See, it’s harder to lobby for billions of dollars in relief for closed schools if schools are open. And that was the end goal here. Not the welfare of little children, but raw political power. And it went full circle as the unions ramped up political donations by the millions to purchase acquiescence from Congress. It’s corrupt from top to bottom.
Teachers’ unions are a public menace. And it’s time for them to lose their ability to organize against children, parents, and communities. It’s time to stop allowing them to use our children as hostages for ransom money that never makes it down to its intended recipients: teachers.
See, this is not an attack on teachers. Far from it. Teachers have been poorly served by these unions as well. Teachers are underpaid and undervalued, with limited resources. This is true. The American Federation of Teachers was established in 1917. The National Education Association was established in 1857. They are some of the most prolific spenders in American politics, spending over $65 million in the last election cycle alone. And yet their constituents have become a byword for underpaid professionals.
What exactly are teachers getting from these organizations other than a bad reputation and a sizable chunk of their still-modest paychecks taken away to fuel political donations? One hundred sixty-four years of lobbying for practically nothing. Because of seniority rules, bad teachers can make more than good teachers, and schools have few financial incentives available to encourage more of the latter. Money meant for teachers ends up funneled into massive administrative bureaucracies and little else. The unions have one job, and they are always failing at it.
Parents in even well-off districts still need to supply classrooms. Students are graduating without basic knowledge that was considered rudimentary one generation ago. Teachers remain historically underpaid. But this is considered “success” for unions — so long as political cash flows to the bosses.
My children’s teachers are great. Our school is a good public school. It’s why we moved to our home. But it is administered by a union-picked school board and superintendent set on holding it back from its full potential. The union that picked our county’s school board wants to keep a system where wealthy people have access to the best public schools while poor children do not because they have no choice.
This past year has shown people across the political spectrum exactly who these unions are. They are selfish leaders in cosmopolitan bubbles who view children and parents as a nuisance rather than as the beneficiaries of schooling. They are willing to demand vaccine prioritization ahead of sick and vulnerable populations, and then after receiving vaccines, they shrug their shoulders with indifference as they still refuse to back reopening. People likely died because of this, but to these unions, it’s just business.
At the beginning of the pandemic, everyone was working with little information or knowledge. We had to be extra cautious and make risk-averse decisions for the public good. Shutting schools down was a no-brainer. But over the past year, we have accumulated a wealth of data, public-health expertise, and real-world experimentation. The evidence showed that schools do not drive community spread, that children are statistically safe from the effects of COVID-19, and that many early precautions were mostly proven unnecessary.
Nevertheless, unions mobilized against in-person instruction. They lobbied to keep kids at home and ignored the crisis within a crisis where children were suffering from rising depression, anxiety, learning loss, nutrition and exercise loss, socialization loss, and even suicide. Children were being victimized by the millions. Think about that being your legacy: harming children.
More than half the country showed us what was possible when unions were not standing in the school door. Half of the country’s students were in school full-time, five days a week, with minimal problems simply because their community wasn’t led by unions. Private schools just down the street from shuttered public schools struggled to keep up with the demand for their services as thousands of families fled the public system.
This has to stop. There are 50.7 million public-school students in the U.S., or at least there were. Becky Pringle and Randi Weingarten lobby against their needs every day. Against children. That is their legacy.
If we want to reward great teachers, if we want all children to access great schools, if we want to give kids what they need to thrive and inherit a great nation, we must give the power back to the parents. And we must never forget or forgive the unions for what they intentionally did to our children this past year.