OK, Candace may be right about college faculty unions, but the fact remains that unions are not the only problem. As I mentioned in my post, many charter schools are starting up with ideas and ideals based on diversity propaganda and race, gender, and class ideology, and so forth, as, for example, detailed by Michelle Malkin on Hispanic-themed charter schools. Here are two of them:
Aztlan Academy in Tuscon, Arizona. According to The Race, the school’s success rests on “Aztlan’s ability to integrate a meaningful Chicano Studies program into their lives, language, and academics, as a means of developing their intellects as well as their pride and self-esteem.” The school’s name—a reference to a mythical swath of the vast Southwestern U.S. expanse , which Latino activists claim is their rightful homeland and which they seek to reconquer for Mexico — says it all.
Mexicayotl Academy in Nogales, Arizona. Who needs the three R’s? At Mexicayotl, it’s all about the three M’s: me, me, me! The school’s program is “structured and developed around the concepts of identity, culture, and language.” Second mission: supporting local ethnic lobbying efforts “to right social injustices by educating the community and helping create social change.”
Bypassing the unions with school choice is therefore not going to solve the problem of getting good curricula into the schools.
And I still maintain that we alienate teachers who see the union as protecting their job security in the often awful circumstances in which they have to teach, and about which conservatives say little. In fact conservatives often idealize students and parents and make teachers the enemy. (In this conservatives are often forgetting what their own inquiries have shown about the dysfunctional families from which many of our public school students come.) I think that is wrong, wrong in principle and wrong in strategy.
UPDATE: Also, it seems to me that college faculty unions are found mainly in the public universities, and are not much of a factor in private institutions, and yet private institutions still present the same problems with distorted curricula, lowered standards, diversity propaganda, and so forth.