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How Long Will We Tolerate Teachers’ Unions Abusing Their Power?
Over the past two years, in particular, we have learned a great deal about teachers and their unions, and the picture is a grim and tragic one. Teachers only care about exerting power and controlling the education environment, and the students be damned. School superintendents, administrators can only meekly go along with the unions’ demands, and politicians aren’t willing to sacrifice the political and financial power that the unions wield over them. Everyone has something to gain.
Except our children.
Where are we now, and how did we get to this point?
During the coronavirus pandemic, teachers dictated rules that no one dared to counter: they made demands about when schools would be open, whether students could attend in-person, who needed to wear masks, the role that vaccinations would play, whether teachers would teach remotely or in-person (or a combination). Meanwhile, the damages inflicted on the children seemed irrelevant to the unions:
Some states, like Texas, opened their doors in the fall. However, schools in many other states such as Virginia, New York, Kentucky, Oregon, California have remained shuttered or at least partially so. Forcing children to learn virtually has adversely affected their emotional and mental well-being. The CDC found that suicide and depression rates among children have skyrocketed. After an unusual uptick in suicide rates this last week, the Clark County School District — the nation’s fifth-largest school district that pulls students from Las Vegas, among other cities in Nevada — decided to reopen schools for in-person learning as soon as it could. There’s another point to make here: Virtual learning doesn’t work very well. NPR recently reported that 4 of 10 teenagers don’t even log on for virtual learning! Children at risk for abuse and neglect are even more so with their school buffers gone.
And many states appeared helpless to take action and save our kids from these union mandates.
Now the teachers are demanding, in spite of rising resistance from parents, that Critical Race Theory be taught in the schools. At one time, school boards and superintendents decided the schools’ curriculum, but in many districts they either don’t know what is being taught in their schools, don’t care what is taught, support CRT in spite of its racist goals, or are cowed by the teachers’ unions. And the unions continue to mandate that CRT be taught:
One of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions vowed Tuesday to go to court to allow the teaching of critical race theory.
Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers, said in a speech that she considers teaching critical race theory to be teaching ‘the truth.’
‘Mark my words. Our union will defend any member who gets in trouble for teaching honest history. We have a legal defense fund ready to go. Teaching the truth is not radical or wrong. Distorting history and threatening educators for teaching the truth is what is truly radical and wrong,’ Ms. Weingarten said at the union’s virtual professional development conference.
The National Education Association agrees with this decision.
It has been over ten years since a country-wide effort was made to limit the power of the teachers’ unions through collective bargaining. It was a dismal failure, primarily because politicians are beholden to the unions. And they still are.
But my hope is that the power centers begin to shift. Citizens, particularly parents, need to tell their legislatures that they cannot, must not, cater to the teachers’ unions any longer. Voters need to tell those running for political positions that they must include changing the collective bargaining laws in their platforms, and must follow through when elected. They must be willing to sacrifice the perks they are given by the unions and transform the balance of power. They must refuse to acknowledge that teachers’ unions are special-interest groups worthy of recognition and compliance.
But the only way this can happen is for people to realize that the teachers’ unions have gone too far and must be stopped in this escalation of power. These unions are the source of the abuse of our educational institutions and the distortions of the history curriculum we are teaching our children. We are seeing parents protesting at the local and county levels; they are running for school boards and actively promoting their cause: the healthy and proper education of our children should be in the hands of citizens, not teachers and administrators.
It’s time to take back our education system, city by city, county by county, and state by state.
It’s time.
Published in Education
Those pesky citizens, don’t they know what we think is good for them?
Apparently wanting to be on the local school board makes one “QAnon” these days.
I think some state — bless our Federal system — should adopt a 100% voucher system. This could be done through the legislative process or by an initiative.
What is needed is model draft initiative or statutory language that effects the voucher system, answering such questions as what to do about outstanding public-school debt and retirement set-asides, deductions (if any) for religious teaching (but not history of religions), provisions for the mentally and physically disabled, and potential insolvency of public schools, etc.
The starting point, for example, would be the amount of current spending per student–$30,000 per student in New York City, which if transferred to parental control would cause a certain shake-up.
Fighting the American Federation of Teachers with universal choice would quickly diminish their power.
I just now got to this question. Are we supposed to be making over-under bets on it?
I retired two years ago after teaching for 24 years in three different states. Then, I was asked to come back as a long-term sub in my old school here for a teacher who left for a different job. Three days later, everything was shut down for Covid. However, we didn’t just “sit at home”– every kid had a computer from the school and we did on-line classes. (First grade— It was hard!!)
I subbed again at a different building in the fall when this school district started up with on-line school again and I ended up doing the entire school year again! We went back in-person in February.
I’m a conservative … It’s Ricochet, okay?? But, without my teacher’s union when I first started (at age 43) (I raised my five kids before I finished college and started teaching) I would have been persecuted to death by a really vindictive principal who got reined in by the teacher’s union in my little district back east.
I DO agree that the national unions are just a money-grubbing group who don’t really do anything for teachers but give us a bad name. However, the local unions really do help teachers who are being treated unfairly by their school’s administration. I usually acted as my school’s rep because most of my co-workers had little children. I have also “encouraged” teachers who were clearly unable to adapt to their occupation to find another type of work.
On the individual school level, in my experience, the union affords the teachers some protection from nincompoop admin. But…the national groups are stupidly radicalized and sour many people against our profession.
I appreciate those who are making these distinctions, @cowgirl. I think they contribute a more focused picture of the entire situation.
Rather than have “toxic” admins that require countering by a union, which seems to remove the normal incentives, why not allow the impetus to get better school principals etc? If the unions thwart some of (but not all of) the rotten behavior of admins, which results in putting off the natural consequences of such situations – that no teachers are willing to work there – that seems to just ignore the actual problem.
There’s a perfectly straightforward way of doing it our way. You divide the education money for the state or the district, however you want to do it, into equal parts, allow parents to pick what school they want to send their kids to, and the money follows the kids. Perfectly easy if politicians weren’t so spineless. If public schools lost money when they lost students, the teachers’ attitudes would change in a hurry.
They’re too young to have been alive for the bicentennial.
Or, who knows what they might think a Bi-centennial even is, these days.
Didn’t SCOTUS say unions couldn’t do that anymore?
Of course they don’t. If they achieved their goals, they’d lose their reason for existence.
There are, and have been, a lot of right to work states.
I don’t happen to live in one. Are you suggesting that I should have tried to find a teaching job in at Right to Work state because I didn’t want to be part of a union?
Yes, SCOTUS did rule on that, but it is very difficult or impossible to monitor where your particular dollars are spent by the union. That being the case, it would involve some Byzantine process to show that your funds were improperly used, so they do what they have always done and accept signed notices from members who don’t want their dues used for political purposes. Nothing changes.
It would certainly be your decision whether or not to.