The Curse of Public Teachers’ Unions

An interview with Marissa Streit, CEO of Prager U, and Ryan Walters, currently the CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance, shared some eye-popping information about the actions of our teachers’ public unions. These organizations have betrayed the trust of our children, parents, our governments, and our entire society with their manipulation of the education system and their misuse of their power and funding.

In their conversation, Walters explained to Streit how the teachers’ unions were abusing their power. First, many local members believe that they are independent of their national unions and believe they do not fund the national, so they are not concerned with the politics of the national organization. Walters corrects this misunderstanding, which is a key purpose of the Teacher Freedom Alliance. The Alliance wants teachers to know that they can choose to opt in or opt out of their unions. Teachers also learn that the locals generally send 40% of their dues to the national.

But it gets worse.

Many teachers are encouraged to manipulate the system when a curriculum does not meet their expectations. Their beliefs usually reflect a “woke” or leftist agenda that, for example, avoids the teaching of history, or instead of providing a balanced curriculum of the pluses and minuses of early American life, they predominantly emphasize the negatives.

When Streit questioned Walters about the abominable reading scores at nearly every education level, particularly since the Covid-19 era, Walters explained that many teachers and certainly their unions were not concerned with reading skills: they were mainly focused on growing activists. On a practical, fiscal level, when unions make donations to political organizations, they expect (and usually receive) the support of those organizations. And that support may not be beneficial to the greater public.

One last point, and there are many more beyond this essay, is the influence of the book publishers. The publishers, which are dominated by people on the left, supply books for students of all ages that meet their agenda and are complicit with the unions.

In many respects, public sector unions are a curse on society. The concept of “public service” escapes them, as they focus on their own personal agendas. At one time, public unions didn’t even exist. President Roosevelt spoke out against them:

As President Franklin Roosevelt put it: ‘The process of collective bargaining… cannot be transplanted into the public service… To prevent or obstruct the operations of Government … by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.’

Unfortunately, in the 1960s, President Kennedy approved forming public unions as a way to pay them back for their support.

As the Teacher Freedom Alliance makes headway, Democrats are fighting back. Hawaiian legislators accused TFA of trying to get union members to forfeit union membership through deceptive means and pamphlets of false information, and they attempted to stop Walter’s group through legislation. But, since the information provided to teachers wasn’t actually untrue, the legislation failed.

On the other side of the coin, though, Florida took action that would make establishing and maintaining public unions more difficult, pointing out the taxpayer-funded benefits that the unions have accrued.

Public unions have seriously abused their benefits and have outlived their usefulness. These unions are depriving our kids of a proper education and brainwashing them with propaganda that doesn’t belong in the schools.

It’s time to make a concerted effort to stop — and even eliminate — teachers’ unions.

[originally published in American Thinker]