When I first started in school choice activism, the recommended approach was to never criticize the teachers unions. The union PR machine has been so effective over the decades that just to mention the roadblocks they routinely throw up in front of education progress was a third rail. It would earn you the label "union buster" among the very people you were trying to persuade. School choice is a bipartisan issue with plenty of Democrats in favor of it, but it was hard to enlist those Democrats to team up in the fight when it might seem like you’re asking them to denigrate the union system.So we stayed away from it and made our arguments in other ways. There’s too much money and not enough accountability; stats show choice works; poor minority students benefit most from school choice; school choice creates competition which drives public schools to up their game. There’s a long list of persuasive arguments and in the interest of not creating an unnecessary divide in delicate alliances, we tiptoed around the union issue.
But I can no longer deny the biggest issue facing the success of our students. I can no longer pretend that the number one roadblock to providing the education our communities need is just a "side issue." I can no longer be a party to the perpetuation of greed in the name of "coming together." What has happened to our children during COVID has stripped away the last of my tolerance.
Teachers unions are a scourge and it is time to end them.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a student of history and I understand the power of collective bargaining and how it changed our society for the better during the industrial age. The wealthy and entrepreneurial industrialists pushed us into the era of American dominance and that is a good thing. There is no doubt that without being forced into accountability, many would have continued to abuse and overwork desperate employees and their children. Unionizing forced that accountability.
Power and greed are not exclusive to any one economic set, and unfortunately as unions began to increase in influence and dues money, they also increased their greed. Which is fine when a private company is negotiating with union bullies. That’s a transactional relationship and companies can be held accountable for their own terrible negotiations. I don’t like it, but it’s private business. Everyone can do what they want.
Public school teachers are paid by the taxpayers. When they unionize they do not do so against a large corporation like Ford or GE. They are necessarily unionizing against the taxpayer. Except the taxpayers have no say in negotiations. It’s a one-sided relationship, with unions having all the power and their bosses (we, the taxpayers) having no choice but to pray they negotiate themselves into actually serving our children.
So far they have failed miserably. It should be no surprise, given that they are unions for teachers, not students. It’s right there in the name. But it is shameful that people like Randi Weingarten keep using our children as shields for their greed, pretending that everything they do is for the students. Nothing they do is for children and I might not even mind that if they were honest about it.
The Weingartens of the world have no interest in making better opportunities for our children. The greedy underbelly of their noble exterior has been stripped away by COVID. While parents helplessly watched their children sink into isolation and depression and lose over a year of vital skills work, the teachers unions bullied local schools boards and muscled their way into the CDC — of all places — to enforce their desires on the COVID language coming out of the nation’s health entities.
It was supremely evil.
It is even more evil that Randi Weingarten — president of America’s most powerful teachers union and the head of the lone stumbling block preventing schools from returning to education — has been trying to gaslight Americans into believing that she’s been advocating to get kids back to school this whole time.