As student scores plummet, teachers unions play politics and make them worse
Washington Examiner
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After another summer of radical activity from the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, Congress should revoke the unique federal charter of the former, and federal agencies should ensure both groups comply fully with labor laws.
Both unions long ago abandoned their proper missions, namely ensuring reasonable working conditions for school staff. Both now are avatars of the extreme Left, focused less on educational attainment than on partisan political activism and radical social crusades.
TEACHERS UNIONS SPENT SUMMER SCHEMING HOW TO BRING LIBERAL IDEAS INTO CLASSROOMS
Witness the major summer conferences of each organization this year. As highlighted in a new report by the Defense of Freedom Institute, the teachers unions keep pushing contentious racial and gender agendas, try to conceal what they are really doing, seek to block parental involvement in education, and push disciplinary laxity at the cost of classroom safety. The Aug. 16 report, called “Summer of Woke, the Sequel,” details a litany of the unions’ conference obsessions that militate against the interests and views of large majorities of parents. The NEA openly advocates violations of Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act by advocating hiring preferences based on race and gender while literally opposing “employment practices that treat people equally regardless of ethnicity or gender.”
This all comes at the expense of a focus on improving teaching, which should be the top priority after recent calamitous drops in national education scores. Consider a resolution on transgender issues that the AFT passed; it advocates “inclusive policies relating to … bathrooms and locker rooms.” It also commits the union and its teachers to work with activist groups that, among other things, demand that staff should avoid telling parents when calling students by “pronouns” that do not fit their biological sex.
The NEA this year released a “Pronoun Guide” listing the “most common pronouns the non-words “ze,” “zim,” “zir” “zirs,” and “zerself” in lieu of he, him, her, hers, and herself. This isn’t a joke. The unions want to fill children’s heads with nonsense instead of teaching them English. One of the NEA’s summer sessions, according to the think tank’s report, “argues that ‘cisnormativity,’ the assumption that people’s gender identity matches their biological sex, ‘can be limiting for [differently gendered people] … and cisgender folks alike.” Schoolchildren should be learning facts, the truth, what is what, at school. They should not be told a pack of ideological lies.
The jargon alone is nonsensical enough, even before one ponders why a school-employee union is pushing teachers to embrace balderdash rather than concentrating on why their students cannot adequately read or do math.
Much of the rest of the unions’ agendas were similarly focused on political and societal change rather than proper classroom concerns or even on teacher pay and working conditions. The NEA called for the packing of the Supreme Court with extra (left-liberal) members to overpower the originalist and textualist majority among the current nine justices. The AFT called for pushing children as young as kindergarten into progressive social action.
When they do address actual school concerns, the unions are utterly wrongheaded. Faced with worsening discipline and classroom violence, the NEA says the cure is to remove “impediments” such as “institutional racism, white supremacy culture,” and a better “network of public services” undergirded by “the adoption of racial and social equity principles at all levels of policymaking.” Such policies make discipline worse.
Whatever happened to just providing administrative backing for teachers who try to keep classes from descending into chaos?
Unlike most unions, the NEA actually enjoys a federal charter as a supposedly “patriotic and national organization.” That charter, strangely, provides perquisites not afforded to the other 94 far less political or controversial federally chartered organizations such as the U.S. Olympic Committee, Little League Baseball, and the American Legion. Unlike almost all those others, the NEA also lobbies, and it runs a multimillion-dollar political action committee. As the Defense of Freedom Institute notes, the NEA also enjoys unique property tax exemptions. It deserves none of them.
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Longtime centrist reformer Philip K. Howard argues persuasively that public-sector unions are inherently both unconstitutional and disruptive to proper functioning of a representative democracy. At the very least, the national education union should enjoy no special privileges. It and the AFT should be policed to ensure they inform teachers properly they have a constitutional right not to join if they so desire.
Schools, students, and teachers themselves would be far better off if the NEA and AFT were denuded of unwarranted power. Their abuses have gone on far too long.