Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, in one of her first challenges, negotiated with striking teachers of the LAUSD for better wages and working conditions back in March while former employees demanded their jobs back for refusing the COVID mandate. It was just last month the LAUSD Board of Education voted to end its mandate.
However, recent anger toward unions lies not in the employees themselves but their leaders acting in their own interests. There’s nobody who has received more flack and deserved scrutiny than those of the teacher unions.
Most of them oppose the growing new practice of school choice, which provides viable options for children to attend schools even outside of their districts. In such cases, parents aren’t beholden to failing education institutions with terrible records and are given opportunities for quality learning. This competition in the free market drives individual schools to better their faculty and curriculum.
Of course, this must not imply all faculty members or students in said struggling institutions have the same experience or outcome.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten dismissed such attempts as “polite cousins of segregation,” which begs the question: what is racist for parents of an underprivileged student wanting to get the best education possible for their child?
Should that child, young man or woman, be trapped in an inept institution where life is made more difficult for them?
According to President of the American Federation for Children Nathaniel Cunneen from the New York Post, white-black segregation increased 35% from 1991 to 2020 and insists school choice has beneficial effects for integration.
Another example of how bureaucratic the leaders are happened when the COVID-19 pandemic began. While the blame for the initial lockdowns could be fairly placed on elected leaders and advisers, it was the insistence of people like Weingarten to keep the schools closed even when public health officials asserted it was safe for students to attend class again in fears of teachers contracting the virus. In 2020, despite her recent whitewashing of history, Weingarten called efforts to reopen schools “cruel” and “reckless” in opposition to the Trump administration.
California resisted partly because the union leaders insisted they do so and now parents are realizing the long-term consequences for the children of this state because of the lockdowns.
And guess which champion of teacher unions kept the public schools closed while he sent his children to the open private and charter schools in October 2020? Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Union leadership has mushroomed into a giant octopus with tentacles reaching out. There are many great teachers in unions but their leaders must put their student’s welfare first and must be held accountable by the parents, taxpayers and voters when possible.
