Re: As student scores plummet, teachers unions play politics and make them worse

[Woke pedophiles]

On 01 Dec 2023, FRED <el...@protonmail.com> posted some
news:ukdgni$20pbr$2...@dont-email.me:

> Unions have no place in education.

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.

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.

Tags: Editorials, NEA, American Federation of Teachers, Woke culture,
Gender Issues, Education, Teachers Unions