Teachers Unions Will Sacrifice Their Students For Their Politics

The following is a guest post written by my daughter Jane Menton:

Last week, United Teachers Los Angeles, the second largest teachers’ union in the U.S., announced that its members will not participate in reopening schools in the fall unless their conditions are met. The conditions are then listed in a lengthy report. 

LA schools superintendent Austin Beutner promptly followed on July 13 with a decision not to reopen, which he described as “painful,” but “we have to keep health and safety first.” 

Health? Safety? Both the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the American Academy of Pediatrics have released their own research stating that the health and safety of the students would be best served by reopening the schools. From the AAP Report (linked here): 

“[T]he AAP strongly advocates that all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school [their emphasis]… Policies to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 within schools must be balanced with the known harms to children, adolescents, families, and the community by keeping children at home.”

In contrast, the supposed health and safety concerns listed in UTLA’s report have nothing to do with the health or safety of the children, unless you count “defund the police'' as advocating for their safety and “medicare for all” as health. The demands listed read like the progressive left’s party platform. The UTLA landing page even contains the fighting line: “It’s time to take a stand against Trump’s dangerous, anti-science agenda that puts the lives of our members, our students, and our families at risk.” Apparently UTLA will call the NAS and the AAP “anti-science” if that suits its members’ agenda.

A small sampling UTLA’s conditions includes: 

• A Wealth Tax: “A new tax on unrealized capital gains to California billionaires only, 1% a year until capital gains taxes are met.”

• Millionaire Tax: “Add a 1% surtax on incomes of over $1mm a year, and 3% for over $3mm a year.”

• Housing Security: "There is no “safer-at-home” for those who don’t have a home. Students need stability, and cities have the power to pass ordinances to prevent evictions and provide rental relief funds… Housing can be a human right assisted by the state.” 

• Moratorium on Charter Schools: “Privately operated, publicly funded charter schools drain resources from district schools…” 

You can read the full report — they call it a “research paper” — here. 

The paper concludes with the final heading: “Normal wasn’t working for us before. We can’t go back.” By “us,” they clearly mean the teachers. But what about the students?  What would actually benefit the students would be for the city to take back the funding from the schools and give it to the families. This would be along the lines of a school voucher program or the charter schools that already exist — which the teachers’ union, based on its “report,” rightly perceives as a threat. 

I admit, I didn’t go to a public or charter school; I went to private school. To say that the ideology there was progressive would be an understatement. I graduated from high school in 2007, when talk of the $1 trillion budget deficit racked up by President Bush and his unconscionable wars in the Middle East dominated our classroom conversations. Michael Moore’s documentary on the subject, “Fahrenheit 9/11”, was shown in one of my civics classes. We discussed Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” during Science. 

Paying lip-service to progressive ideology is one thing, but trying to implement it is another. Private schools may preach progressive ideology, but they depend on tuition to function, so they are capitalist in practice. And Covid-19 might be a reckoning for the schooling industry in terms of how private vs. public schools operate. If social-distancing concerns prevent private schools from filling their classrooms, they will be incentivized to find solutions and workarounds that parents are willing to pay for. They have to — their alternative is to go out of business. The result will be to the students’ benefit. In our current cultural climate, this will probably be disparaged as another example of privilege in action.

Public schools are under no such pressure to reopen or innovate on behalf of their students. They are funded by taxpayers and factored into city budgets. They will get that money whether or not schools open in the fall. Teacher salaries are not on the line, and the unions are taking advantage of that to make major political power plays. 

Giving the funding to students instead of schools would subject the public school system to competition and market forces.  it would incentivize schools to find innovative solutions to meet social distancing concerns. It would give parents choices and agency. It would give students similar “privileges” to the private school students, whose schools don’t have the luxury of guaranteed funding — what a thought.

My cousin sent me the following tweet while we were discussing this issue: 

“Look at the market solving problems!” she wrote. If that turns out to be the result of the Covid-19 pandemic, it would not be a bad thing. But that’s probably too much to hope for.