January 29, 2024
Randi Weingarten is really ramping up the rhetoric against parents in the fight for school choice.
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She would, wouldn’t she? Her position as a union boss — president of the American Federation of Teachers — has been credited with accelerating the abysmal decline in education for children nationwide.
Parents, for years, have been on to her union tactics, and that of her colleagues. They can hardly take seriously Ms. Weingarten’s latest meltdown asserting that parents “undermine democracy,” in their efforts to remove their children from failing schools.
Who can blame Weingarten’s sense of panic? Those undermining parents are making tremendous progress in their determination to seek out better education options for their children. Groups such as the pointedly named Parents with Pitchforks have galvanized their efforts, turning to conservative legislators, and have successfully expanded school-option legislation in 20 states in 2023.
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This is very bad news for Weingarten and her 1.72 million union members. Their behemoth numbers would suggest they are bulletproof when it comes to job security — if not for those loudmouthed parents.
The parents have become more of a thorn in the side of the teachers’ unions: They are now filing lawsuits in attempts to uncover the extent unions will go to protect unprofessional or incompetent teachers. Many of the sordid facts came out in a lawsuit filed by parents of minority students who claimed the unions were responsible for their children’s appalling education in California.
Former LA Unified School District superintendent John Deasy testified as a whistleblower confirming the parents’ worst suspicions. He alleged, in his testimony “that it can take 10 years and $250,000 to $450,000 to fire a lousy teacher,” according to a Wall Street Journal article.
The parents were already familiar with a perverse system cynically labeled, “Dance of the Lemons.” This “Dance” involves rotating incompetent teachers from one mostly minority school to another. “Fewer than 0.002% of teachers in California were dismissed for unprofessional conduct or poor performance,” according to the WSJ.
None of this is to suggest the parents are winning the war against unions’ controlling public schools, but the fight is expanding. And it’s getting nastier.
Parents are now “outing” Democratic lawmakers — who they claim make up “a long line of hypocrites:” They “want to deny poorer parents” the right of school choice, despite sending their own children to private schools, according to parents in the non-profit Education Freedom Institute (EFI).
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The EFI offers an interactive map to help parents track down elected officials “who live the school choice for me, but not for thee” lifestyle, according to the map.
Most “progressive” legislators are better off ducking the issue of where they send their own children to school, but Gene Wu, Texas Democratic state representative, offered an excuse that served to further enrage parents.
“See, most private schools have strict admissions standards,” said Rep. Wu. “Both of our kids had to TEST-IN. We spent weeks preparing them and paid for assistance.” He was sensitive enough to ask the rhetorical question: “How can low-income families afford this?”
Really! What about school vouchers for alternative options? Or the attempts of parents to enroll their children in a charter school? Oftentimes, parents are filmed attending town hall meetings, using a lottery system, to select the name of the next lucky child to escape enrollment in the public school system.
Some of the parents are pictured actually praying for their child’s name to be called.
In a predictable move, Mr. Wu, and his colleagues, were responsible for recently voting down Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature education legislation, axing funds that would have provided school vouchers in the massive school bill.
This social phenomenon, say EFI parents, isn’t confined to political representatives, but also applies to union leaders which makes up the most “galling group of hypocrites.”
Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, earns a lucrative $262,429 annual salary, enabling her (without the benefit of a voucher) to send her children to a private high school. She is among the most vociferous opponents of school choice, devoting her taxpayer-funded time to lobbying against a myriad of creative school options proposed by parents.
She is joined by Sean Denney, Illinois Education Association official, who sends his children to private schools, but his personal efforts have been devoted to opposing Illinois’ “Invest in Kids” tax credit for scholarship programs.
His six-figure job enables him to send his own children to a Catholic school in Springfield.
Of course, parents would also greatly enjoy the ability to protect their children from schools where failure reigns at unprecedented levels of academic decline. The hypocrisy of the system could not be made more clear than progressive legislators and, even union leaders, searching for the best educational prospects for their children, and in the process not seeking out the union label.
Image: Hillel Steinberg
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