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If you find yourself suddenly agreeing to Mike Bloomberg’s views, there must be one of these two truths. Either:
- You need to reconsider your beliefs.
- what he’s saying is so indisputably true only a fool or a liar could disagree.
A June 2 editorial published by the author in his own journal Bloomberg magazine, it’s the latter.
Bloomberg, despite all his failings as New York’s mayor, is still remarkably enthusiastic about charter schools.
In the op-ed, headlined “A Wake-Up Call for Public Education: Falling enrollment in America’s schools is a sign of a system in crisis,” the typical New York politician notes that, “(A)fter students have fled public schools in record numbers, states are paying more to educate fewer children. If students showed great progress, this might have been okay. Instead, we are paying more for failure.”
A similar opinion was published in December last year by the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg cited the example of New York’s Success Academy, whose network of 47 public charter schools serves children whose families predominantly live below the poverty line. And yet its students have historically outperformed public-school students in Scarsdale, N.Y. — the wealthiest town on the East Coast and the second-wealthiest town in America — by significant margins.
Bloomberg reports that while charter schools make up seven percent of all public school students, they only receive one percent of the federal education spending. This imbalance must be rectified as more families leave traditional districts schools and charter schools struggle to pay the teachers needed to educate their students, many of whom live in poverty.
Meanwhile, students shoehorned into the traditional public school model were being badly educated even before they were banished from the classroom for close to two years by the nation’s overreaction to the COVID pandemic.
Most gratifyingly of all, Bloomberg seems to know where to place the blame for both the current failures and the opposition to charter schools — the nation’s all-too-powerful teachers’ unions.
While the National Education Association (NEA) and the rival American Federation of Teachers (AFT) grandiosely assert their efforts serve both their member teachers and the students in their charge, neither is the unions’ top priority.
Instead, modern teachers’ unions — like most labor associations in the public and private sector — are primarily consumed with the task of advancing a radically liberal political agenda having little or nothing to do with teacher working conditions or educational outcomes.
Responding to parent criticism during the COVID quarantine, Cecily Myart-Cruz, head of the Los Angeles teachers’ union, last summer told Los Angeles Magazine, “Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience.”
Myart-Cruz also asked her union for a condemnation of Israel.
Do you think this sounds like someone who has teachers and students? Or is it a social justice fighter hunkered down in an anti-Semitic foxhole?
Randi Weingarten of the AFT, who Bloomberg claimed he collaborated to increase teacher salaries by 43%, even though student scores were plummeting, is even more active, committing variously the union’s resources to pro-life, climate change, and gun control causes.
And despite later trying to reinvent herself as an advocate for returning to in-class instruction, internal emails showed Weingarten and her union were invited to write key portions of the Centers for Disease Control’s official policy of slow-walking the process.
From the top down, teachers’ unions have abrogated their responsibilities in a headlong quest to turn America’s schools into socialist indoctrination centers and use the dues of their members to fund the full range of radical leftist candidates and causes.
Despite his flaws, Bloomberg has absolutely right to conclude that the union-controlled model of public schools is beyond repair, and charter schools are perhaps our last best chance to teach our children the things they really need, rather than the stuff their statist masters want.
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