Children Simply Collateral Damage in Teachers’ Unions’ War on Parents – Opinion

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Teachers’ union bosses have declared war on public school parents.

What we’re now seeing in school districts across the country is a punitive reaction by political educators against parents who discovered while their kids were home during the COVID school closures what had been going on behind their backs for years.

Let’s just give you a couple of examples.

• For the near future, Fridays will be online-only in school districts all across the nation.
• Meanwhile, in December the Los Angeles Unified School District announced that 34,000 students will be barred from campuses for the second semester starting in January because they haven’t complied with the vaccine mandate to simply attend class.
• Chicago Public Schools also announced that it would be eliminating gender-specific toilets in the same month. This was right after Loudoun County (Va.) made national headlines for its school board’s coverup of the sexual assaults on two high school girls by one alleged perpetrator.
• Even when the weather gets colder kindergartners in Portland, Ore., are forced to eat lunch outside, seated on socially distanced buckets.

Union bosses have resisted because they are labor leaders and resist the temptation to hold members accountable for any actions. But even more fundamentally, teachers’ union leaders are first and foremost dyed-in-the-wool Marxists who see schools not as institutions for learning but indoctrination centers in which the next generation of radical minds can be inculcated.

They believe that the curriculum should focus on unlearning values learned at home and not strengthening them.

They are now realizing that they played too safe. The unions’ politically motivated school closures in some cases won them a few workplace or agenda-driven benefits they couldn’t otherwise have won in collective bargaining sessions, but it came at a heavy price.

Parents, for the first time, got a good look on their computer screens at what they were being taught, and they didn’t like what they saw.

Beginning in mid-2020, parents across the country began rising up in a classically organic movement to defend their children against radical left-wing propaganda disguised as “education.”

Unions have come to expect that school board meetings will be rubber-stamped in front only a few hardcores. School board meetings became standing room-only events. Parents were outraged and made their voice heard.

These parents of all political, socio-economic, and racial backgrounds wanted their kids back in the classroom to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic rather than ideological hogwash that won’t pay the bills later in life.

But rather than taking the parents’ concerns seriously and making changes accordingly, teachers’ union bosses and the school board members bought and paid for with teacher dues money dug in their heels.

The school board meeting became a national story, but the educators remained firm in their opposition to school closings. They even went so far to lobby the Centers for Disease Control and the White House to prevent school reopenings.

When parents protested that Critical Race Theory (CRT) taught their children to judge one another by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character, the political educators told them they didn’t know what they were talking about and lied about how it was only taught in law schools.

Following a mountain of evidence that CRT is, in a variety of ways, being taught in K-12 classrooms, the unions and their apologists in the media responded by accusing the parents of racism — even though the complaints came from parents of all races.

The National School Board Association, (NSBA), did then something that was unimaginable. In September 2021 it wrote a letter to president (apparently composed by a White House staffer). It called for federal intervention against outspoken parents and compared them to domestic terrorists.

But the union leaders overlooked a harsh reality: Parents don’t react well when their kids are screwed with.

The parents fought back relentlessly and even went to the state legislators with their concerns. And now, more than half of the country’s state legislatures have taken action to ban CRT in K-12 classrooms, and many of those same states’ school boards have distanced themselves from the national group.

By November 2021, school board members across the country were either retiring or facing challengers to their seats that they wouldn’t be able to overcome.

This should have caused political educators and leaders to review their practices, but self awareness has not been a distinguishing quality of the left or for public-sector union officials in particular.

School board members know their actions are in direct conflict with the parents’ preferences and desires, and that’s exactly why they’re putting these policies in place.

It’s a power-hungry message to the parents that the political educators do not care what parents want for their children. If you challenge their power structure, the political educators will take over.

It’s long past time to break the stranglehold teachers’ unions (and by extension, the school boards they control) have over the public education system.