Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has been widely criticized for her commitment to a liberal educational agenda. (REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz)
I was a public school teacher for 28 years and I know who's to blame for what education has become
By Rebecca Friedrichs | Fox News | February 12, 2024
Did you know the first full week of February is the celebration of "Black Lives Matter Week of Action" in many public schools?
It’s puzzling to consider why public schools – whose responsibility is to serve the taxpayers by educating children in academics and citizenship – would set aside an entire week to promote an organization that boldly claimed it, "Disrupts the Western prescribed nuclear family structure," and inspires young people to riot. But since I was a public school teacher for 28 years, I know exactly why America’s schools have lost their mission to educate.
The reason? Unions, pure and simple.
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In fact, so-called teachers unions helped start BLM. I know this because they bragged about it on the front cover of a magazine they used to force on my husband when he was a professor at a state-run university.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has been widely criticized for her commitment to a liberal educational agenda. (REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz)
Most people think unions exist to help teachers with bargaining for wages and working conditions, but after 70 collective years of being forced to fund unions, my husband and I beg to differ. Unions don’t help teachers, they damage everything teachers cherish – including the students in our charge. And that damage is incalculable.
Unions are behind the loss of academic freedom in the public schools. They’re the inspiration behind politicized curriculum, low and declining performance in language and math, and saddest of all, the sexualization of children.
Biggest pushers of revisionist history? The so-called teachers unions. Abortion on demand? Keeping that secret from parents? Switching genders? Keeping that from parents? Allowing boys to dominate girls’ sports? Schooling in social activism? Racism? Class warfare? Unions, unions, unions.
And within the profession, more union-led bad news. Unions bully and subvert good teachers while supporting radical activists (including BLM leaders), turning schools into indoctrination centers and driving good teachers away.
It wasn’t always so. U.S. schoolchildren a generation ago, or before, compared well with students in other countries. Core subjects received as much emphasis here as they did in, say, Great Britain or India or New Zealand.
Not so these days. That’s why about half the nation’s 4th-, 8th- and 11th-graders test so poorly in reading and math. Not even half of them can perform at "grade level," which is an academic standard that’s been dumbed down over recent years because so many students were failing. This is a catastrophe!
Not a pretty sight for parents hoping their kids will enjoy a more prosperous future than they had. And it’s especially egregious because unions got us here, and they opened the door to BLM allies who work round the clock with unions to convince our children they’re either oppressed or oppressors.
It’s troubling to note that tyrants throughout history have used such "divide and conquer" tactics to destabilize and destroy nations, and those tactics are working, right here in America’s classrooms, all thanks to unions.
CTU president Stacy Davis Gates, middle right, and AFT President Randi Weingarten, middle left, join faculty members at a rally on the University of Illinois Chicago campus on Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2023. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Especially telling is the proportion of teachers in government schools who send their own children to private schools. Nationally, about 10% of children attend private schools. But according to a Chalkboard News item, about 21.5% of teachers working in government schools send their children to private schools.
In cities where union-inspired policies reign, the fraction is higher: Philadelphia 44%, Cincinnati 41%, San Francisco-Oakland 34%.
In Chicago, even the teachers union president, Stacy Davis Gates, sends a child to private school – all while badmouthing alternatives to government schools. And about 39% of her fellow teachers agree, sending their kids to non-government schools.
Parents may wonder: What do these teachers know that we don’t? The answer is fairly clear.
What non-union alternatives, realistically, can parents pursue?
Parents can home school. National organizations like Public School Exit can help with teacher and parent training, curriculum selection, textbooks, class outlines, networking, education co-ops and other matters that make homeschooling a viable option.
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Online learning has grown, especially during the pandemic lockdowns.
Non-union public charter schools, public magnet schools, private schools (religious and otherwise), co-ops and one-room school houses all are legitimate options and have seen enrollments grow as rapidly as enrollments have declined in the nation’s government schools.
Not a pretty sight for parents hoping their kids will enjoy a more prosperous future than they had. And it’s especially egregious because unions got us here, and they opened the door to BLM allies who work round the clock with unions to convince our children they’re either oppressed or oppressors.
In a better time, the educational "troika" that guided America’s schools consisted of "The Education Triangle:" students, parents and teachers. Today’s "troika" sadly consists of unions, special interests and union-funded politicians at the expense of everyone else. Together they have engineered a government school system that is not only outrageously expensive and used to propagandize our children, but that doesn’t deliver even rudimentary basic education to its students.
That’s by design, and it’s an existential threat to the future of America.
Alternatives are looking better all the time. The government schools may some day return to their position as trustworthy educators of the nation’s children, but that will never happen until the unions and their allies are utterly eradicated from our schools.
Rebecca Friedrichs is the founder of For Kids and Country, the author of Standing Up to Goliath: Battling State and National Teachers’ Unions for the Heart and Soul of our Kids and Country, and a 28-year public school teacher who was lead plaintiff in Friedrichs v. CTA.