The Spectacular Virulence of Teacher Unions

2,766 words

NEA Thanks President Biden, Endorses Vice President Kamala Harris in General Election.

One school principal has said that Randi Weingarten, of the [AFT] teachers union, would protect a dead body in the classroom. 
From a New Yorker cartoon, illustrated by Richard Thompson

In recent posts, here, here, and here, I have argued that 21st century, Americanized Stalinism made its initial germination and unique American hybridization in the thought laboratories of higher education, the universities. Every strain of Stalinism employs state-sanctioned, propagandists and enforcers to sustain its domination. So, over decades, legions of commissars have been turned loose to invade the workplace, the schools, the corporations, the professional associations, the NGOs, and the courtrooms. You must say only what is officially correct, do what they say or else, and think only those thoughts they deem sufficiently wholesome. The moralistic vocabularies they wield, the dictatorial mentalities through which they exert power over you – these they acquired at the universities. At the universities the virtue regime’s restless, ruthless minds reside and continue to fabricate the ideological brickbats that are used to assault reality and sow as much confusion as possible.

As in the “prestigious” Ivy Leagues.

Princeton University’s anthropology department currently offers a course on prostitution: “‘Power, Profit and Pleasure: Sex Workers and Sex Work’,  a discussion [sic] about sex workers and their clients; covers stigmatization and controversies regarding the topic, as well as race, class, and queer dynamics.”

Multiply the take-aways from this single “course” times the dozen or more of similar, ludicrous fare that a student completes at the alma mater of James Madison then ask yourself: What rigorous discipline has he been intellectually equipped with to make sense of the world he will encounter? With such a disordered perception of reality, what useful contribution could this graduate make to a profession, a community, a marriage, parenting?

A complete rendering of the ideological subversion and the abandonment of the university’s traditional mission of veritas, however, is incomplete without a close scrutiny of one of the most powerful forces that defeats the possibility of a genuinely educated American people. I am speaking here of the malignancy of what we call “the teacher unions.” They exert a strangle hold on public education and their tentacles reach into high government echelons.

From the National Education Association website, neaToday: “Joe Biden: A President Who Hears Our Voices. This is the most pro-public education and pro-union administration in modern history.”

Click on your “hermeneutical” app to decode President Pringle’s encomium, and it comes out like this: “A high ranking, rent-seeking, union Educrat confesses that Joe Biden is the most useful idiot ever to occupy White House.”

At least seventy per cent of teachers in American public education belong to a teachers’ union.

The unionized public schools are tantamount to detention centers where your children are detained for 13 years, 13 of the most formative, vulnerable years of their lives to have their characters and intellects shaped by people of questionable intellect and character, many of whom would be the least competent you would want to “teach” them anything important.

Case in point:

 “Defending the Freedom of our LGBTQ+ Students to be Themselves: Our LGBTQ+ students need us to ensure our schools are places where all students are protected and empowered.”

Public education is seamlessly connected to higher education: higher ed’s colleges of education train future K-12 teachers to prepare their students to absorb the advanced “social justice” programming upon arrival at the universities.

Below, the first sentence in the Mission Statement of Columbia University’s Teachers College, the oldest teacher ed factory in the country.

“Our name notwithstanding, Teachers College was founded on the proposition that education alone can’t correct our society’s inequalities — that to maximize the life chances of all people, we must also support poorer communities’ physical and nutritional health and psychological wellbeing.”

Two phrases in this sentence – “correct our society’s inequalities” and “maximize life chances of all people” – give away the game. No one, singular or as a collective, who talks like this should be regarded as anything other than a hopelessly deluded utopianist. And, should not be in charge of anything. Someone without resources or influence evincing such “ambition” can be dismissed as a harmless crackpot. Power and influence, however, turns such delusional ideation into a powerful, destructive ideology – such as bolshevism. Turning teachers into utopian activists (maximizing everyone’s “life chances” and correcting “society’s inequalities”), rather than educators, appears to be the principal mission of teacher education colleges. The teacher unions act as the ideological enforcers.

Particularly notable are the many, seemingly uncontested, dimensions of power the teacher unions have imperceptibly seized. It has enabled them to capture the massive machinery of public education and turn it into an instrument to promote the ideology of “progressivism,” a poisonous cocktail of multi-cultural agitprop transmitted with a vocabulary of cult-Marx cliches deployed by feminists, race hustlers and transgender activists. Worse is that the frothy, compassion patois of “progressivism” is a cover for naked self-interest and unearned entitlements and immunities.

There are two fundamental aspects of this power grab that should be scrutinized for anyone to grasp fully the dimensions of this malignancy – collusive power and subversive ideological power.

1. Collusive Power

For starters, teacher unions are public sector unions as distinct from private sector unions. The critical difference between them lies in the defining relationship within each one between employer (management) and employee (labor union).  With private sector unions that relationship is adversarial – the employees use the threat of the strike to extract concessions against the adversary-employer who counters with the threat of the lockout. The union contract is a temporary peace treaty.

With public sector unions, in stark contrast, the relationship is collusive. The putative employer is in fact “hired” by the employees (the union). The “hiring” process takes place through our election system corrupted by campaign finance contribution shenanigans. The union dues extracted from the members are funneled to the campaign coffers of political candidates, who when elected (hired), “hear the voices” of their benefactors (the so-called employees) by doing their bidding and complete the quid pro quo. The union contract finalizes the specifics of the collusion, and unlike with private sector union contracts, the financial costs are off-loaded to the tax-payer, a third party for whom the services are rendered, but is excluded from the bargaining.

Chicago, perhaps, is where teacher union collusive power is the most brazenly muscular.

From Zerohedge:

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s hand-picked school board just voted unanimously to fire Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez without cause. Johnson and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) have been pushing for months to oust Martinez following his refusal to back Johnson’s demand for a $300M high-interest loan to pay for a new CTU contract. The CTU is Johnson’s largest campaign funder and former employer.

Brandan Johnson, who, incidentally, began his career as a teacher, was elected to represent all the citizens of Chicago, but, despite the job title, “Mayor,” he acts as the union’s chief hit man, in this case to connive at firing an official (Martinez) who refuses to be a party to the union’s attempt to extort funding for union wages – borrowed funding at high-interest rates paid by Chicago tax-payers.

Money, of course, is the transmission belt of the union’s collusive power.

The NEA is by far the largest teacher union. It is also the largest labor union in the United States with approximately three million dues paying members – tons of cash to purchase “friends” in high places who “hear our voices.”

From Open Secrets:

Teachers unions have steadily amped up their political involvement: From 2004 to 2016, their donations grew from $4.3 million to more than $32 million — an all-time high. Even more than most labor unions, they have little use for Republicans, giving Democrats at least 94 percent of the funds they contributed to candidates and parties since as far back as 1990, where our data begins. Two organizations account for practically all of the contributions made by teachers unions: The National Education Association (about $20 million in 2016) and the American Federation of Teachers (almost $12 million).

Clearly, the NEA is the 800-pound gorilla of teacher unions. In addition to giving the Democrats over 90 percent of their campaign money, they campaign vigorously, aggressively and exclusively in their support. With election success purchased by union contributions, the hired hands in turn deliver pro-union legislation, regulatory favoritism, job protection (tenure legislation) and monopolistic control of K-12 education (Teachers Unions’ Nonsensical Fight against School Choice Hurts Students, Families).

The stockpile of anonymous flunkies that maintain the bloated, feckless Department of Education came out of the collusion of Democrat Jimmy Carter with the NEA.

“The NEA gave its first presidential endorsement ever in 1976, when Walter Mondale promised them, at an NEA annual meeting, that the Carter administration would form an education department…  [According to] NEA executive director Terry Herndon. ‘There’d be no department [of Education] without the NEA.’”

Imagine for a moment, how much better off the American people would be without this massive edifice of moral inquisitors?

1. Subversive Ideological Power

Public education is firmly in the clutches of a special interest coalition that has purchased sufficient levels of political patronage to enable it to carry its hard-left political ideology into the schools, an ideology largely at odds with what most parents would want as part of their child’s education.

Pedagogically speaking, most parents, I would wager, want the schools to focus on mathematics, science, languages, history, and geography – subjects children need to master to be successful living in a modern world and to be productive citizens, and to leave their moral formation to the families.

The NEA has other priorities that have nothing to do with being literate, numerate and knowledgeable about the world around them.  From the NEA website, under “Celebrating our Diversity,” resources that “undertake the work of breaking down the walls that divide us:”

• Are You Biased?
• NEA’s Cultural Competency Training
• 10 Tips for Talking About Race in School
• Black Lives Matter at Schools
• The 1619 Project

Meanwhile, according to Education Week:

The 2023 administration, the first since the COVID pandemic, shows mixed outcomes across the world. While some countries experienced growth in student achievement or held steady, others saw a decline—including the United States. American students still score above the international average on TIMSS, but they rank below children in the highest-performing nations, including Japan, Singapore, and Korea. Now, other countries that previously lagged behind the United States—such as Poland, Sweden, and Australia—have leapfrogged the country in some subjects and grade levels.”

To “achieve” this dubious outcome, the U.S. outspends the world’s wealthiest countries on public education “breaking down” invented “walls.”

From AEI:

Except for tiny Luxembourg, the United States spends more money on education than every other OECD country and exceeds the OECD average by over 50 percent. This is not just true of absolute levels of expenditures: As a share of GDP, combining federal, state and local expenditures, the US also spends more on education than its peers.

From Zero Hedge:

In 2017, New York also scrapped its basic literacy requirements for teachers, noting it was meant to increase diversity among teachers.According to the NEA, only about half of New York students in grades three through eight tested proficient in English and math during the 2022-2023 school year despite the state spending almost twice the national average on education.

In spite of the obvious, growing shortcomings of American public education, parents, however, have little collective power to oppose the ideological messaging in the unionized public schools and to force priorities that serve the educational interests of children, not the latest fads of the ideologues.

[Hyperinflated FOIA] fees have also been used by schools to prevent parental access to information on woke propaganda lessons, including Critical Race Theory indoctrination, DEI lessons and classes on gender fluid theory.  The primary organizations blocking parental access are national teachers unions… the driving force behind the fast spread of woke indoctrination in the US school system, with a greenlight from the Department of Education, of course.

The NEA remains obdurate in resisting accountability and affirming that the mission of the public school educator is to achieve “social justice.”

From the NEA website:

NEA engages and mobilizes activists in the effort for racial, social, and economic justice in public schools and on campuses. We are building and growing a community of activists committed to advancing social justice policies in public education.

“Activist” – that cursed euphemism for “leftist zealot”— a “growing community” of them, no less, with our children in their clutches, hell bent on exterminating the “isms” and “obias” that keep multiplying, the self- appointed guardians of public morality.

Forewarned is forewarned but, alas!  One has to wonder: over the years, what has “public education” done to the critical thinking capacity of a “public” that it allows zealots to be in charge of “educating” the children? Is it incapable of distinguishing fact from fantasy, unable to recognize that “social justice policies in public education” have nothing to do with the normal process of educating a human being and everything to do with “correct[ing] our society’s inequalities” as a moral desideratum?

“Racial justice,” “social justice,” “economic justice,” “education justice” – with this frenzied, adjectival multiplication of “justice,” justice, as a serious philosophical-moral concept goes…poof! It has no meaning. The justice-lingo is mumbo-jumbo, entirely performative, part of the ritual filled ceremonies of self-affirmation and chest-thumping that signals the world: “we represent the family of humanity and are about saving the lesser among us from the bigots intent on denying their full membership.” These are not educators, but missionaries of a particularly troublesome kind.

Now, I suspect that most Americans have nothing personal against missionaries as long as their targets for salvation are free to disassociate themselves from the proselytizers. When the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on your door, you can invite them in and join their ranks or politely send them on their way.  Ordinary missionaries represent only themselves and their sect as vehicles of the truth. Their success derives only from their powers of persistence and persuasion. But the social justice missionaries are a wholly different animal. Behind them is a massive, interlocking institutional complex of state power – the U.S. department of education, teacher education colleges and the teachers unions – in possession of enormous resources that makes complete disassociation, and escape from the proselytizing, nearly impossible.  Home schooling and private schools are escape options, but you still pay taxes to run the public schools and pay the teachers whose union dues help elect Democrats.

What also makes the racial-social justice missionaries unique, and especially menacing, is that their soteriology has to play out in a this-worldly drama. Unlike traditional missionaries who seek salvation in the afterlife, and who conceive of good and evil as supernatural forces that must be negotiated with through the articles of faith, salvation for the social justice believers is to be achieved here in the material world, and it is achieved by the elimination of evil that manifests itself as a specific failing of certain people.  “Racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “transphobia” – these are all moral evils (recently discovered), that mark the characters of “the damned” (“irredeemable” and “deplorable” as Hillary Clinton expressed it).  Jacobinism in late-eighteenth-century France, bolshevism in the twentieth-century were this-worldly religions that ontologized evil in classes of people – aristocrats, capitalists, kulaks — that had to be “exterminated” (in Leninist terms: “We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.“) for the “just” society to come into place.  In the twenty-first century “abolishing the white race” has become the goal of this-worldly religion – as detailed in Harvard Magazine.

For the social justice believers, from the beginning of his political quest in 2015, Donald Trump was not an ordinary Republican who pretended not to be a racist, but the embodiment of evil, an unapologetic racist. His supporters continue as legions of the damned, “enemies of the people,” “racists” who have no standing as legitimate participants in the political arena, “thankfully not American” per Hillary’s excommunication.

Anti-racism is twenty-first-century bolshevism, and the history of the twentieth century suggests that the outcome of yet another experiment with a virtuous elite in charge will bear the same despotic, eliminationist resemblance as its forerunners.

In sum, the grim reality exposed in an honest appraisal of the state of public education is that it is compulsory, and therefore, the indoctrination that is standard fare in the classrooms is equally compulsory. Worse, to obtain a tax-supported education you must submit your child to the indoctrination of a religion, that is a secular religion, twenty-first century bolshevism, whose highest article of faith is equality and whose practice of the faith defies the constraints of reality and immiserates those under the its clergy.  The resistance too it must never cease.