Earlier this evening, The Untouchables happened to be on TV. The movie has as much to do with the actual takedown of Al Capone as Love Story. But it does paint a portrait of a thoroughly corrupt system where the real power lies with thugs who can never be held accountable.

LA Magazine, which somehow manages to perform the journalism that the LA Times won’t do, implicitly asks that question with its profile of the radical head of LA’s untouchable teachers’ union.

United Teachers Los Angeles President Cecily Myart-Cruz gets her own Capone moment.

UTLA’s headquarters was besieged by protesters. Nearly 100 parents gathered outside the union’s office tower at Wilshire Boulevard and Berendo Street waving signs (“Cecily Myart-Cruz Doesn’t Care about Our Kids”) and chanting slogans (“We demand a seat at the table!”). Some called for Myart-Cruz’s resignation; others, for the dismantling of UTLA altogether. Still others simply asked that their voices be heard. All of them were angry and upset.

Flyers for the event started circulating a week before the rally, and during our interview, Myart-Cruz examined one of them. It was a parody of the sci-fi thriller Total Recall, with Myart-Cruz’s head photoshopped on top of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body, with smaller images of other players swirling around her—Newsom, L.A. superintendent of schools Austin Beutner, the seven members of the L.A. Board of Education. Myart-Cruz gave the flyer a brief, rueful glance, then smiled. “I love that my picture is the biggest one,” she said. “But here’s the trouble: You can recall the Governor. You can recall the school board. But how are you going to recall me?”

As long as municipal unions maintain their power, paying off and intimidating politicians, the only solution is to create options through school vouchers. In California, where unions were powerful enough to effectively outlaw freelance workers, and even when a specific proposition was put on the ballot and approved by voters to preserve Uber/Lyft drivers, a Democrat judge struck that down, that’s a pipe dream.

But this ought to be a wake-up call to the rest of the country. 

Teachers’ unions are radical, ruthless, and determined to destroy children.

 UTLA boss Cecily Myart-Cruz makes it clear that her only use for children isn’t education, it’s indoctrination.

“There is no such thing as learning loss,” she responds when asked how her insistence on keeping L.A.’s schools mostly locked down over the last year and a half may have impacted the city’s 600,000 kindergarten through 12th-grade students. “Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.” 

If what you want is a Red Guard, then this is the educational system for you. And that’s what Democrats increasingly want.

The LA Mag story notes that UTLA still won’t agree to commit to full classroom instruction. And another recent report notes that UTLA is demanding a student vaccine mandate and low triggers to shut down classes. 

Myart-Cruz keeps hiding behind racism, but it’s easy to spot the racist.

Case in point: Renee Bailey, a single mother of two in South L.A. Her 14-year-old son, Kaled, suffers from autism and in the past year away from the classroom has developed new and distressing behaviors like bed-wetting and biting. She tried repeatedly to get Kaled enrolled in an in-person instruction program but her efforts came to nothing; citing safety concerns, UTLA discouraged its teachers from participating in the program. “With distance learning, he was receiving behavior-intervention services through his iPad,” she says. Frustrated that parents have been frozen out of reopening negotiations, Bailey began organizing parent rallies and attending protests at UTLA headquarters.

She posted an article to Facebook in which a school superintendent in Chicago charged that parents pushing to get kids back in the classroom were fueled by “white-supremacist thinking.” “Right on!” Myart-Cruz wrote approvingly, going on to claim that she and other UTLA staffers were being “stalked by wealthy, white, Middle Eastern parents.”…

Myart-Cruz allegedly ordered a study to determine the ethnic backgrounds of her more vocal critics, presumably so that she could prove her point. One parent, Maryam Qudrat, who had been loudly pushing in the press for more Zoom time for kids, claims she received an odd email from a researcher at UTLA asking pointed questions about her racial background.

They could have just googled. Qudrat is a Muslim from Afghanistan. But in some confusing universe, she’s a white supremacist.

Back to The Untouchables, the answer still lies in taking away the monopoly that empowers petty monsters like Cruz. As long as one man or woman can control the education system by extracting more blood money for her union to drink, it will be a corrupt nightmare.

If we’re going to fund schools, we should fund students, not corrupt systems like LAUSD and its UTLA vampires.

That’s how you recall Myart-Cruz and rebuild an educational system that serves children, not the unions.