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[Pre-order a copy of Daniel Greenfield’s first book, Domestic Enemies, by clicking here. Orders will begin shipping on April 30th.]
The Biden administration is on a hunt for systemic racism. Thus far it’s found systemic racism everywhere from the highway system to the military, but the one place it hasn’t looked is among the ranks of the teachers unions who provide much of its cash and its election foot soldiers.
But new data reported by the New York Times shows that the pandemic school closures demanded by teachers unions were the single greatest act of systemic racism in 50 years.
During the pandemic, members of the corrupt teachers union machine demanded school closures to “save lives”. Unwilling to do their jobs, they instead marched around brandishing coffins at political protests while warning that if they had to go and teach, everyone would die.
Education was replaced with the Orwellian misnomer of “remote learning” which parents, students and honest teachers admitted was not actually teaching any of the students anything.
And the newest data backs that up, showing that “in districts where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, they fell more than half a grade behind in math.”
The numbers were even worse for the poorer students who fell behind three fifths of a grade.
The decline in math scores was the worst in 50 years making it a historic setback and while all students suffered during the pandemic, the learning experiences in districts where schools shut were far worse for poorer students, often minorities, than for wealthy or middle class students.
And while the DEI complex and the media have spent years talking about disproportionate impact, it was the Left which was responsible for the worst disproportionate impact in 50 years.
And therefore for the “systemic racism” that they had selfishly brought into being.
Previous figures showed a “larger score gap between white and black students nationally—from 25 points in 2020 to 33 points in 2022.” Fourth grade math scores fell twice as much for black and Hispanic students as for white students. While we already knew that minority students fell back further during the pandemic, the new numbers compare the schools that stayed open and those that closed in order to pander to teachers union members who refused to come to work.
“More time spent in remote or hybrid instruction in the 2020-21 school year was associated with larger drops in test scores,” the Times analysis showed. “Students that were offered a hybrid schedule (a few hours or days a week in person, with the rest online) did better, on average, than those in places where school was fully remote, but worse than those in places that had school fully in person.”
The media had accused Georgia, Florida and other states that opened up of conducting experiments in “human sacrifice”. The actual human sacrifice was carried out by Democrats and their educational establishment which brought up children as human sacrifices to the unions.
Teachers unions waged a relentless and ruthless war to close schools and keep them closed.
American Federation of Teachers (AFT) boss Randi Weingarten called reopening schools “reckless, callous, cruel”. Union members protested, threatened, sued and even physically blocked schools from reopening. The teachers unions won while students and parents lost.
Rep. Aaron Bean noted that “school districts with lengthier collective bargaining agreements were less likely to start the fall 2020 semester with in-person instruction.” Surveys found that the more powerful the teachers unions were, the more likely schools were to stay closed.
And therefore, the more powerful the teachers union, the less the children learned.
Teachers unions chose not to work and they leveraged school reopenings to extract personal and political benefits without paying any price for it. That is true of the lockdown advocates nearly across the board, but the teachers unions emerged politically stronger than ever from the educational disaster they had helped to cause. Strikes, slowdowns and elections made them wealthier and more powerful. And they continue to grow more powerful every year.
As late as 2022, 73% of the members of the Chicago Teachers Union voted not to come to work while claiming that COVID-19 was still too dangerous. A year later, CTU organizer Brandon Johnson was elected as the 57th mayor of Chicago.
What happened during the pandemic was not a unique event, it just accelerated the current state of affairs in which teachers unions have wielded their political power to demand more money for less work while dismantling all the basic standards of the educational system.
According to teachers unions, the ideal educational system has no test scores and no expectations but that students be taught to parrot the politics of their teachers.
The price for the dismantling of the educational system by the educators, during the pandemic or the rest of the time, is being paid by students. Especially poor and minority students.
Teachers unions claim that they advocate for students and that when they wield power, they do so to improve educational outcomes. The data, not only during the pandemic, proves otherwise.
In 1960, the American Federation of Teachers had a mere 60,000 members. Today it’s 1.7 million. And students are less capable of reading, study less and know less than their peers in 1960, but receive much higher grades than they did 60 years ago.
What has improved in schools since 1960 are the teacher salaries, by “45 percent in real terms”, so that teachers union members, like other government workers, are outperforming the taxpayers who pay their salaries.
The growth of the teachers unions has been great for teachers, but terrible for students.
The pandemic brought home the consequences to many parents and the years since convinced many that the public school system, fatally corrupted by teachers unions, is incapable of reform. That’s why movements such as homeschooling and school choice continue to grow, not just for the stereotypical conservatives, but for a spectrum of parents, many of them minorities.
Restoring public education will require many reforms, but the most fundamental of these will be ending the death grip that the teachers unions have over the nation’s students.
Thanks Daniel! I first got interested in public employee unions many decades ago when I was a student working part-time in the insurance industry, and we had some big public employee unions as clients. Been following developments ever since.
I would hope at least some commenters here would click on the link and actually read the NYT article, which does not in the least support Greenfield’s account of what happened.
Nobody said, for example, that if schools reopened “everyone would die.” That’s just typical Greenfieldian fabrication. Way to go, Daniel!
“Restoring public education will require many reforms, but the most fundamental of these will be ending the death grip that the teachers unions have over the nation’s students.”
What reforms. Are you capable of proposing a realistic reform that would improve public schools? “Unions are evil” is just blather. What reforms?
and now the schizophrenic, limey wanker is replying to itself, multiple times! there isn’t a combination of medications and electroshock therapy powerful enough to cure your level of deranged psychosis.
I know a reform.
Eliminate the woke chickenshit madrassas pawning themselves off as learning centers and put private schools & charter schools in their place.
At least that way if a superintendent in Loudoun County covers up a rape & carts the trans-trash to another school (to repeat it), we can at least have the leftist arrested for it.
The current gov’t run shitholes don’t allow us to redress such garbage – they just arrest the father of the victim.
Mickron says “what reforms?”
johnw1120 draws a picture for Mickron:
“There are several things that must be done to ever reclaim public education and it still may not be enough. 1. get rid of teachers unions, that is a must, they have nothing to do with education. 2. Eliminate the federal Department of Education, one size fits all out of DC has never worked, political agendas change every 4 years. 3. Do away with teacher tenure, longevity does not correct a bad teacher, you would not even stand for a bad hair dresser or a car mechanic, let alone a doctor, why would you stand for a poor teacher for your child? Still the best choice, home school.”
Thank you for putting the softball up on the tee. Hmmm, how about introducing more competition via vouchers, genius? Of course, when you are rich politicians such as the Obamas, Clintons, Governor Pritzker, or the head of the Chicago Teachers’ Union, you send your children to an expensive private school while enjoying the votes of the competition-suppressing teachers’ unions.
Here’s a lesson at no charge. (I like helping the learning disabled.) Sometimes people conspicuously exaggerate to make a point. That you avoid that the teachers’ union reps did argue some people would die is telling.
Still suffering from GDS? Keep growing your bitterness.
Well, hey, if the ever neutral NYT says so.
You don’t need to NYT to know what teachers unions did to children, you only need a child.
It never ceases to amaze me the capacity of liberals to believe common sense can be trumped by spewing the most words.
Most people already understand the fact, the NYT is a useless rag and full of crap, pretty much useless for facts.
There are still some sheep that believe the convid virus was dangerous.
Weingarten seems to still claim 1st place for low-life trash among the teachers union, edging out stiff competition from across the states.
Scott Ziegler, schoolboard superintendent, was in 1st place for enabling & then covering up an LGBT scumbag who raped a 15 year old girl. The prick was uncomfortable the girl’s dad asking annoying questions, so he had the police arrest him.
But since he resigned, Weingarten moved back into the lead
Zeigler should’ve been fired and jailed along with the trans-rapist, but apparently that’s reserved only for Trump supporters.
All public schools should be disbanded with private schools taking their place.
Lesbians are completely ignorant of children and only see them as objects and not a reality.
Their reasoning and purpose is perverted and they should never be in control of children!
Thank you. ALL gays groom children. All of them. In their crusade to be “included” they wish to equalize homosexuality and its kaleidoscope of perversions with heterosexuality. That’s evil, animals have more sense. And Randi Weingarten IS a disgusting animal who should never be allowed within a thousand yards of any child. Read some of her demonic posts, speeches , and comments. She LIVES to teach children, “hey, kiddies, you can be a trannie, too!” L
Tacky of me, I know, but as an aging hetero male, every time I see Randi Weingarten’s disturbing visage I can only think “wouldn’t you love being married to THAT?”
Before they were teaching such lies as Evolution Gun Control and Climate Change back to when the 3 R, was not Reduce Reuse & Recycle
I am happy my kids, now in their late thirties, mid-forties, survived their public school experience.
I worry for my grandchildren. Even in conservative Sturgis, SD, the liberal infection is ruining the schools.
The more powerful the teachers union, the more ossified their hardening-of-the-categories, and the more intense their displacing the consequences of their actions elsewhere.
Weingarten can do an impressive Joseph Goebbels when speaking to a crowd. One may think she’s a raving lunatic but in reality Comrade Randi is quite shrewd and knows exactle what she is doing.
On DAY ONE announce the END of the Dept of Ed!! Send the funding back to the States – cut out the payouts to the Deep State at the Dept of Ed! Make life miserable for the Teachers Union and in fact also RESCIND President Kennedy’s EO that ALLOWS Gov’t Unions – “Civil SERVANTS” should be beholden to ONE GROUP – US Citizens!!
There are several things that must be done to ever reclaim public education and it still may not be enough. 1. get rid of teachers unions, that is a must, they have nothing to do with education. 2. Eliminate the federal Department of Education, one size fits all out of DC has never worked, political agendas change every 4 years. 3. Do away with teacher tenure, longevity does not correct a bad teacher, you would not even stand for a bad hair dresser or a car mechanic, let alone a doctor, why would you stand for a poor teacher for your child? Still the best choice, home school.
Randy in the UK means Horny.
This ”female” has a surname that translates as Wine Garden.
So she is a Horny ”person” drunk on her own ego trip.
Horny Wine Garden… And she is in charge of your children while they are in School.
Think about that..
A brief look at California’s public school history:
-early 1960’s Cal. public school system is ranked #1 in the nation.
-mid 1960’s – teachers unions are created for the public school system even though many teachers and parents did not want this. Parents no longer have input for school’s curriculum.
-today – California’s public school system ranks #46 in the nation – with no hope of getting better because Little Fidel Newsom forces CRT marxism, transgender perversion. and the fake science of climate change down the throats of innocent children. No wonder Little Fidel sent his kids to private schools.