President Trump has announced an executive order to abolish the Department of Education. Thank God! But if we want to dig out the diseased roots of our educational system, and restore America to her former glory, the so-called teacher unions must be abolished too.
Those unions are behind everything that’s damaging our kids, schools, and nation. The next target for Elon’s DOGE team’s deep-dive should be teacher unions. I believe their findings will convince Americans that we should make teacher unions illegal again.
Did you know every dollar collected by teacher unions is funded by taxpayers? Taxpayers fund the schools, school employees, and the agencies that influence our schools. Unions exploit that funding by collecting dues, manipulating school expenditures, controlling school boards and legislators, promoting propaganda, and bullying all stakeholders.
Unions exploit teachers too — using our apple pie image to manipulate Americans into accepting educational quackery and giving radical union activists access to vulnerable children.
Teachers never asked for unions, and we’ve never had access to union books.
Fraud alert: Unions will counter this by saying they offer “arbitration” hearings to teachers.
I know teachers who’ve attended union “arbitrations.” They were given one hour to inspect union financials piled in eight-inch stacks on large tables — a thorough inspection would require weeks. They endured a “hearing” at which they attempted to ask questions without the benefit of reviewing the records, and the “independent” auditor was what teacher Barb Amidon called, “A friend of the union.”
While seeking honest investigation, these teachers were mocked, subjected to intimidation, and talked over by union employees. This is not an “arbitration,” it’s Mafia-like enforcer “muscle” tactics. And it’s one reason our American founders forbade government unions and federal influence in education.
In the early days of America, 80% of school funding came from local sources, 20% from the state, and zero from the federal government, and government unions were illegal.
Our educational system was the envy of the world. Americans were highly educated and moral. Great teachers were permitted to educate with excellence and were not bullied or hindered by outside forces.
Then unions intruded into our educational system.
In 1867, the National Education Association (NEA) influenced President Andrew Johnson to start a national Department of Education (DOE). In January 1962, John F. Kennedy gave government unions the right to collectively bargain. In 1976, NEA endorsed Jimmy Carter. His thank you gift was an independent National DOE including a cabinet level position.
All this allowed unions and other “educational” organizations to gain more power and influence over education – exactly what our founders feared.
The federal department now constitutes 21% of all national spending on education, and, according to the latest Nation’s Report Card, only 31% of fourth-graders and 30% of eighth-graders perform at or above reading level.
About 65 million Americans are functional illiterates.
Such horrendous results are the fault of unions, and they are intentional.
Americans have poured trillions into our educational system since unions and DOE intruded, yet our achievement levels have plummeted. We don’t even know what’s happening to the money because unions run agencies like the DOE.
It’s time for DOGE to shine a bright light onto the darkness of unions, so we can stop the exploitation of teachers and rescue our kids and country from the trainwreck.
The wreckage is everywhere:
In addition to the dismal achievement numbers, K-12 language and math scores have dropped consistently since 1969, when the “Nation’s Report Card” first launched. The newest report reveals that a mere 28% of eighth-graders performed at or above proficient.
Unions were also behind the Obama administration’s anti-discipline policies, including his “Dear Colleague” letter, which has empowered bullies on school campuses to reign, intensified racial strife, and caused teachers to say publicly that they fear for their safety.
Not only this, but unions continue to push politicized curricula so that our kids are bombarded with sexual propaganda as early as preschool. And they support hard-line leftist candidates who write this nonsense into law, undermining patriotism, excellence, morality, and honest history.
These are just a few of thousands of examples. The failures of this leviathan are much worse than just those listed here.
Randi Weingarten and her fellow government union leaders are fighting hard to convince Americans that our schools will collapse without the DOE and unions.
But that’s not the case. We know this because history — the same history unions rewrite and cover up — tells us that our education system thrived when parents and independent teachers led the way.
The truth is, our republic cannot survive the DOE and so-called teachers unions.
Now is the time for change. To Make Education and America Great Again, we must shutter the DOE, fully expose and abolish “teacher unions,” and hold them accountable for the carnage they’ve caused.
Rebecca Friedrichs is the founder of For Kids & Country, the author of Standing Up to Goliath and a 28-year public school teacher who was lead plaintiff in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association.
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