Leftist Teachers Unions

It seems that a major part of the educational problem in this country as to what students are taught in public schools lies with the teachers unions that have, in recent years, decided the time has now come to bring their left-wing biases out into the open.

An article by Lance Izumi that appeared on https://www.pacificresearch.org for August 6, 2019 observed: “Recently, the Washington Times published an op-ed that I authored where I describe how the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, to use the newspaper’s headline, ‘Careen Left.’ But the reality is that the political landscape and momentum of teacher unions across the country is even trending further left than the actions of the national unions’..I point out that the NEA approved resolutions on a whole host of liberal social-justice non-education issues which indicated that the union was ‘moving in a more openly progressive direction,’ according to ‘Education Week.’” That’s a nice way of saying the teachers unions are turning openly socialist, as opposed to just being covertly socialist.

Izumi’s article continues: “For her part, AFT boss Randi Weingarten openly advocates building up union political power in order to enact a liberal agenda ranging from universal healthcare to climate change. Yet, the liberal stances of the national teacher unions pale in comparison to the socialist activity of local teacher unions. In Chicago, the city’s teachers union sent a delegation to–I’m not making this up–Venezuela. Why would the Chicago Teachers Union send a delegation of its members to one of the most brutal socialist dictatorships on the planet, which has been a primer on socialism’s failures?” According to the left-wing publication ‘Fight Back’ the union delegation sought ‘to learn what they could from Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, exchange views on effective education and to show solidarity with the students, teachers and social movements of Venezuela.” In other words, shorn of all the sophistry, the CTU delegates want to learn more about how the communists educate their kids. Why? So they can implement some of their techniques here, that’s why. Oh, they will deny that but what else can be inferred from their actions and their show of “solidarity with students, teachers and social movements” in Venezuela.

Izumi noted that the Chicago Teachers Union was not just the odd man out there. He also noted in his article that “Last year, in a piece I wrote for ‘Education Week’ I noted that leaders of the union-supported teachers movement in Arizona were leftist radicals.”

Another article on https://wng.org for December 15, 2021 noted that some teachers are discontinuing their memberships in the NEA due to some of its left-wing positions. The article observed: “As NEA membership has declined, some alternative organizations have reported strong growth. The Ohio-based Christian Educators Association International, a professional organization that provides liability coverage, has seen a membership growth surge of 25 percent this year, executive director David Schmus said’”

I don’t know anything about this Christian group at this point, whether they just represent Christian teachers in public schools or what, but it would seem that many view it as something they’d rather be part of than being stuck in the NEA.

Remember one thing from the authors of these articles. Sometimes the local teachers unions are even more leftist than the national bodies are–which fact does not bode well for parents in some of these school districts. Again, as I have said in the past, you will never reform the public school system and you will never reform the teachers unions to any meaningful extent. Parents still need to remove their children from these leftist groups and educate them privately. Education should be a private matter and not a part of government at any level. That’s what we need to get back to and until we do the educational problems in this country will only multiply–and the solutions offered up to us will be nothing more than regurgitated leftism.