A coordinated effort by the far-left and their media accomplices is in full swing as they scramble to paint the narrative that parent concern about public education is a manufactured fairy tale by right-wing loony-toon activists, conspirators, and extremists. The elephant in the room is that it was COVID-19 that opened the eyes of parents, exposing the corrupt teacher union/educrat monopoly plaguing public education. I call it the “education cartel.” It’s comprised of teachers, union activists, administrators, school boards, and their cohorts in the liberal media.
The education cartel flew largely under the radar prior to COVID and it was blindsided. Sunlight really is the best disinfectant and the pandemic exposed these ringleaders operating under the veil of “educating” our kids as nothing more than a bunch of tyrants. Their jig is up.
No greater example of this can be found than in Northern Virginia’s Fairfax and Loudoun Counties, where liberals outnumber conservatives and, until recently, most people couldn’t name a single member of their school board. Now the board members are household names. As COVID upended normal life, parents got their own education, and one by one the shoes dropped.
Shoe 1: Unions dug in their heels, opposing school reopenings. Their power and influence had been established for so long they thought they were invincible and never imagined they were overplaying their hand. The longer they insisted on keeping kids locked out of school, the angrier parents became, and the more the spotlight shone on what their kids were learning.
Shoe 2: Critical race theory. Parents got an education on the indoctrination of their kids with radical concepts that had infiltrated school curricula. Courtesy of the Zoom classroom, they witnessed teachers injecting racial division into their lesson plans.
Shoe 3: Gender policies and First Amendment rights. Increasingly packed school board meetings became media circuses, and when a Loudoun County Public School (LCPS) teacher offered his opinion on a controversial proposed policy regarding transgenderism, the school board went woke and suspended him. Even after they were inundated with support from parents for the teacher, Tanner Cross, LCPS announced they’re appealing a court order requiring them to give him his job back. Rather than call a truce with parents, the board is doubling down. Parents can go stick it.
Now enlightened, parents (who, in many cases are paying substantial amounts of money in property taxes) are now packing school board meetings across the country to push back on the severe overreach of tyrannical school boards and power-drunk teacher unions. But instead of answers, compassion, or respectful dialogue, they’re getting their mics cut.
While it’s absolutely arrogant, condescending, abhorrent – insert any number of adjectives – that they would treat parents like second-class citizens, complete with all the discrimination they rail against, these education cartels have been free-ranging it with our kids’ “education” for years. They’ve just now been exposed thanks to COVID-19. Their reaction is typical of political activists, not public servants. Instead of working with the parents they supposedly serve, they’ve launched a political smear campaign against those very parents.
In Loudoun County, they set up a Facebook group targeting parents who dare disagree with the education cartel, including on issues like CRT. Group members created a list of names, addresses, employers, etc. of parents who don’t walk the line. Patti Hidalgo Menders, a parent from Loudoun County, was one of those targeted. “They put three pictures of me in there, and they called me a racist. They had my first and last name, the name of my husband, where my son goes to high school, what town I live in, and they called me disgusting,” she said.
Among the who’s who in this group doing the targeting: LCPS staff – as in taxpayer-funded government employees – school board members, and a prosecutor in Loudoun County whose salary is also paid for by these parents.
Maybe next time we revisit bullying in schools, we should circle back to the grownups in charge.
The education cartel is imploding and they need a better PR strategy because attacking parents isn’t working. Nevertheless, they persist. Their cavalry of reinforcements is working overtime. Virginia Democrat State Delegate Marcus Simon chose the White supremacy route, saying many of the parents advocating for open schools are part of the KKK. Referencing a substantial group of parents in Fairfax County who’ve organized and tirelessly advocated to open schools he said, “we know who is an ally of this movement…I’m not saying everybody who supports Open FCPS is a member of the KKK, but when the KKK is on your side, you need to rethink your priorities.”
If you want your kids to have a respectable education in the classroom, you’re a racist. You almost can’t make this stuff up.
Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee for governor in Virginia, arrogantly brushed off concerns of thousands of parents storming Virginia school board meetings furious over the indoctrination of CRT being pushed in their schools as just another “right-wing conspiracy.” If McAuliffe wants to take a break from counting his campaign cash from the teachers’ union, he might be interested to know that many parents who are part of this so-called “right-wing conspiracy” are Democrats. It turns out that when it comes to CRT and indoctrinating our kids, parents are politically colorblind.
Kids trump politics. Every. Single. Time.
These terror tactics are all part of their effort to shut up and shut down parents. There is no tolerance for debate and dialogue. Parents will not be intimidated, bullied, or silenced by the tyrants running our public education system. COVID-19 unleashed a giant spotlight on the education monopoly and it turns out it has very little to do with educating our kids.
Parents, now armed with facts on their side, aren’t going away.
Here Come the Power Brokers: Teachers’ Unions
As the debate over critical race theory and schools reaches a fever pitch, the two national teachers’ unions are entering the fray, vowing to defend their members against any backlash over how they teach about the nation’s complicated history with race and racism.
Both unions have presented a single underlying message: Teachers must be honest about racial injustices so that students learn to think critically about how the country’s problematic past has shaped its present. Any efforts to restrict those conversations in the classroom, the unions say, are akin to censorship.
“The backlash [to teaching about race] that you see in these radicalized circles is going to hurt kids,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten in an interview. “I felt the need to make it crystal clear to teachers … that I honor their professional responsibilities and that their union will have their back.”
Already, 26 states have introduced bills or taken other steps to limit how teachers can discuss racism in the classroom, and nine states have enacted restrictions. Many right-leaning policymakers have said they’re trying to keep critical race theory out of K-12 schools. Critical race theory has become highly politicized, and experts say that any efforts by the unions to support its use in the classroom will be met by attacks from conservative groups.
Weingarten has already taken steps to distance her union from the divisive rhetoric, telling her members Tuesday that critical race theory isn’t taught in K-12 schools, but that “culture warriors are labeling any discussion of race, racism, or discrimination as CRT to try to make it toxic.”
National Education Association President Becky Pringle has avoided using the term critical race theory in interviews, instead calling for educators to teach the truth about the most painful parts of American history. But at the NEA’s representative assembly, union delegates passed several measures that explicitly support the use of critical race theory in curriculum and allocated tens of thousands of dollars to those efforts.
One such measure, introduced by the NEA’s board of directors, said the nation’s largest teachers’ union will support and lead campaigns that “result in increasing the implementation of culturally responsive education, critical race theory, and ethnic studies curriculum in pre-K-12 and higher education.” The measure is part of a larger $675,000 effort to “eradicate institutional racism” in public schools.
The national unions are now starting to organize their legal responses to protect educators who might be punished for how they discuss racism with their students.
Some of the state laws specify consequences for teachers who break them: New Hampshire says that anybody, including the attorney general, can sue a school or district for violating new guidelines on how teachers can discuss race, gender, and other identifying characteristics in the classroom. Also, a teacher who is found to have violated the law could receive a disciplinary sanction by the state board of education. (An Arizona bill would have gone one step further and fined individual teachers $5,000 for promoting only one side of a controversial issue, but that bill failed to pass the state senate.)
“Mark my words: Our union will defend any member who gets in trouble for teaching honest history,” Weingarten said in a speech Tuesday. “Teaching the truth is not radical or wrong. Distorting history and threatening educators for telling the truth is what is truly radical and wrong.”
In an interview, Weingarten said some of the laws are so broad that they undermine the required state standards for instruction. The union plans to seek some clarification there, possibly in court. AFT has also put additional resources in its legal defense fund. “There are constitutional scholars that are looking at these laws,” Weingarten said. “I’m just trying to make sure that teachers can teach the constitution.”
How fiery is Randi Weingarten about teachers pushing CRT on kids? She’s so fiery, listen to her speech to her union members Tuesday as she grossly misrepresents the facts that thousands of parents have verified regarding which kids are being taught Critical Race Theory and at what age:
Summary
Let’s be clear about several things:
- Teachers Unions have become TOO powerful, TOO politically partisan, and TOO arrogant for parents to continue benign trust of children to their care;
- Leaders of Teachers Unions are rejecting the belief that parents when entrusting their children to public school teachers do so believing that these teachers know better than parents everything that is best for the children;
- Many teachers are “in the tank” for Critical Race Theory even though believing it obliterates American history and justifies all to see the world through a lens that sees only the skin color of people. And they teach children to use that to determine the worth of EVERYONE.
My wife and I were each educated in public schools. Our three children all were educated in public schools. We ALL graduated high school with a well-rounded view of pretty much everything in life we needed at the time to cope. We all knew while growing up the horrors of racism and identity politics. But we weren’t taught that by public school teachers. We were taught that by our parents!
I’ll close with this question: Is it fair to say that Big Government and Big Public Education feel unilateral authorization to assume the nurturing of America’s children on everything in life? Did Hillary Clinton really mean when she published her book “It Takes a Village” that the “Village” was comprised of public school teachers and administrators?
I’m just one guy with my opinion on the matter. I would NEVER give the responsibility to teach my children in any unilateral fashion without my knowing it in advance. And if I disagreed with what comprised that teaching, my kids would NOT attend such a school.
Let’s face it: these educators are afraid — afraid of what will happen now that parents have awakened and they understand kids are no longer receiving education in public schools. Their horror is that they have discovered their children are instead attending school and are being indoctrinated with the political hackery promoted by Democrat Socialist politicians who have accepted millions of dollars in campaign dollars from Teachers Unions!
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