OPINION:
“I sleep with an NEA member every night,” said President Biden, celebrating Labor Day. Yes, he does.
And, if we are reading his intended meaning correctly — that is, that the teachers unions are so near and dear to him that their influence over him is equal to that of his spouse — then we can understand the root of a significant problem we face today, because, let’s face it, the teachers unions aren’t about ensuring our children get a good and proper education, they’re about what virtually all labor unions have become about — ensuring a nice lifestyle for their leaders, and growing and sustaining their political power.
Many parents still don’t know it, but their children’s teachers who are members of either the National Education Association (roughly 3 million members, the largest labor union in the nation) or the American Federation of Teachers (approximately 1.7 million members) don’t prioritize their children’s needs over those of the teachers.
That became crystal clear during the pandemic when it was evident that children were neither likely to become infected by, nor likely to become terribly ill from nor likely to serve as spreaders of the coronavirus. Despite those three key points of science (it was “all about the science,” remember?), the teachers unions made ridiculous demands about what it would take to reopen schools — and then worked, to the detriment of the children themselves, to keep the schools closed for as long as possible.
Why? Because they could. And perhaps merely to show that they could, because power does no one any good unless those the powerful seek to control acknowledge that power.
That the teachers unions have power over Democrat Party politicians is evident. At any given Democratic National Convention, the single biggest element is the teachers union members — they make up roughly 10% of all the delegates on the floor at a Democrat convention. So Mr. Biden’s joking comment that he slept with an NEA member every night wasn’t merely a joke; it was an acknowledgment of reality.
The teachers unions’ hold over the Democratic Party has real-world consequences — ask the children who’ve lost more than a year of in-person learning. Enough time has passed that we’re beginning to see serious analysis of the educational costs paid by our school children. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a study conducted by researchers from Brown University, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and MIT that examined the relationship between in-person learning and the testing scores of third- through eighth-grade students in a dozen states. “They found that the share of students who scored ‘proficient’ or above declined in spring 2021 compared to previous years by an average of 14.2 percentage points in math and 6.3 percentage points in language arts,” reported the Journal. Worse, wrote the authors of the study, “these declines were larger in districts with less in-person instruction.”
Noted the Journal, “Urban districts with stronger unions tend to have lower student test scores because their collective-bargaining agreements make it harder to fire lousy teachers, reward good ones and implement other reforms. These districts also tended to keep schools fully shut.”
The teachers unions do not exist for the sake of ensuring our children get a good and proper education. They exist to cater to the needs of their members and — more importantly — their leaders. And they are powerful not because of the merits of their positions, nor because of their creative ideas, nor because they care about children, as their general counsel once famously pointed out. They are powerful because they coerce a ton of people (involuntarily in many states, due to laws enacted by politicians they helped elect in the first place) into handing over a ton of money in dues every year.
And Democrat politicians who’ve gotten away for decades by claiming that they and only they “care” about the children (because they support the political demands of the teachers’ unions) are stuck with that.
Ask Terry McAuliffe how that worked out for him.
• Jenny Beth Martin is honorary chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.
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