One of my favorite people on Twitter is Corey DeAngelis. Every day I see him fighting for the rights of parents to get the education that they want for their kids. And he follows all the legislation that is being pushed in all the states. What I like about him is that like Ron DeSantis, he always seems to be taking ground from the secular left. Well, he has a new article in the The Federalist. Let’s read it.
It says:
Not a single state had universal school choice prior to 2021. In the past three years, eleven states have enacted it. This is a monumental achievement — and more victories for America’s children are imminent. School choice advocates are grateful to the power-hungry teachers unions, which overplayed their hand and sparked a parent revolution.
He says that there 11 states that have it, but there are more that have introduced legislation to get it.
What I like about Corey is that he’s not afraid to have an enemy in life. I was raised on Cyrano de Bergerac, a play about a French musketeer who always speaks his mind, and offends a lot of bad people. For me, it was always a good sign for your honor if you could point to bad people who opposed you. But today, it seems like the default view, especially of feelings-focused people, is to try to be liked by everyone. Well, Corey likes parents, and parents like Corey. But the teachers unions… they’re his enemies.
He writes:
The teachers unions-induced school closures harmed students academically, mentally, and emotionally, with virtually no reduction in overall coronavirus transmission or child mortality. Parents were understandably furious at the public schools that had broken faith with them during their time of need, and they weren’t going to just sit there and take it.
How did the unions respond to efforts to exert more control? By attacking parents, of course. No, it wasn’t the virus that needed to be defeated. It was you, mom and dad.
The unions publicly smeared parents who had the temerity to suggest that schools should do their jobs. In Chicago, home of the nation’s third-largest public school system, the local union took to Twitter to demonize those who favored reopening schools: “The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny,” tweeted the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) on Dec. 6, 2020.
By the way, I noticed a Daily Wire article last week about how the Chicago Teachers Unions wanted 50 BILLION DOLLARS to fund abortions and migrant services, even as student performance is dropping:
Last year, Chicago Public Schools spent nearly $22,000 per student, much higher than the national average of $14,347.
Meanwhile, in 2022, only 12% of Chicago’s eighth graders were proficient in math, and only 19% were proficient in reading.
But let’s get back to Corey’s article. It’s funny that the teacher unions are claiming that parents who wanted schools to re-open were motivated by “racism”.
Take a look at this:
According to McKinsey, by the end of the 2020–21 academic school year, students “in majority-Black schools ended the school year six months behind in both math and reading, while students in majority-white schools ended up just four months behind in math and three months behind in reading.” If any policy had racist results, it was the union-pushed school closures and remote learning — which really should be called remotely learning — not parent-backed school re-openings.
Wow! So, the teacher unions fighting against re-opening schools actually hurt BLACK students the most. To me, it looks like the teacher unions are the real racists – the ones who deliberately cause harm to visible minorities.
I just want to quickly add that there are plenty of studies showing the harm that school shutdowns did to kids:
- Science Advances: The youth mental health crisis: Quasi-experimental evidence on the role of school closures
- Perspectives on Psychological Science: The Impact of School Closures on Learning and Mental Health of Children: Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic
But it’s not just name-calling, there’s also spying on parents and persecuting them for wanting the schools open:
The California Teachers Association (CTA) even stooped to spying on parents, conducting what amounts to opposition research, the same as political candidates do on their opponents. A public records request uncovered emails from a union employee asking a public school principal for information about “the ideological leaning of groups that are funding the reopen lawsuits.” She noted that she had heard the principal had “lots of information regarding the Parents Association.”
I’ve read in other places that the secular leftists want to go after parents who oppose them personally – whether that be with doxing, death threats, violence, or other tactics. It’s a labor union, after all.
Elsewhere in the article, Corey notes how the union thugs went after parents who enrolled their kids in small “micro-schools”. These micro-schools would teach kids how to code, using free tools and online teaching videos.
The National Education Association (I think that’s the largest teacher union in America) wrote up opposition research reports to scare parents away from the micro-schools:
The first one warned union members and their allies: “The Opposition Report has documented widespread support for micro-schools.”
The report identified more than 20 additional microschool networks and related organizations, and recommended that their staff and allies familiarize themselves with a list of anti-microschool talking points the NEA had developed, such as that the microschools “do not guarantee students or educators the same civil rights protections that are required in public schools,” their staff are “not required to be credentialed,” and their students “are not held accountable to state standards of learning.”
Well, that’s enough for now. Corey has a new book out about the fight between parents and teacher unions. It’s called “The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools”. Check it out. I have the audio version on my wishlist.
WINTERY KNIGHT 