Tag Archives: Teacher Unions

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Which presidential candidate will help minorites get a better education in better schools?

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One of the major issues affecting blacks and Hispanics in America is the issue of poor-performing public schools. Because the administrators and teachers are unionized, they are immune to criticism, discipline or termination for poor performance. And many of the administrators and teachers have no real-world experience at earning money in the private sector. Who will fix it?

Here’s Daily Wire reporting on Trump in his own words:

On Thursday, President Trump redeclared his commitment to enacting school choice, a conservative pitch most popular in the black American community, many of whom have grown weary of sending their children to government-funded public schools.

Speaking at the “Transition to Greatness” roundtable, the president called upon Congress to enact school choice now, hailing it as the great “civil rights issue of our time.”

“We are renewing our call on Congress to finally enact school choice now, school choice is a big deal, because access to education is the civil rights issue our time,” the president said. “I’ve heard that for the last, I would say year, it really is, it’s the civil rights issue of our time.”

President Trump elaborated on the benefits of school choice by forcing underperforming schools to better improve their methods.

“When you can have children go to a school where their parents want them to go, and it creates competition, and other schools fight harder, because all of a sudden they say, ‘Wow, we’re losing it, we have to fight hard,’” the president said. “It gets better in so many different ways, but there are groups of people against that. You have unions against it, you have others against it, and they’re not against it for the right reasons, they were against it for a lot of the wrong reasons.”

So basically, Trump wants schools to work more like companies in the private sector that are accountable to customers. When private sector companies compete, you get Amazon, Apple, Dell, Samsung, LG, etc. Competition gives you more choice, so you can find better quality for less money. Public schools don’t work like that, and children suffer as a result.

And note:

President Trump’s push for school choice at this turbulent moment in history is not coincidental, being that black American voters routinely have expressed support for it alongside criminal justice reform, which the president helped to enact with the First Step Act.

The Washington Times reports on more differences:

President Trump is pushing schools to reopen amid the COVID-19 pandemic, saying parents want it, the children can handle it and the economy needs it.

Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden says the teachers don’t want it, the children can spread the coronavirus and the country can’t stomach another surge of COVID-19 cases he fears would result.

[…]Beyond school choice, Mr. Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have rescinded Obama administration rules on school discipline, racial disparities and gender identity, and have given states more flexibility in meeting federal mandates.

And here’s Biden:

Mr. Biden counters Mr. Trump’s parent-centered approach to education with a teacher-centered platform, promising the money will flow to public education instead.

Mr. Biden counters Mr. Trump’s parent-centered approach to education with a teacher-centered platform, promising the money will flow to public education instead.

He wants to triple federal spending on schools with significant low-income populations and require that much of that cover higher salaries for teachers. He also would increase the availability of student loan forgiveness for graduates who go on to work in education.

Mr. Biden’s campaign says he will hire up to 60,000 more psychologists for schools to help with what he warned is a mental health crisis.

His unity platform, reached with former opponent Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont, opposes vouchers that support private schools and takes a dim view of public charter schools.

The Biden-Sanders plan would impose bureaucratic standards for diversity and discipline on charter schools, cut off money for those deemed underperforming and impose an outright ban on federal money for for-profit charter schools.

I don’t see the profit motive as a problem, as it is profits that causes people in the private sector to produce quality goods and services for their customers – or risk losing those customers to competitors who do a better job of pleasing customers.

You can see from this chart how well throwing money into a unionized monopoly has worked over time:

Cato Institute graphs education spending against test scores
Cato Institute graphs education spending against test scores

In public schools, administrators and teachers are not paid more or less based on pleasing their customers (parents) by achieving results (student performance).

Reason.com is a libertarian web site, interviewed Education Secretary Betsy Devos. I liked this:

You are someone who has advocated for more choice, more local decision making, in education. But then you were thrust into the role of national education official. It had to be tempting to use that position to really push local governments to implement more of the ideas that you have. But your idea is that there shouldn’t be some person in charge of telling everyone what to do. Do you ever feel this tension?

I do. The previous administration went exactly the opposite direction and overreached in multiple areas. Much of what I’ve had to do is come back and undo a lot of that. But at the same time, there are plenty of folks who’ve been critical of my not implementing all kinds of conservative policies that, in my view, would be desirable for students and their families. But I think my [approach] here has been one of restraint, and that I believe is ultimately a big accomplishment.

I view this department as one that probably never should have been stood up. I think there are ample arguments for it having gotten more in the way of students and their futures than actually being any kind of value-add.

Should the Department of Education be abolished—or gradually abolished, perhaps?

I would not be at all unhappy to work myself out of a job. I think that states and local communities and, most importantly, the family has to be the epicenter of these decisions. The 40 years since this department has existed, there’s been over a trillion dollars spent to close the achievement gaps. They haven’t closed one little bit. They’ve only opened in multiple areas. So why would we continue to advocate for doing more of the same thing and expect something different?

Do you like having Betsy Devos in charge of education policy? I do. For me this is just another reason to support Trump for President.

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The rights of parents of children with gender dysphoria during a Biden presidency

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Enraged Joe Biden howls out his hatred for Bible-believing Christians
Enraged Joe Biden howls out his hatred for Bible-believing Christians

This week, Democrat candidate for president Joe Biden answered questions from Democrat supporters at a town hall run by a sympathetic Democrat. There was an interesting question from a Democrat mother about transgenderism. Biden was asked what his opinion was of childred aged 8 being able to transition from their birth sex to a different sex. His answer will shock you.

The Daily Wire reports:

Answering a question at the ABC News-hosted townhall on Thursday night, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden stated that an eight-year-old child should be able to decide that they are transgender.

[…]After telling a story about his father, Biden answered, “The idea that an 8-year-old child or a 10-year-old child decides, ‘I decided I want to be transgender. That’s what I think I’d like to be. It’d make my life a lot easier.’ There should be zero discrimination.”

Watch:

The majority of children outgrow gender identity issues by the time they hit puberty, but that’s not a popular scientific fact to raise with Democrat voters. So, Biden told them what they wanted to hear.

It’s important to understand that the wishes of parents who DO NOT WANT their child to receive drugs or sex-change surgery will not be respected by a government that is beholden to LGBT activists.

Let’s look at an example from a country that pushes transgender ideology from their government-run classrooms, government-run hospitals and government-run courtrooms.

The Federalist reports:

For the past 11 months, Robert Hoogland, a father in Surrey, British Columbia, has been forced to watch as his 14 year-old daughter was “destroyed and sterilized” by court-ordered testosterone injections. After losing his legal appeal to stop the process in January… is making a desperate attempt to bring his case into the courts of public opinion, even though it breaks a court order demanding his silence about the case.

“I had a perfectly healthy child a year ago, and that perfectly healthy child has been altered and destroyed for absolutely no good reason,” Rob said in an exclusive interview. “She can never go back to being a girl in the healthy body that she should have had… She won’t be able to have children…”

[…][T]he courts judged his daughter competent to take testosterone without parental consent… [and] he was convicted of “family violence” by the BC Supreme Court for his “expressions of rejection of [his daughter’s] gender identity.” He was also placed under threat of immediate arrest if he was caught referring to his daughter as a girl again.

[…]Rob remains under a strict gag order forbidding him from speaking about his daughter’s case in public and requiring that he “acknowledge and refer to [his daughter] as male” in private.

The Canadian “Democrats” didn’t want anyone to know what they were doing to this father, so they took action to silence him:

[…]Rob granted two video interviews to Canadian YouTube commentators about his case… [T]he commentators who granted them quickly found themselves under threats of litigation. Rob’s first interview was immediately taken down. Rob’s second interviewer… faced similar threats, but initially refused to take her video (not currently available in Canada) down.

[…]Justice Michael Tammen of the British Columbia Supreme Court ordered that Thompson’s interview and various social media posts be taken down. When Thompson stalled, trying to keep a rapidly sharing copy of her interview available to Canadians on Bitchute, the police were sent to her house to demand she take the video down.

Tammen also harshly reprimanded Rob for speaking about his case to the media, warning him that if he broke his silence again, he would likely be cited for contempt of court.

You can check out this story from Mass Resistance, where they have photos and names of all the people who attacked the father’s right to parent his child.

And by the way, American public school teacher unions want the exact same rules in place as in this Canadian case, as the Daily Signal reports. Which is why you should support school choice.

Lest you think that this is just one rogue province, the Canadian legislature has actually introduced a bill (C-8) that allows the government to jail parents who refuse to approve their child’s gender transition for up to 5 years:

Under C-8, parents could spend up to five years in jail for trying to help their son accept himself as a boy, or for helping their daughter to accept herself as a girl. Bill C-8 also would impose prison terms up to five years for doctors, counselors, psychiatrists, psychologists and other paid professionals whose treatment for gender confusion departs from politically correct orthodoxy. Parents would be punished if they do anything other than encourage a confused child to “transition” to the opposite gender. Transitioning is an extreme form of intervention that includes taking puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and undergoing permanent surgical sterilization, including the removal of healthy organs such as breasts and testicles.

The Democrats have already passed a bill in the House called the “Equality Act”, and you can read about what it does here at the Daily Signal. If the Democrats win the Senate and White House, this will become law.

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Three cheers for the Janus SCOTUS decision and right-to-work laws in 27 states

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Political contributions from unions are overwhelmingly given to Democrats and leftists
Contributions from unions are mostly given to Democrats and leftists

Some people think of unions as a force for good. Perhaps they were in the past, but a little reading of economics shows how they actually produce very bad results for workers. In addition to that, unions are actively trying to influence the outcome of elections in 2020, using the money collected from their members. Fortunately, there have been two great developments recently that limit their power.

Here’s a recent story from Just the News:

Leaders of several public and private sector unions are threatening to organize walkouts this fall for teachers, truck drivers and service workers in an effort to protest police killings.

“The status quo — of police killing Black people, of armed white nationalists killing demonstrators, of millions sick and increasingly desperate — is clearly unjust, and it cannot continue,” said a statement issued over the weekend by various arms of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Service Employees International Union, and National Education Association.

[…]The union leaders also called for defunding police departments and universal health care.

You can see their progressive convictions coming out in how they distribute the money they collect from their members.

The Washington Examiner reports:

Organized labor has given more than $1.3 billion to Democratic Party organizations and liberal nonprofit and activist groups since 2010, while 1 percent went to conservative groups or causes, according to a survey of federal data.

The giving is starkly different from the beliefs of most rank-and-file union members, many of whom lean Republican.

Having said all of that, there were two pieces of good news about labor unions that I think we should celebrate during Labor Day.

First of all, there was a very good decision to allow teachers to opt out of having to pay union dues in all 50 states. Second, a large number of states have enacted right-to-work laws, which allow employees in union-dominated jobs to be able to work without being forced to join a union.

This article explains both:

While every public sector employee across the country now enjoys right to work protections under the First Amendment as a result of the 2018 National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation-won Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court decision, private sector workers in the 23 states that have yet to pass a right to work law can lose their job for refusing to tender dues or fees to a union.

Right to work protects each worker’s freedom of choice, but the advantages of right to work hardly stop there. Enshrining workplace freedom also brings significant economic benefits to the 27 states that have passed right to work laws.

Between 2009 and 2019, right to work states saw the total number of people employed grow by 16.9%. That’s nearly double the 9.6% gain in non-right to work states, according to an analysis of federal government statistics compiled by the National Institute for Labor Relations Research, or NILRR.

The study also found that, after adjusting for the cost of living, the mean after-tax household income in right to work states was about $4,300 higher than for households in forced-unionism states in 2018, the most recent year for which household income data is available.

The connection between right to work laws and better economic performance is not a surprise. Business experts consistently rank the presence of right to work laws as one of the most important factors companies consider when deciding where to expand or relocate their plants and facilities, where they will create new jobs and new opportunities.

Take the manufacturing sector, for example. The NILRR analysis revealed that employment in the manufacturing sector increased by 10% in right to work states from 2009 to 2019, over three times the 2.9% gain forced-unionism states saw over that same period.

Right to work laws clearly make economic sense, but protecting employee freedom has always been their central feature.

I really liked the Janus decision and right-to-work laws, because I don’t think that conservative workers should be forced to join a union in order to earn a living. The unions should not get access to worker money for free – unions should have to earn their worker’s money by providing value. And the worker should decide whether there is value there, or not.

You can see a full breakdown of union contributions by political affiliation for 2019-2020 here at Open Secrets.