The Teachers Union Strike in LA

The subhead on Monday’s Wall Street Journal article on the United Teachers Los Angeles union strike against the Los Angeles Unified School District says it all.

Nearly one in five LA public school students attends charters unaffected by the strike; union wants a cap on them

Herein lies one more proof of the disingenuousness of the UTLA. While the UTLA is striking, demanding a cap on the number of charter schools (and money, money, money), all the while holding Los Angeles’ public school students hostage to their demand, the charters are open and actually educating their students.

With its strike demand, the UTLA is ignoring the enormous opportunity that should be available for the children of LA: the two systems of schools could complement each other.  Instead, the union has chosen to present the situation as a zero-sum game. The contrast couldn’t be sharper.

It’s no wonder the union wants to eliminate what it sees as its competition; it can’t stand the clarity the charters’ existence and performance provide in the union’s zero sum.

Cynically, the union’s demand for money, is nothing more than what unions do; although, here it’s also a smoke screen.

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In the end, the LAUSD caved completely. In addition to a 6% pay raise and more than $400 million in additional money to be spent on the union, there’s this:

Union President Alex Caputo-Pearl said the agreement goes beyond contractual issues and addresses “having accountability and regulations on charter schools,” including how to give traditional schools a bigger say when charters are given space on their campuses.

Never mind that that space was available to the charters because the union’s schools weren’t using it. No, contract matters, as Caputo-Pearl just confessed, had little to do with the union’s strike. Now they have near-veto say on what their competition will be allowed to do. That’s to the great harm of the children this union has pretended to want to protect.

Pseudo-Conservatives also Lie

Here’s Charlie Kirk, founder and CEO of Turning Point USA, which pretends to advocate for young conservatives. The op-ed at the link is headlined

I judged the Covington kids too quickly—Here’s what I missed

It’s a missive in which he acknowledged he erred in jumping on the bandwagon and smearing those children as soon as he could, along with the rest of the Liberal class, on the basis of an initial, brief, carefully edited video (my characterization of the video; he thought differently about it). Here’s how Kirk described that careful edit.

It’s not that it had been taken out of context. It’s not that the situation was more complicated than we originally thought. It’s that there wasn’t anything there in the first place. There wasn’t now, and never had been, any evidence of the high school students doing anything untoward.

It’s not a matter of the video taken out of context; it’s that the video had undergone that careful editing to fit a preconceived narrative—that anyone wearing a Trump-supporting bit of clothing was evil, that anyone from the Left confronting such a person must be right, that blacks also involved must be innocent of any wrong-doing.

Aside from that little bit, here’s what Kirk missed.

This wasn’t a case of the press lying. Not this time. I made the same judgment that they did and I wasn’t lying. This wasn’t one of the media’s usual, deliberate distortions of facts or vitriolic attacks.

Yes, this was a case of the press lying.  This was a textbook, blatant case of the media’s deliberate distortion of the facts.  The lie—not a mistake in judgment—was made clear by the full 1¾ hour video that gave the full story, a video that was available very quickly after the event.  This was a video that would have been available if the press and the rest of the Left, and pseudo-conservatives, had been willing to tarry a bit and get actual facts instead of hastening to see who could be first with the smear.  And you lied, too, with your jumping onto the smear wagon.  The lie continues to be made clear by the press’ continued attacks on those children even now that the facts are out.

It absolutely was one of the press’ most vitriolic attacks—they called for the brutal (woodchippers) murders of these children.

Here’s the other thing Kirk missed.  Nowhere in his 500-word piece purporting to explain his error is there a single minim of an apology.  Kirk doesn’t even have the grace to apologize for his monstrous error.  Or he still doesn’t understand what he’s done.