Recall the duration of school closures due, allegedly, to the Wuhan Virus situation in our nation. Not everyone is on board with the teachers unions’ attitude toward reopening our schools and getting our children back to in-person learning—where they actually could learn and where they, and school staff, would be far safer than either are cooped up at home.
Tommy Schultz, Vice President of Communications and Marketing for the American Federation for Children:
For the past year, there has essentially been a national teachers union strike that has left tens of millions of families without access to an adequate education[.]
And
This will haunt our country for decades to come, and the teachers unions’ blatant refusal to [follow] science in the name of political extortion is outright shameful[.]
You bet. And the unions’ strike demands? A guarantee of perfect safety. Oh, and more money. Billions of dollars more money.
It’s not just the unions, though. Here’s a teacher, Rebecca Friedrichs.
Most good teachers are deeply troubled by the strikes. We never want to deny the children even one day of learning, and we understand that we are servant leaders to those children.
That is, to use the technical term, a crock; it’s just porch dog yapping. If “good teachers” actually were troubled by the strikes, they’d tell their union bosses to take a hike, and they would go back to the classroom.
Friedrichs also used to be a union official, and she was the lead plaintiff in Friedrichs v CTA, through which she and some of her colleagues tried to get the right for teachers, et al., to decide for themselves whether or not to fund unions. That makes her empty rhetoric all the more useless.
Moreover, although Friedrichs’ suit failed at the Supreme Court when the short-handed Court voted 4-4, nothing in that failure forced union members to stay union members. They were, they are, they always have been free to stop being card carriers, to leave the union, and thereby to regain their right to decide.
There’s also the meme that teachers are afraid to cross their unions. They may be, but they’re only afraid of their own mental creation of union responses—which in the end, are only words. And so we have more crockery.
Still, if teachers really are so timid, it’s time for adults to step up: school boards and local and State governing jurisdictions need to move to decertify the unions, fire the teachers who won’t go back to work, and redirect the funds originally allocated to closed schools to private, parochial, voucher, and charter schools that are open. After all, if a school isn’t operating, it doesn’t need any money.
‘Course, that takes the true adults—We the People, particularly us parents—to do our jobs and fire reluctant board members and politicians and elect those who will take prompt, decisive action.