Posted on 03/10/2019 3:38:51 AM PDT by robowombat
Charter schools, homeschooling coming under heavy fire from teacher unions
March 4, 2019 (American Thinker) — For the first time in a generation, there is labor unrest in America's public schools. Strikes in Los Angeles, Denver, Oakland, and West Virginia as well as threatened strikes in other localities are more than teacher unions flexing their muscles to get more pay and benefits for their members. At issue everywhere is the success of charter schools and the perceived threat they pose to the nation's public schools.
Indeed, Ray Domanico of the Manhattan Institute points out that the increased activism of the unions is occurring as the Democratic Party is drifting ever farther leftward.
Washington Examiner:
What's behind the recent spate of teacher strikes from Los Angeles to Denver, West Virginia, and Oakland? Local issues like across-the-board raises and increased educational spending are certainly a big part of teachers' demands, but they could have been fought without a strike. The larger issue at play, and the real reason for these strikes, is a shift in the landscape of the party the teachers' unions have always called home.
The Democratic Party continues to drift away from centrist ideas and toward a more "progressive" approach to labor and education, and teachers' unions are prepared to exploit this shift. In a very real way, the teacher strikes across the country serve as a signal to the progressive left within the Democratic Party that union support is contingent on falling in step with their demands. Gone are the days of Obama-era bipartisan support for charter schools, teacher accountability, and merit pay. In addition to increased school spending, that means ending the use of merit-based pay and hindering the growth of non-union charter schools, and the progressive left, for better or for worse, is prepared to acquiesce.
That acquiescence runs counter to the interests of some of the Democrats' core constituencies:
The unions' move against charter schools, however, is deeply misguided. This move puts them in direct opposition to the exact families who are traditionally a core constituency of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. These working class and low-income black and Hispanic families constitute the vast majority of those who choose to send their children to high-performing charter schools in urban areas. The threat posed by charter schools is not just in drawing students away from public schools. It is an existential threat in that the unions know that if they institute the kinds of reforms that work in charters, their power will be broken.
Charter schools around the country, especially those structured to provide an education based on the classical model, have succeeded in improving the educational opportunities and achievements of those lucky enough to be enrolled in them. That fact that has remained as steady over the years as the low reading scores posted by the public-school system. What has evolved is the tenacity of the opposition from the local public school boards over which the teachers' unions exert so much control, and from whom desperate parents must seek a blessing for a charter. Rules designed to inhibit the creation and operation of charters are being augmented with other impediments won by unions in recent strikes:
The school boards' objections are typically couched in concerns that the charter, for one reason or another, will fail to meet the board's standards regarding discrimination, generally meaning not that the charter will not discriminate among applicants but that it cannot guarantee a student roster consisting of X percent of this or that minority or identity group. But the real fear is likely what it has always been when it comes to charters: that if they graduate too many students who don't do drugs, find themselves in trouble with the law, or get pregnant (or get someone else pregnant), and instead can read and write; know something of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates; and feel some sense of gratitude when they hear Beethoven or read the Bill of Rights, the result could be an exodus from the underperforming public schools to the excelling charters, and with it a concurrent diminishment of union power.
Serious improvement in educational delivery may be at the point now of examining options to emancipate school choice from the fetters of the union-dominated school boards, which have a vested interest in the status quo and an ideological opposition to traditional, effective education, the learning of knowledge for its own sake and the passing along of our patrimony. A battle was lost in Colorado, but it is a long war and it will continue, for there is a great deal at stake. The assault on charter schools goes hand in hand with the war against homeschooling. The goal is to make pulling your child out of traditional public schools as difficult as possible. For the unions, it's a matter of survival. There is a notion that if they allow the formation of charter schools and educating children at home, the public schools will be left trying to educate the poorest, the most problematic children. I think that's a straw man argument, but it appears to be working.
Every charter school is not excellent, nor is homeschooling the answer for everyone. It's all about choice. And taking choices out of the hands of parents is a loss of freedom and a loss for quality education in an age when dumbing down the education of our children has become a specialty of teacher unions.
Published with permission from the American Thinker.
Every Democrat is a violent totalitarian thug.
The lobbyists are complaining again.
The left claims to be pro choice but it's about indoctrination of thought, be it education, free speech, abortion or gun rights. Conform or be scorned.
If we got rid of teachers’ unions, eighty percent of our problems would disappear.
They are threatened by something that works and theirs which doesn’t but will make every effort to force you back into it or hold you captive. How dare we interrupt the propagandist learning centers!
Just because it's the law, it doesn't make the law just.
The student abused by a priest or bullied in school, grows up and joins a teacher’s union to victimize other children.
They know it is hypocritically immoral, but they want the stable and better paycheck.
GREED
Dear GOD, we need help !
The queers and the enemy are a strong force to resist against and it is ALL fomented by PUBLIC SCHOOLS ... that do not actually TEACH to reatain, American history
America had better wake up !
Two less than educated, muzzie freshman representatives are already the camels' nose in.
as pointed out in THIS VIDEO , Almost Occasionally Conscious is very professionally scripted and she is really, really good at delivering her lines.
AND
ALL of this adds up to a very well executed plot to take over the America every drop of blood shed in every war has ever paid for.
Aoc, tlaib and omar have bonded together to get Congress to drop the headgear ban JUST FOR THE TWO MUZZIE enemies the tratorous Americans actually voted in.
THIS SHIT IS DANGEROUS !
The article was "written" by Rick Moran and, as usual for Mr. Moran, most of the article is ripped off from another source, in this case The Washington Examiner.
WE WILL CONTROL YOUR FAMILY LIFE.
Typical union mentality. Instead of “Build a better mousetrap” it’s “What’s so bad about a few mice?”
They *really* hate home schooling. Difficulty in infiltrating such an environment.
hslda.org is a great resource for parents thinking about this very do-able option.
Private education produces a better quality product at a lower cost.
That’s what the NEA is terrified of—any manner of competition.
And when you are so badly scared of any competition of any crime, the only thing it does if expose all of your weaknesses.
And that is what the NEA is afraid of!
No, 80% of your teachers would disappear. Increasingly, it's a miserable job. Children are being raised by their cell phones, and they are lazy, belligerent, and uncontrollable. They don't read. They don't do homework. Their parents act like it's the teacher's job to raise the child. No disciplinary measures are allowed... that pay and pension is the only thing keeping most teachers hanging in there.
Without it, you'll get nothing but wide-eyed college kids who will rarely last more than 2 years. If that's what you WANT, now, go ahead. It wouldn't surprise me. People talk like their children are so precious to them, but they'll leave them with the cheapest person they can get.
They can't stand the competition that highlights their failure.
They are desperate to indoctrinate ALL children to their culture of death and Godless, anti-American, communism.
They are obsessed with expanding their ranks and the union dues used to keep Dems in power.
As long as there is one child who is taught to think for themselves, who has been brought up being taught about liberty, who has been taught about freedom, what it means, and what is required t keep it, then they are threatened.
It’s one more mind they can’t control...and if they can’t control it, they must eliminate it.
I refer to teachers’ UNIONS.
I know there are good meaning teachers who are abused by their students, BUT WTH ARE THE UNIONS DOING ABOUT THAT?
If I were a teacher, I would feel totally abandoned.
The culture and the standards have already vanished.
I believe that this did NOT just start yesterday.
Agreed. This socialist/communist cancer has metastasized and now requires strong, highly invasive and damaging treatment to cure.
Are we able?
God Forbid that ANY kid today gets anywhere near the education I got in a one room school.
Seeing the DISMAL condition of today’s teaching & ‘education’ , I am beyond glad that I had no kids.
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