Tag: National Education Association

Commentary: Third Largest Teachers’ Union Faces Demise of Its Own Making

RealClearWire
United Teachers of Dade

In a frantic attempt to preserve its monopoly over the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, attorneys for the union currently representing the district’s 24,000-plus teachers and support staff are relying on a strategy that has the potential to backfire and leave its members without workplace representation altogether.

On March 18, United Teachers of Dade (UTD), using an argument that would invalidate its own petition, asked a hearing officer with Florida’s Public Employee Relations Commission (PERC) to reject a competing union’s bid to participate in a forthcoming election to determine the bargaining representative for the South Florida educators.

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Commentary: Eliminating Standardized Testing Had Shockingly Bad Results

Connecticut Star Staff
Test Taking

For years, liberals have scoffed at the idea that standardized testing is the best predictor of academic success. The National Education Association, for instance, claims standardized tests are “both inequitable and ineffective at gauging what students know.” Activists’ campaign against standardized testing — and their assertions that such tests discriminate against “underrepresented minority students” — culminated in the decisions by more than 1,000 colleges to drop their standardized testing requirements.

This week, cold, hard data showed just how foolish those decisions were. The University of Texas at Austin released the academic performance data for students who submitted standardized scores versus those who did not submit such scores. The result is unambiguous: Students who did not submit standardized tests performed drastically worse than students who did submit their scores. The students who did not submit ACT or SAT scores finished the fall 2023 semester with a grade point average 0.86 grade points lower than students who did. This demonstrates an average difference of almost an entire letter grade. Had the University of Texas utilized all applicants’ standardized scores, it very well might have decided against admitting many of those who did not provide their scores. Students who did not provide scores had a median SAT of 1160, markedly lower than that of the students who did provide their scores: 1420. The University of Texas would have been correct in deciding against admitting those students with lower scores given how much better students with a higher average SAT performed academically.

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Commentary: School Choice Keeps Spreading

Connecticut Star Staff
Classroom

In just three years, the number of states with universal or near-universal private school choice programs has grown from zero to 10, and the number of students eligible for these programs has increased by 60%. According to the latest ABCs of School Choice – EdChoice’s comprehensive report about all matters pertaining to educational freedom—32 states (plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico) are using school choice as of 2023. Additionally, policymakers in 40 states debated 111 educational choice bills last year alone. Overall, approximately 20 million students—or 36% of all kids—are now eligible for some kind of private-choice program.

But what’s good for children and their families is problematic for the teachers’ unions and their fellow travelers. As such, on January 22—not coincidentally the beginning of National School Choice Week—the Partnership for the Future of Learning released a toolkit, maintaining that “voucher programs are “deeply rooted in segregation, racism, and discrimination.” The PFL, which is comprised of predominantly left-wing outfits—the National Education Association, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Learning Policy Institute, etc.—adds that private schools “do not have necessary accountability measures.”

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Commentary: Teacher Union Power Is Still in Full Bloom

Connecticut Star Staff
CTA Event

As a result of the Janus decision in 2018, no teacher or any public employee has to pay a penny to a union as a condition of employment. The good news is that since then, 20% of workers in non-right-to-work states have dropped out of their unions, according to a report from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The not-so-good news is that 70% of teachers nationwide are still willingly paying union dues, a great deal of which goes to politics, specifically to progressive candidates and causes.

The California Teachers Association has the honor of being the biggest political-spending teachers’ union in the country. A recent report reveals that between 1999 and 2020, the 300,000+ member union spent an astonishing $222,940,629 on politics – about $6 million was spent on the federal level, while almost $217 million stayed in the state – with 98.2% of all spending going to Democrats. The top advocacy issues for CTA include regulating charter schools, immigration reform, social justice, and a slew of almost exclusively left-wing causes.

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Commentary: The Year in Teacher Union Double Dealing

Connecticut Star Staff

This has been an egregious year for the country’s teachers unions. Okay, you may be thinking, so what else is new? But 2023 has exposed them as hypocrites par excellence.

The National Education Association convention in July provides myriad examples. While one might think a gathering of teachers would be concerned with the lack of literacy in public school students, he would be dead wrong. This year’s NEA convention in Florida was strictly political, and sex- and gender-obsessed ideas were front and center.

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Teachers Union Tells Teachers to Destroy Evidence of Student Gender Identity Surveys: Report

Connecticut Star Staff

A Colorado affiliate of the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, told its teachers to destroy any evidence of having given students a gender identity survey, according to a recent report.

CBS Colorado notes that while the JeffCo Public Schools district says it is “unclear” whether surveys about “preferred pronouns” are in violation of state law, it advised teachers against using them as lawsuits are ongoing.

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America’s Largest Teachers Unions Unveil LGBTQ Toolkit Detailing ‘Ze/Zim’ Pronouns, How to Address ‘Bias’

Connecticut Star Staff

The country’s largest teachers union released an LGBTQ toolkit Wednesday for educators, explaining “ze/zim” pronouns and how to address bias around sexual orientation and gender identity within the classroom.

The National Education Association’s (NEA) newest guidance aims to provide resources to educators to help them support LGBTQ students within the classroom by “using inclusive language [and] addressing harmful comments.” The toolkit includes a guide that encourages teachers to introduce themselves with their pronouns and use “gender neutral” pronouns such as “they, them, or their” when they are unsure of someone’s gender.

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Commentary: Teachers Don’t Want to Tell Parents What’s Going on in Classrooms

Admin

Do parents have the right to know what their children are being taught in public school?

Parents say yes; teachers say no.

Of course, it’s not quite that simple. The description of the latter party can be tweaked to “teachers unions” — although you don’t hear many individual teachers bucking the union line — but the dichotomy remains: parents want to know what’s going on in their kids’ classrooms, and teachers, administrators, and their union bosses would rather not tell them.

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Teachers Flee Unions as Membership Plummets by Almost 60,000

Admin

The nation’s largest teachers unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), declined by at least 59,000 members during the 2021-2022 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) disclosure reports.

The NEA, the nation’s largest teachers union, lost 40,107 members while the AFT, the nation’s second largest teachers union, declined by 19,078, according to the DOL reports. The decline comes as public schools added 95,000 educators from September 2021 to 2022.

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Commentary: The Systemic Racism of the Teachers Unions

Admin

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could reverse the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, in which SCOTUS asserted that the use of an applicant’s race as a factor in an admissions policy of a public educational institution does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The current case specifically cites the use of race in the admissions process at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, maintain that Harvard violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, “which bars entities that receive federal funding from discriminating based on race, because Asian American applicants are less likely to be admitted than similarly qualified white, Black, or Hispanic applicants.”

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Teachers’ Union Suggests Summer Reading About Kneeling for the National Anthem

Admin

The country’s largest teachers’ union suggested a book about kneeling for the national anthem as part of its August 2022 summer reading list, according to its website.

The National Education Association (NEA) listed the book “Why We Fly” by Kimberly Jones and Gilly Segal, which features marijuana use and tells of two girls on the cheerleading squad who take a knee for the national anthem after being inspired by a football star protesting in the media, according to the website. Discussion questions and related resources on athlete activism are also provided by the NEA to pair with the reading.

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Two Studies Raise Concerns About Public School ‘Serious Violence Incidents’

The Center Square

At a time when school shootings are a concern for many Americans, serious violence incidents are also up in schools across the nation, reports two recent studies.

One study, from the National Center for Education Statistics, shows a 35% increase in serious violence incidents in K-12 public schools from the 2015-16 school year to 2019-20. Serious violence incidents include rape, attempted rape, sexual assault other than rape, threatened rape, physical attacks, fights with a weapon, threat of physical attack with a weapon, and robbery with or without a weapon.

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Largest Teacher’s Union Plans to Compile List of Opposition Groups to Target

Admin

The National Education Association (NEA), the country’s largest teacher’s union, committed to spending more than $140,000 to research and target opposition groups at a convention July 3-6, according to Education Week.

NEA will research and create fact sheets on at least 25 organizations “that are actively working to diminish a student’s right to honesty in education, freedom of sexual and gender identity, and teacher autonomy,” according to a convention business item seen by the Daily Caller News Foundation.  The resolution was approved for $140,625 at the NEA’s convention last week, and the fact sheets that will be distributed to NEA state affiliates, according to Education Week.

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Commentary: What I Saw at Teachers Union Convention

Admin

As a teacher, I attended the National Education Association convention last week, and my worst fears were confirmed. 

Public schools are no longer a safe place for families who hold traditional values or for families who believe gender (as in male/female binary) is biologically determined. 

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National Education Association President: ‘Radicalized Supreme Court Issuing Decisions That Do Not Reflect Views or Values of America’

Susan Berry, PhD

The president of the nation’s largest teachers’ union told union delegates at the start of the Representative Assembly (RA) Sunday that 2016 was the year of a “fateful election,” one that made clear the U.S. Supreme Court would become “radicalized.”

In her keynote address Sunday in Chicago, National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle targeted former President Donald Trump for his choices in appointing Supreme Court justices.

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More Teachers, Fewer Students Nationwide Despite Claims of Teacher Shortage

The Center Square

The number of teachers in the U.S. has increased from 2013 to 2020 while the number of students has decreased, according to data from the National Education Association, the nation’s largest public-school union.

While total enrollment has dropped 1.4% over those seven years, there has been a 2.3% increase in the number of public-school teachers.

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Teachers’ Union Boss Raked In Massive Six-Figure Salary While Fighting to Close Schools

Admin
Randi Weingarten at AFGE

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten was paid nearly half a million dollars during the 2021-2022 school year, a report from Americans for Fair Treatment stated Wednesday. Weingarten raked in six-figures while simultaneously pushing for schools to stay shutdown during the COVID-19 pandemic.

With teacher’s union dues, Weingarten is paid $449,562, the Americans for Fair Treatment report stated. Weingarten’s salary is about seven times more than the average high school teacher makes as of 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor.

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Black Lives Matter at School ‘Week of Action’ Teaches Kindergartners to Replace Nuclear Families with ‘Villages’

Susan Berry, PhD

Elementary and high schools throughout the country this week are having children participate in Black Lives Matter at School’s “Week of Action,” using lesson plan “resources” based on the activist organization’s core principles that seek to disrupt Western family structure, and teach children to affirm the “transgender” and “queer” lifestyles.

Black Lives Matter (BLM) at School has provided a toolkit for schools and teachers with a curriculum that features a movie for different grade bands matched to “the 13 guiding principles of the BLM movement.”

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Teachers Unions ‘Hold the Education of Kids Hostage,’ Worker Rights Group Says

Connecticut Star Staff

A worker rights group is calling out two powerful teachers unions, claiming that they “hold the education of kids hostage” in a press release.

Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTWLDF), told the Daily Caller News Foundation that teachers unions like the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) are taking advantage of a labor law provision passed in the 1930s for the private sector.

“In several states across the country, union officials, specifically teachers’ union officials, have been granted a really unique privilege called exclusive monopoly bargaining,” Mix said, adding that former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt opposed granting such privileges to public-sector unions while in office.

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