Editor's Note: This article is from Woke Wars, an email-only newsletter from The Sentinel published six days per week to cover the cultural insurgency of wokeness. If you want to read more content like this, sign up for free here.
We all know that government schools have had a difficult few years. But those are largely self-inflicted wounds caused by corrupt administrators and bureaucratic teachers unions.
Those government schools have been gradually declining for decades, but when they locked their doors four years ago and sent children home at the behest of the teachers unions, that gradual decline became more of an immediate plummet.
Test scores are abysmal. Attendance has dropped.
Opportunities for educational achievement are lower than ever.
That is why National Education Association President Becky Pringle, rather than meaningfully explaining why these failures happened, spent half an hour ranting about the greatness of government schools while decrying efforts to address these failures with conservative school choice policies.
Everything is fine. We promise.
Now, more money, please!
Pringle shouted that her organization would fight “privatization” and “vouchers,” as well as “any and all schemes to drain resources from our beloved public schools.”
She even pounded the lectern with her hands as she screamed that “our students are depending on us to win all the things," hysterically repeating the phrase “all the things, all the things, all the things,” as fellow teachers union officials stood to applaud her.
So profound. So stunning. So brave.
Surely they were not applauding her use of vocabulary that would make graders for the AP English Language and Composition exam burst out laughing.
But they were probably applauding the actual intention of the modern teachers unions: channeling money to fund Democratic campaigns and force an unhinged progressive agenda into schools, all while students languish and struggle to learn.
Just a few months ago the Chicago Teachers Union issued a series of new contract demands which would drastically hike teacher pay in the failing urban school system, as well as include complete coverage for teachers who obtain in-vitro fertilization and abortions, offer cash to illegal immigrant students, remove police from schools, and implement climate change reforms.
This is what they mean by ‘all the things.’
Groups like the National Education Association have nothing to do with education. Instead they have everything to do with advancing leftist causes at the expense of education.
They hate the growing movement of parents, including those in urban areas, who remove their children from government education and provide them with homeschooling or private schooling, especially when those parents are allowed to take their tax dollars with them.
That is why officials like Becky Pringle are screeching: not because they are losing students, and definitely not because of plummeting educational achievement, but because they are losing money to the parents who have the right to educate their children in the first place.
