Teacher Unions vs. Teachers

Lee Duigon

This is what happens when virtue-signaling legislators are thoroughly insulated from the consequences of their daft public policies.

Starting in the 2020 school year, a new law in California will make it illegal to suspend students for disobeying their teachers.

In 2020 the law will cover students in grades 1-5. From 2021 through 2025, it will be expanded to grades 6-8.

Where is the teachers’ union? Why aren’t they fighting tooth and nail against this?

It’s because of the—ahem!—“reason” offered by the legislature as to why this measure is necessary. To wit: Suspension is used “disproportionately” against “students of color.” To union leaders, chaos in the classroom is a small price to pay for Social Justice. Especially when neither legislators nor union honchos have to pay it.

Having been a classroom teacher, I can say for a fact that if you don’t have order in the classroom, you don’t have education. You just have tax money being wasted. But what do the legislators care for that? What do the unions care?

As today’s alleged educators see it, Job One of the public schools is to crank out a whole generation of Far Left loons, who will then go on to college where their politics is to be hard-wired by left-wing professors. That would be the long-term project of fundamentally transforming America into a Venezuela-style hell-hole with themselves sitting comfortably at the top of the heap. The Chicago teachers’ union even sent delegates to Venezuela to learn how it’s done.

Suspension is the teachers’ next-to-last resort, expulsion being the last resort, for removing disruptive students from the classroom so that some small amount of education can get done. With that option removed, the only alternative would be to isolate the trouble-makers in a special holding room during the school day. Honk if you think that will fly.

This kind of mischief got its start in the latter years of the Obama administration, when school officials in Minnesota received a “Dear Colleagues” letter from the government—they called it a “guidance letter”—threatening “investigations” by the Justice (LOL) Dept. and the Dept. of Education into schools that “disproportionately” exercise discipline on minority students.

Surprise! Incidents of violence against classroom teachers went through the roof. In desperation, the Minnesota legislature in 2016 passed a Teacher Protection Act.

Which the teachers’ union opposed.

Can you smell the liberal racism here? “Minority students” and “students of color” can’t be expected to behave themselves, so you have to let them misbehave—while enlightened liberals run things for them. There’s always a handy liberal somewhere nearby who’s eager to run your life for you. If the kids come out of public school having learned nothing but how to waste their lives, so what? They’ll either go on to college or on welfare. We don’t want the common people meddling in government, do we? Why should they bother governing themselves, if liberals can do it for them?

All of this mischief, which we still call “public education,” is the work of the Democrat Party. What a low opinion they must have of minorities! But then for liberals no one is a person in his or her own right. “You” are not you, but only a member of this or that identity group, to be treated accordingly.

We are in a battle for the preservation of our constitutional republic, under which our liberties have flourished for more than 200 years.

One more Democrat president, with a Democrat congress, and we can kiss it all goodbye.

If at all possible, homeschool. Because if we can kill of public education, the Far Left Crazy dies with it.

I have discussed these and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/ . Stop in for a visit; a single click will you there. My articles can also be found at www.chalcedon.edu/ .

E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net