The More Powerful the Teachers Union, the Less the Children Learned

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

The Biden administration is on a hunt for systemic racism. Thus far it’s found systemic racism everywhere from the highway system to the military, but the one place it hasn’t looked is among the ranks of the teachers unions who provide much of its cash and its election foot soldiers.

But new data reported by the New York Times shows that the pandemic school closures demanded by teachers unions were the single greatest act of systemic racism in 50 years.

During the pandemic, members of the corrupt teachers union machine demanded school closures to “save lives”. Unwilling to do their jobs, they instead marched around brandishing coffins at political protests while warning that if they had to go and teach, everyone would die.

Education was replaced with the Orwellian misnomer of “remote learning” which parents, students and honest teachers admitted was not actually teaching any of the students anything.

And the newest data backs that up, showing that “in districts where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, they fell more than half a grade behind in math.”

The numbers were even worse for the poorer students who fell behind three fifths of a grade.

The decline in math scores was the worst in 50 years making it a historic setback and while all students suffered during the pandemic, the learning experiences in districts where schools shut were far worse for poorer students, often minorities, than for wealthy or middle class students.

And while the DEI complex and the media have spent years talking about disproportionate impact, it was the Left which was responsible for the worst disproportionate impact in 50 years.

And therefore for the “systemic racism” that they had selfishly brought into being.

Previous figures showed a “larger score gap between white and black students nationally—from 25 points in 2020 to 33 points in 2022.” Fourth grade math scores fell twice as much for black and Hispanic students as for white students. While we already knew that minority students fell back further during the pandemic, the new numbers compare the schools that stayed open and those that closed in order to pander to teachers union members who refused to come to work.

“More time spent in remote or hybrid instruction in the 2020-21 school year was associated with larger drops in test scores,” the Times analysis showed. “Students that were offered a hybrid schedule (a few hours or days a week in person, with the rest online) did better, on average, than those in places where school was fully remote, but worse than those in places that had school fully in person.”

The media had accused Georgia, Florida and other states that opened up of conducting experiments in “human sacrifice”. The actual human sacrifice was carried out by Democrats and their educational establishment which brought up children as human sacrifices to the unions.

Teachers unions waged a relentless and ruthless war to close schools and keep them closed.

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) boss Randi Weingarten called reopening schools “reckless, callous, cruel”. Union members protested, threatened, sued and even physically blocked schools from reopening. The teachers unions won while students and parents lost.

Rep. Aaron Bean noted that “school districts with lengthier collective bargaining agreements were less likely to start the fall 2020 semester with in-person instruction.” Surveys found that the more powerful the teachers unions were, the more likely schools were to stay closed.

And therefore, the more powerful the teachers union, the less the children learned.

Teachers unions chose not to work and they leveraged school reopenings to extract personal and political benefits without paying any price for it. That is true of the lockdown advocates nearly across the board, but the teachers unions emerged politically stronger than ever from the educational disaster they had helped to cause. Strikes, slowdowns and elections made them wealthier and more powerful. And they continue to grow more powerful every year.

As late as 2022, 73% of the members of the Chicago Teachers Union voted not to come to work while claiming that COVID-19 was still too dangerous. A year later, CTU organizer Brandon Johnson was elected as the 57th mayor of Chicago.

What happened during the pandemic was not a unique event, it just accelerated the current state of affairs in which teachers unions have wielded their political power to demand more money for less work while dismantling all the basic standards of the educational system.

According to teachers unions, the ideal educational system has no test scores and no expectations but that students be taught to parrot the politics of their teachers.

The price for the dismantling of the educational system by the educators, during the pandemic or the rest of the time, is being paid by students. Especially poor and minority students.

Teachers unions claim that they advocate for students and that when they wield power, they do so to improve educational outcomes. The data, not only during the pandemic, proves otherwise.

In 1960, the American Federation of Teachers had a mere 60,000 members. Today it’s 1.7 million. And students are less capable of reading, study less and know less than their peers in 1960, but receive much higher grades than they did 60 years ago.

What has improved in schools since 1960 are the teacher salaries, by “45 percent in real terms”, so that teachers union members, like other government workers, are outperforming the taxpayers who pay their salaries.

The growth of the teachers unions has been great for teachers, but terrible for students.

The pandemic brought home the consequences to many parents and the years since convinced many that the public school system, fatally corrupted by teachers unions, is incapable of reform. That’s why movements such as homeschooling and school choice continue to grow, not just for the stereotypical conservatives, but for a spectrum of parents, many of them minorities.

Restoring public education will require many reforms, but the most fundamental of these will be ending the death grip that the teachers unions have over the nation’s students. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.