Teacher Union Strikes Will Be a Slap in the Face Against Kids

However difficult it is to fathom, the people who loudly claim to care more about your children than you are about to hit the picket lines to … well, shake down the Los Angeles-area citizens funding the salaries of those working in the nation’s second-largest district.

Now, with similar strikes against school districts elsewhere in California, we face the prospect that tens of thousands of schoolchildren, already learning-challenged in key subject areas, will be stranded without instruction for some length of time.

If it happened, a strike – which would also involve bus drivers, nurses, janitors and other school employees – could last quite a while, leaders say. Oh great, that should work out nicely for the city’s roughly 400,000 public school students.

This conjures memories of those glorious Covid shutdown days, when the union famously demanded schools stay closed long after other shuttered institutions had reopened. Remember their conditions? Defund the police and shut down charter schools.

They threw teachers under the bus during the Covid nightmare, too. Los Angeles Unified School District teacher Heather Poundstone told us, “In 2021, LAUSD made getting the Covid vaccine a condition of employment. Though thousands of teachers did not want the Covid vaccine, the union refused to support us.”

We learn more recently that the union felt so strongly about the issue that it sponsored spying on parents who fought to reopen the schools.

It just doesn’t seem like this group is putting kids first, as it sanctimoniously claims to do. And according to Poundstone and her teacher allies, the union isn’t putting them first either.

“There are several LAUSD teachers who do not want to strike,” Heather shared with us. “Strikes disrupt learning, and are used by United Teachers Los Angeles to obtain more power and to get harmful things into the contract that have nothing to do with education. Many teachers are fed up with a union that does not fight for their rights but uses teachers to promote the union’s agenda.”

Heather and her friends will bravely cross the picket line in order to put the children first.

The pending LA walkout is gigantic in scale – 68,000 employees threatening to strike. It dramatizes the illness among so-called teacher unions that is streaking across California at the moment and threatens to spread.

The LA union wants a 17 percent pay increase for its members. This would come from taxpayers who already face a school district deficit well into the billions of dollars.

And the strike, if it came, would precede state testing by two days, making the union job action a slap in the face to every student and conscientious teacher in California.

Many districts in the state face similar budgetary problems, and thousands of layoff notices have already been sent to school employees. Not surprisingly, most of those laid off will be administrative or support personnel. Meanwhile, the LA union demands a 17% raise for its members.

The union also wants more staff hired and improved working conditions. Veterans of decades of teacher-union strikes have taught us that those are bedrock demands, but in LA, one wonders why a staff increase is needed for a district that has lost and is still losing student population.

Academic achievement has been declining for decades in the country, under presidents of both parties. The one constant in American schools? The union. Why is that important?  Because rather than focus on academic achievement and student advancement, the key aims of the teaching profession’s supposed representative – the union – are all-in on politics. And it shows.

An effort to reshape American education would likely involve breaking the union’s stranglehold on policy, negotiations, and curriculum. The government, which allows national teachers’ unions to operate under antiquated charters, should intervene.

The government’s own collusion in forming an unfair structure – labor doesn’t negotiate with “management” in the public arena; it negotiates with the politicians it helps to elect – has led to untold losses in public funds to corrupt unions. That alone militates toward government involvement to undo the damage it’s already done.