Teacher Unions Should Own Failure, Not Children

Make no mistake, the head of Chicago’s teachers union – who said yes, we own your children – is filled with hatred of Donald Trump. She is beyond racially sensitive and said Trump is trying to “relitigate the end of the Civil War” and notch a nice win for the Confederacy.

Stacy Davis Gates said she’s first and foremost an “organizer” (like another Chicagoan, who became the nation’s 44th president) and contended she and her allies are the last best hope to overturn the chaos and horrors of Trump that are “now part of our lived experience.”

Gates and her people, she said, are “hostages to the MAGA movement” and must oppose Trump’s attempt to “dismantle public education.”

Not only that, she told the City Club of Chicago recently, “Donald Trump is dismantling the idea of the common good and community.”

Oh, and cuts to the National Park Service budget mean he is dismantling all the parks, too, and that’s where we all go to get along together.

But for the moment, let’s consider the ownership-of-your-children notion.

Gates cited the American writer James Baldwin, who once wrote in The Nation that children “are always ours. Every single one of them, all over the globe.”

Add a little poetic license and voila, the union believes it owns children sent to the public schools. But non-supporters immediately objected, leading Gates to brand them – this will shock you – as right-wing MAGA extremists. She made a mocking attack:

“CTU thinks your children are its children,” she childishly and shrilly hollered, saying that’s the voice of her foes. Then, firming her jaw, she continued, “Yeah, we do.”

As with most things, context is important here.  Besides charging Trump with trying to re-fight the Civil War so that the Confederacy wins and, presumably, the country once again subjugates blacks, Gates had numerous other accusations worth noting:

– Trump engages in “forced birth.”

– Trump is “dismantling” (that horrible word again) the Smithsonian Institution.

– Trump has begun an unsanctioned war against Iran.

– Some orphans in the country “were kidnapped by our government.”

– The Dept. of Education is threatening to withhold funds if you don’t “bend the knee.”

– Trump is “dismantling” public education in this country.

– All of this matters because “there are bombs dropping right now.”

What’s notable about these pronouncements is that they’re all false or ludicrous, almost sophomoric, distortions. And it’s all spoken by a powerful union chief who claims to own your children.

Student outcomes in the public schools nationally have fallen precipitously, particularly in core subjects like math and reading. Students in Chicago get somewhat more “teaching,” if that’s the proper word, in sex, gender dysphoria, class warfare and racism, a lot of that thanks to Stacy Davis Gates and her comrades.

In fact, if you undertook an aggressive, frontal attack on the schoolchildren of Chicago, trying to dumb them down to their lowest possible achievement levels, you could scarcely succeed any better than Gates and her union have over the past generation.

In Chicago, the proportion of students who showed grade-level proficiency in language and math had already fallen below half in the years before the Covid shutdown. By 2022, about 80 percent of schoolkids in Chicago failed to read at grade level. Only 15 percent were proficient in math.

And let’s remember, 99% of this sad, soul-draining decline happened long before Trump. This one’s owned by the people who had the reins for decades, not the guy trying to fix it.