The
Media and Teachers Unions: Creepy Crass Actors
Joining a racially charged situation, largely inflamed by the
media, the nation’s teachers unions hypocritically play the civil rights card.
To acknowledge the obvious, the February 26, 2012 events in
Sanford, FL were tragic. Trayvon Martin is dead and George Zimmerman will be
haunted – and very possibly hunted – for the rest of his life. While there are
gray areas of the incident where good people can disagree, there is one
overarching truth that cannot be denied: Much of the nation’s mainstream media
behaved in a downright despicable way. They have done everything possible to
stoke racial tensions with exaggeration, misrepresentation, pandering, deceit
and lies. Just a few examples:
- March 21, 2012 – CNN accused Zimmerman
of using a racial slur, which two weeks later it later retracted.
- March 22, 2012 – Zimmerman, of mixed
race, was dubbed by the New
York Times a
“white Hispanic.”
- March 27, 2012 – NBC edited a tape to
make Zimmerman appear to be a racist.
- March 28, 2012 – ABC News falsely claims
Zimmerman wasn’t injured the night of shooting.
- The whole narrative of Zimmerman as a
rabid Klansman also disintegrates when you look at what the vast majority
of the media didn’t
report:
- He is of white and Afro-Peruvian
descent.
- He and a black friend partnered in
opening an insurance office in a Florida.
- He’d engaged in notably un-racist
behavior, such as taking a black girl to his high-school prom.
- He tutored underprivileged black kids.
- He launched a campaign to help a
homeless black man who was beaten up by the son of a white cop.
Now
here’s where we go from contemptible to perverse.
The heads of the two national teachers unions – Dennis Van Roekel (National
Education Association) and Randi Weingarten (American Federation of Teachers) –
are leading the charge to put Zimmerman behind bars by any means necessary. The
two bosses urged their members to sign petitions to the Justice Department,
saying that “Zimmerman must face the consequences of his actions.”
All of a sudden the teachers unions are worried about civil rights??!!
What a brazen and sleazy attempt to divert attention from their day-to-day
“we-really-don’t-give-a-crap-about-the-kids-but-can’t-come-out-and-directly-say-it”
modus operandi. To wit:
In 2009, desperate to kill Washington, D.C.’s popular
and successful opportunity scholarship program, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel wrote a threatening letter to every Democratic member of Congress. The union boss clearly
declared that NEA strongly
opposes the continuation of the DC private school voucher program. He went on
to say that he expected that any member of Congress whom the union has
supported will vote against extending the program and warned that, “Actions
associated with these issues WILL be included in the NEA Legislative Report
Card for the 111th Congress … Vouchers are not real education reform. . . .
Opposition to vouchers is a top priority for NEA.”
The sad fact is that DC public schools have the lowest NAEP scores
and the highest dropout rate in the country, whereas just about every student
in the voucher program graduates from high school, almost all of them
going on to college. The fact that thousands of children, a great majority of
whom are African-American, would be forced to remain in their failing schools,
thus closing the door on their future, didn’t seem to faze Mr. Van Roekel one
bit.
In 2011, AFT’s state affiliate in Connecticut neutered a Parent
Trigger law and bragged about how it managed to snooker the mostly-minority
parents. The union went so far as to post the step-by-step process on its
website. Fortunately, writer RiShawn Biddle managed
to save the document before AFT pulled the webpage, having realized that their
gloating might not be in sync with its pro-minority persona. Parent leader Gwen Samuel,
an African-American mother of two, saw through the union’s malfeasance,
however. “When will parents matter?” she asks.
In 2011,
the ACLU filed a lawsuit that would have exempted 45 of the
worst schools in Los Angeles – predominantly black and Hispanic – from teacher
union-mandated seniority rules, enabling those schools to keep good teachers
instead of being subjected to constant turnover. In an Orwellian statement,
United Teachers of Los Angeles elementary vice-president Julie Washington fumed,
This settlement will
do nothing to address the inequities suffered by our most at-risk students. It
is a travesty that this settlement, by avoiding real solutions and exacerbating
the problem, actually undermines the civil and constitutional rights of our
students.
The suit was successful, but subsequently the ruling was
overturned on a technicality. Having no concern about the rights of the
minority children disparately affected by the archaic last-in, first out
statute, UTLA was thrilled.
If
successful, the Students Matter
(Vergara
v. California) lawsuit in California will remove the tenure,
seniority and arcane dismissal statutes from the state education code, thus
making it easier to get rid of incompetent and criminal teachers. While this lawsuit will help all students in the state,
inner-city kids would benefit the most.
Collectively, the
laws Vergara v. California challenges deprive those students arbitrarily
assigned to the classrooms of ineffective teachers of their fundamental and
constitutionally guaranteed right to equal opportunity to access quality
education.
Though not named in the suit, the teachers unions just couldn’t sit idly by and accept a
change in the rules that would benefit kids at their expense.
Two state teachers
unions – the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of
Teachers – released a joint press release … announcing that they had filed a motion “to intervene in
litigation.” This means that CTA and CFT would like to be become involved in
the case because they feel that the current defendants – the state and the
school districts – are not adequately representing the interests of their
teachers, whose rights they maintain could be adversely affected by the case.
There are countless other examples which exemplify the fact that
the teachers unions’ raison d’être is preserving their influence, and doing so
by any means necessary. That minority children are the ones who suffer the most
from the unions’ ongoing power-lust is of no concern to them. That these raving
hypocrites are now grandstanding and calling for the scalp of George Zimmerman
boggles the mind.
Of course, it is highly unlikely that you will be reading about
this latest outrage in the mainstream media. Like the teachers unions, these
bad actors are doing their best to push their agenda and con the public.
Larry Sand, a former
classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing
teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations
and positions on educational issues.
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