It’s early yet, but already 2025 is shaping up as the year the public at large finally gets wise to the toxic impact teachers unions have had on the American education system for decades.
And you don’t have to take the word of the Freedom Foundation for it, either. A pair of media hits in just the first month of the new year underscores the message that is coming back in full swing.
A Feb. 9 article from the Magnolia Tribune, for example, offers an unsparing account of how the woke agenda embraced by both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) has diluted our schools’ focus on core skills, like reading and writing, in order to champion the left’s version of “justice and excellence.”
The article is a five-minute read that lays out precisely how, when and why teachers unions have actively transitioned from conscientious advocates for teachers and their students into a special interest monstrosity for which neither is a priority. It is a great piece to send to someone just getting familiar with the criticisms of unions as the year presses on.
Its author, Russ Latino, is a Mississippi attorney and founder of the Magnolia Tribune, who has researched and chronicled the deterioration of the nation’s education outcomes for years.
“People who like NEA’s and AFT’s politics,” he writes, “will inevitably read this and claim it is an attack on teachers. Nothing could be further from the truth. I can name half a dozen public school teachers who had real impact on my life. And I can tell you both of my kids in Mississippi public schools love their teachers.”
Equally compelling is a video essay produced by Brett Cooper, former host of YouTube show “The Comments Section” from the Daily Wire, and now host of The Brett Cooper Show.
In a Feb. 10 YouTube video, Cooper asserts that the entire Department of Education is outdated and calls on the fledgling Trump administration to “break up the power monopoly (DOE) has over our education system.”
Cooper reminds viewers the agency’s tyrannical reign over our schools was intentionally structured by and for the benefit of teachers unions, a fact that no doubt was unknown to her young viewership until pointed out. Then to double down on the incompetence that is benefitting from the institution, Cooper plays a clip from a Feb. 4 video of an interview AFT President Randi Weingarten had with MSNBC’s Ana Cabrera.
In the full video, Weingarten spouts off aimlessly for five minutes on subjects she is woefully unprepared to address, then launches into a fear-mongering rant about the disaster that would befall democracy should the Education Department even be curtailed, let alone eliminated altogether.
Weingarten’s wailing only serves to illustrate why union bosses like her couldn’t be trusted to educate our children even if they were competent enough to do so.
The combination of Latino’s exhaustively researched Magnolia Tribune piece and Cooper’s eloquent explanation of the problem, lays bare the true objectives of teachers unions for all to see, and provides further evidence that their reign of terror may be coming to an end sooner than anyone could have dared hope.
