Why isn’t state government in Ohio honoring the will of its residents? Why are school board across this state dominated by leftist activists? Why is Ohio’s board of education controlled by people eager to push a socialist agenda in the classroom?
Follow the money.
The unions representing Ohio’s government employees confiscate dues averaging about $60 a month from thousands of bureaucrats and administrators, clerical and support staff, laborers, teachers and other school personnel as well as police and firefighters. Add it all up and you have a special interest with both the means and the motive to exert at least as much influence over public policy as the voters themselves.
Meanwhile, federal reports show the National Education Association, to cite just one example, spent a grand total of $13.21 per dues-paying member on workplace representation in all of 2022.
You read that right. In return for annual dues of about $720, OEA members got a little more than a dollar’s worth of concern every month about pay, benefits and working conditions.
So what did members get for their money? For starters, they got a bloated, overpaid union hierarchy that obviously couldn’t care less about their individual concerns. But even worse, they got a well-oiled political machine bent on advancing an agenda calculated to erode parental rights, rob children of their innocence and undermine the effectiveness of teachers whose objective is to teach rather than indoctrinate their students.
Politicians with attachments to leftist ideology, regardless of party and on all fronts, are major benefactors of this money.
Financial war chests built on the backs of hardworking teachers buy the favor of politicians from the state house to school boards, where the radical ideas upheld by unions are embraced.
Unions are the financial backbone and the architects of the radical left, and this strategy is why nearly 20 percent of this state’s school districts are knowingly and openly pushing radical content on young people in public classrooms.
Gender affirmation, critical race theory, social emotional learning, and comprehensive sex education has infiltrated the classrooms of more than 110 districts throughout Ohio, as recognized by groups of concerned parents and grassroots activists. They have uncovered highly controversial practices in these school districts through careful detection and research.
Government unions and teachers’ unions have codified their agenda into the curriculum of public schools. For over 30 years they have collected dues from unsuspecting educators and public employees to accomplish their aims.
But that’s about to change, with Ohio’s educators and parents themselves seizing the narrative from the union leviathan.
This summer, dozens of teachers from every corner of the state will join other freedom-loving educators at a four-day Teachers Summit in Aurora, Colo., and it won’t cost them a penny.
Sponsored by the Freedom Foundation, a national public policy watchdog specializing in the abuses of public-sector unions, the event will equip attendees with the truth about how to protect the rights and of parents, children and themselves. More specifically, they will learn how to inspire and encourage other educators to keep their dues dollars in their pocket, stripping their union of the revenue it needs to exert its will.
In March, generous Ohioans stepped up and donated so that educators can attend this conference completely free of charge.
Empowering teachers with moral clarity and the will to do the right thing by young people and families is certain to deter the embrace of poisonous curriculum in Ohio’s classroom and defeat radical school boards across Ohio.
Creating an army of teachers in Ohio who crave righteous positive change is the only winning strategy against the union machine. Rather than tools to be used by Big Labor, attendees will emerge from the Teachers Summit as the instruments for needed, positive change in Ohio and across the country.
