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In an abject show of selfishness and political bias, teachers unions are trying to hold the country hostage over baseless COVID-19 fears. It’s not enough that public school teachers and the college professors who train them are increasingly prone to teaching leftist absurdities like “2+2=5” or presenting the mendacious 1619 Project as legitimate American history. Teachers unions are now trying to blackmail the entire country into meeting a set of leftist political demands for reopening the schools this fall, using COVID-19 as their excuse.Of course, the pandemic certainly presents challenges for re-opening schools, but other sectors of society have managed...

For most Americans the coronavirus is a scourge. But teachers unions seem to think it’s also an opportunity—to squeeze more money from taxpayers and put their private and public charter school competition out of business. That’s the only way to read the extraordinary effort by national and local union leaders to keep their members from returning to the classroom. Last week Randi Weingarten, leader of the powerful American Federation of Teachers, declared support for “safety strikes” if local unions deem insufficient the steps their school districts are taking to mitigate Covid-19. And on Monday an alliance of teachers unions and...

Ten teachers unions, the Democratic Socialists of America, and other groups are organizing a National Day of Resistance to protest for demands including no reopening of schools, police-free schools, and a “massive infusion” of federal funds while banning new charter schools.Over 20 cities across the United States are scheduled to have protests tomorrow, including Chicago, Dallas, New York City, and Los Angeles. Prominent teachers unions are supporting the “actions” including the Chicago Teachers Union and United Teachers Los Angeles.  Twitter link   The protests are being formed to stop the reopening of schools until the ambiguous demand of “no reopening...

California Teachers Association (CTA), the most powerful public-sector union in the Golden State, issued a statement asserting that, due to coronavirus concerns, state schools should not open .. The following day, the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) released a 17-page “research paper” in which concerns about coronavirus were secondary to sweeping political demands — including Medicare for All, guaranteed housing, a wealth tax, a millionaire’s tax, defunding the police, financial support for illegal immigrants, and a moratorium on charter schools. ... The Los Angeles Unified School District fell into line ... The circle was completed on July 17, when...

On no pretext of benefit to Students, Teachers are united in beating back Charter Schools, the Gig Workers of K-12 education, like Dr. Seuss' Sneetches with Stars against those without. Empty Public Schools will get full funding; Charter Schools will get nothing. Teacher Unions imagine they are otherwise secure in keeping their strangle-hold over Federal education money. Labor Unions overall are almost dwindled down next to nothing along with their old Bluebeard marriage to American Corporate dinosaurs gone to extinction with globalism. But the Teacher Monopoly Unions, like the Post Office, imagine they can have the secret of immortality, perpetually...

The pandemic has left everyone with lots of give and take. In educating our children, however, don't let teachers' unions take from our children to give to themselves. As the Wuhan virus pandemic persists and wild rhetoric along with it, teachers unions are threatening to strike if schools reopen, but they’re also pushing to limit online teaching. These unions have long incentivized all the wrong things in education, but demanding teachers be paid to do virtually nothing is a new low. As a New York Times headline announced this week, teachers are “Wary of Returning to Class, and Online Instruction...

A group of Iowa teachers have sent their own mock obituaries to their governor in hopes she'll revisit plans for reopening schools. "I'm very scared," 7th grade teacher Kerry Finley of Iowa City told "Good Morning America." "Are we going to wear scrubs? Are they going to amend the dress code? If we are going to do this, we are going to have to do this the way the hospitals did. We need training. We can't just say, 'OK, go back.'" Finley is one of several educators who wrote their obituaries after art teacher Jeremy Dumkrieger shared his own obit...

The president of the American Federation of Teachers warned Wednesday that strikes due to unsafe working conditions in schools were possible in Texas, Florida and Arizona — all states with high coronavirus infection rates. “If people die while they are educating kids, you eviscerate any credibility that you would have going forward about whether or not a school is safe,” Randi Weingarten told POLITICO. Earlier this month the American Federation of Teachers, which represents over 1.7 million educators, adopted a resolution which demands the only schools that should reopen for in-person instruction should be in places where the infection rate...

As the nation heads toward a chaotic back-to-school season, with officials struggling over when to reopen classrooms and how to engage children online, teachers’ unions are playing a powerful role in determining the shape of public education as the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage. Teachers in many districts are fighting for longer school closures, stronger safety requirements and limits on what they are required to do in virtual classrooms, while flooding social media and state capitols with their concerns and threatening to walk off their jobs if key demands are not met. On Tuesday, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union raised...

he union representing resident assistants at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst says the plan to reopen residence halls this fall while in the middle of the pandemic is “suicidal,” and says its members will have no part of it without increased precautions for their safety. Members of the Resident Assistants and Peer Mentors Union, part of United Auto Workers, Local 2322, on Monday were nearly unanimous in opposing plans to reopen the residences calls with the start of the fall semester. According to a statement, 95% of members voted to authorize the union’s bargaining team to formally refuse to...

Scientists are yet to find a single confirmed case of a teacher catching coronavirus from a pupil anywhere in the world, a leading epidemiologist has said. Mark Woolhouse, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Edinburgh University, offered reassurance to staff preparing for the full reopening of schools next month. Professor Woolhouse, a member of the UK government’s scientific advisory group, Sage, said that in hindsight closing schools in March was probably a mistake, but the limited role children play in spreading the virus only became clear further along the infection curve.

A North Carolina teachers' union is calling for the implementation of universal health care and welfare benefits for illegal immigrants in order to reopen schools in the fall. Just days after the Durham Association of Educators (DAE) issued a statement railing against the school district's reopening plan, Durham Public Schools voted unanimously to hold all classes virtually for at least the first nine weeks of the school year. Included in the DAE statement was a call to adopt a variety of far-left policy goals before holding in-person classes, including Medicare for All and "direct income support regardless of immigration status."...

When public school districts have a monopoly, they can easily justify delaying school or implementing extended closures. School choice is the solution. Across the country, school districts are announcing delayed openings or full-on closures for the semester or year. In its place, they will offer virtual learning as they did in the spring.Despite President Trump’s clear opposition to this (or because of it), school district leaders insist that a risk of a COVID-19 outbreak is too great to safely reopen schools. This is doubtful, seeing that schools would have to be “guaranteeing that no one will get sick if schools...

The largest teachers union in Florida sued Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday over his administration's push to fully reopen all public schools next month - even as the number of coronavirus cases in the state is spiking. The Florida Education Association accused DeSantis and other state officials of violating a state constitutional mandate to keep public schools "safe and secure." The union asked a state court in Miami to halt the governor's reopening edict, according to a copy of the suit obtained by NBC News. The lawsuit, filed in state circuit court, names several defendants: DeSantis, state Education Commissioner Richard...

Thousands of union workers left their jobs on Monday in an effort to support initiatives to dismantle racism in a protest that was dubbed the Strike for Black Lives. The protest was organized by union groups including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of Teachers, United Farm Workers, and the Fight for $15 and a Union, alongside social justice groups including the Movement for Black Lives, U.S. Youth Climate Strike Coalition, and the Center for Popular Democracy. The protest took place in over 25 major cities across the country, including New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Seattle, and...

As states and municipalities pursue phased reopenings of economic and social life amid the novel coronavirus, workers are headed back to work. But some workers are finding teachers unions to be an unexpected impediment to their own resumption of something-like-normality. The burden of the unions’ obstinacy will likely fall hardest on suburban professional women, forced to choose between their careers and supervising children forced to “learn” through “distance learning” — a euphemism for government school systems’ pathetic substitute for classroom instruction. The unions argue that subjecting children to inferior home-based, video conference schooling is necessary to protect them and the...

. . .We have to link these fights in a new and deeper way than ever before,” said Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, which represents over 2 million workers in the U.S. and Canada. . .The service workers union has partnered with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the American Federation of Teachers, United Farm Workers and the Fight for $15 and a Union, which was launched in 2012 by American fast food workers to push for a higher minimum wage. . .

... In a series of conversations with the Washington Examiner over recent weeks, the union officials, all registered Democrats, expressed alarm at Biden’s shift to the left on energy policy while giving him some benefit of the doubt that they would not grant to more liberal candidates such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, who pledged to ban fracking during the campaign. Biden has promised to end new fracking leases on federal lands, where only 13% of natural gas was produced in 2017. But he has struggled to overcome a gaffe during an exchange with Sanders in a March debate,...

Thomas Sowell is a truth seeker who grew up in Harlem and is one of the wisest men of our times. In his new book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies — published on June 30, 2020, his 90th birthday — he exposes the hypocrisy of our politicians, teachers’ unions, and public school bureaucrats. To do so, Sowell compares New York City’s charter schools to its public ones. For example, Success Academy (47 New York City schools) and KIPP Academy (15 NYC schools), both public charter schools, have established the best K-12 schools in Harlem and have demonstrated the ability to...

or Laila Barakat’s children, school will be home, like other students in their district. But they won’t participate in distance learning. Their teachers will be mom and dad. Barakat has decided to homeschool her three school-aged children – one in first grade, one in transitional kindergarten, and one in pre-kindergarten – instead of connecting them to an online classroom. “We just decided to take the leap,” said Barakat, a stay-at-home mom and freelance writer in Elk Grove. “At first it seemed like a radical thing, and now more and more people are doing it.” Read more here: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article244232657.html#storylink=cpy