Yes, the Public Education System Is Broken

I have been in education for a long time. My first teaching job came two weeks after my younger nephew was born. His birthday is next week, and he’ll be 29. Take out the five years when I was working in retail and going to graduate school, and I’ve been a teacher for 24 years. There is not enough money in the world to tempt me back into public education. I’d rather stay poor, thank you. I keep hearing about a teacher shortage. That’s incorrect. There’s not a teacher shortage; there’s a people willing to be treated like dirt shortage. Why? How did public education come to this sad state? Jonathan Turley’s opinion piece in The Hill speaks to the problem and nails it right to the wall.

His opinion piece titled "The Blue-State Model for Education has Failed, and the Public has Caught On" states early on that one of the reasons the public schools have gone down the drain is because of the teachers’ unions. Early in the article, Turley states, “New polling shows that K-12 education has now reached a record low in the number of people who are even “somewhat satisfied” with the state of education in the U.S.” He then talks about the “education cartel,” a self-sustaining, self-perpetuating alliance between unions and politicians. The cartel has rendered families and students irrelevant.

How is that possible? people ask. Without the students, there is no school system. It doesn’t matter to the cartel. As long as the money keeps coming, which it does through dues, the cartel continues to operate. Personally, I have very little experience with the teachers’ unions. I joined the American Federation of Teachers briefly so I could get some legal help regarding the principal at the high school where I taught. I was a second-year teacher, and he had determined that I needed to go. He was black, and I was white. The AFT pointed me to the union steward at my high school, a government teacher who was also one of the basketball coaches. He told me that there was nothing the principal could do to force me from the building. I had to leave on my own. I’m a stubborn soul, so I was determined that the principal was going to leave first. He did, two years later.

Was the advice I got worth the annual membership? Absolutely. But that was twenty years ago. I dropped my membership the next year. Today, I wouldn’t join any teachers’ union because at their very core, they are about representing the teachers, not the students. The unions protect every teacher, even the teachers who have no business being anywhere near a classroom. In the states where teachers are required to join a union, the power is tenfold over the states that give teachers a choice, the right-to-work states.

In states where union membership is required, even if the teacher is able to quit the union, the union will still take a deduction from the teacher’s paycheck unless the teacher stands up and says “No.” In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court in Janus vs. AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) said that taking dues from non-union members was a violation of the First Amendment. This had an effect on union membership, which dropped by 10% after the ruling. However, the unions are not letting the decision slow them down. One year after the Janus ruling, a full 52% of teachers surveyed did not know they could leave the union without paying a fee. We are now eight years after the Janus decision, and the deep blue Democrat states with powerful teachers’ unions are working to make it easy to join a union but very hard to leave.

Aren’t unions supposed to protect workers and allow them to negotiate on a level playing field with their bosses? During the time of the Robber Barons in the early 1900s, yes. Today, most unions serve no purpose other than to enrich their heads. Both the head of the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) make six figures. The head of the Chicago Teachers Union makes six figures. Their salaries come from dues. Fewer dues-paying members, lower salaries. If the unions actually promoted better teaching and better practices, I would have no problem with them, but they don’t. The problem? Money. As long as the money keeps flowing to the unions, they can do whatever they want.

While the NEA, the AFT, and state and city teachers’ unions rake in the money, the students suffer. Children do not learn basic math and reading skills when they should and are simply passed along, because holding a child back today makes the school and the school district look bad. As I stated in another article, public schools are all about making things look good without any actual work being done. It’s the Gilded Age all over again, but in public education.

Related: The Public School Mess

Teachers are not allowed to give grades below 50 even if the student has never done any work. The teachers who question the policy are labeled as "difficult" or "troublemakers." Anything that makes the schools and school districts look less than perfect is seen as a problem. Rather than correcting the problem, schools cover it up. The “troublemakers” are given poor evaluations, denied the renewal of their teaching contracts, or even fired from the school and the district because they dare to question the system.

Students who graduate from high school with barely the basics struggle in college. Faculty at Harvard have been reduced to teaching high school math to incoming freshmen because the freshmen have no knowledge base. They never received it. This past May, the University of California reported an alarming lack of math knowledge among incoming students. The University of California, San Diego, faculty report showed a 30-fold increase since 2020 of incoming students whose math abilities fell below the high school level. Guess which political party most of the college professors in California vote for? California also has a very strong teachers’ union. Ninety percent of teachers in California are union members. They are voting for their own destruction.

It’s not just math that high school students are doing poorly in. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2023 that most California students cannot read or do math on grade level. How is that possible? When the people running the system don’t care what the students can or can’t do, it makes it easy to ignore the problems. It’s not just California with poor test scores; the deep blue Democrat states have the biggest problems. It’s not like they care.

What is the solution? Is there a solution? Turley states that school vouchers appear to be the only way to take control from the education cartel, by introducing real competition based on academic performance. I agree with him. I am 100% pro-school choice. Like him, I believe in the public schools. My parents, I, my siblings, and their children went to public schools, but what’s going on today in the public school system is not acceptable.

School systems cannot simply keep churning out people who do not have the basic skills needed to survive in life. School vouchers, which allow parents to choose which school their children attend, take care of the biggest problem in public education: money. The less money the school systems get, the less there is to waste. When parents have a choice of schools to send their children to, very few choose to send their children to substandard schools.

Editor's Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America's kids get the education they deserve.

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