The woman some call the most powerful teachers’ union boss in the whole country has gone on the record saying that “learning loss” that children suffered during lockdown is not only a right-wing conspiracy, but that times tables aren’t as important as learning about “insurrection” and “sedition.” I wish I were kidding.
Cecily Myart-Cruz*, head of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), sat down with Los Angeles Magazine for a rare in-person interview. Apparently, if she speaks to the media she does it by written statement. After this interview, I think I know why. Myart-Cruz doesn’t have a very good filter.
“There is no such thing as learning loss,” she responds when asked how her insistence on keeping L.A.’s schools mostly locked down over the last year and a half may have impacted the city’s 600,000 kindergarten through 12th-grade students. “Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.” She even went so far as to suggest darkly that “learning loss” is a fake crisis marketed by shadowy purveyors of clinical and classroom assessments.
There’s so much to unpack here. How does it make you feel to hear the most powerful teachers’ union boss say she doesn’t believe in “learning loss”? Isn’t that anti-science or something?
MSNBC, not a conservative source by any means, reported the opposite. If there are “shadowy purveyors of clinical and classroom assessments,” I guess MSNBC believes them.
After a year of school closings and distance learning amid the coronavirus crisis, more than half of public school K-12 teachers said the pandemic resulted in a “significant” learning loss for students, both academically and from a social-emotional standpoint, according to a report by Horace Mann.
The number of teachers reporting learning loss is huge.
Nearly all — more than 97% — of educators reported seeing some learning loss in their students over the past year when compared with children in previous years, and a majority, or 57%, estimated their students are behind by more than three months in their social-emotional progress, Horace Mann found.
And then there’s what we can see as parents with our own eyes. My two children who were in school five days a week did not suffer any learning loss, but my high schooler, who was only a part-time in-person student, struggled to stay above water–and she had never struggled like that before. Her friends’ parents reported the same experiences. It got so bad that the school had to throw out their part-time model at the end of the year and pull everyone back in-person to catch them up so they could pass. To recap: a majority of students were failing. How is that not learning loss?
Not a good look for someone in a very powerful position: "There is no such thing as learning loss."
For one thing, it devalues the importance of teachers.https://t.co/TnTGbVVQeu
— Jake Rosenfeld (@JakeRosenfeld1) August 30, 2021
But don’t believe your lying eyes, people. There are dark and shadowy forces out there trying to make it look like kids didn’t do well with distance education or something.
Then there’s the issue of Myart-Cruz’s assertion that times tables aren’t important as long as your children are properly indoctrinated into wokism. How on earth can math be less important than listening to some woke cat lady ranting about January 6? These are the people in charge of your kids. And before you say it, homeschool is only the answer for some people. It is not the answer for everyone. And abandoning our publicly funded schools to the left without an epic fight is a mistake. Conservatives have abandoned every institution to the left. We have to stop this.
The fight against critical race theory is working. Parents have the power to take over their local school boards and lobby their representatives to pass right-to-work laws for California teachers who do not want to be forced to pay into this wretched union. Can you imagine being a conservative teacher and having to give your dues to a person like Myart-Cruz? Shiver.
Speaking of despicable porcine harpies, this woman who kept L.A.’s children from getting an in-person education, thus disenfranchising an untold number of minority children, could not even reach her own feet to zip up her shoe for a photoshoot. That’s how rotund she is! The person demanding your kids breathe their own exhaust all day through snot-covered gags can’t even recognize she has a deadly comorbidity that is far more dangerous to her than a classroom full of healthy kids. Eat a salad, lady, and leave the kids alone. I’m so done fat-coddling these people. I need to lose a few myself, but if I ever am so fat that I can’t zip up my shoe for a photoshoot with Los Angeles Magazine, please check me into a fat farm and throw away the key.
Fav part about this article is that the union boss fought back against reopening schools disenfranchising millions of minority children in LA all because she can't be bothered to eat a salad. She's so fat she can't bend over to zip up her shoe for a photoshoot. #comorbitity https://t.co/sqQVc6vwQJ pic.twitter.com/Z3YSdz5T65
— Megan Fox 🦊 (@MeganFoxWriter) August 30, 2021
I know what you’re thinking. “That’s mean.” Yeah, so? So is keeping kids out of school because you’re a ham beast who doesn’t take care of your own own health and makes it everyone else’s responsibility instead. Why isn’t she as scared of diabetes or a massive heart attack as she is of COVID? I’m done being nice to these people.
The narcissism drips off Myart-Cruz in the interview. “You can recall the Governor. You can recall the school board. But how are you going to recall me?” she said.
Los Angeles Magazine admitted it’s next to impossible to get rid of a harridan like Myart-Cruz.
Technically, it is possible to impeach a UTLA president for gross malfeasance, but it has never happened. But it’s precisely that imperious attitude that infuriates so many parents. A growing faction of them have banded together to form groups like Concerned Parents Los Angeles and California Students United—the latter claims to have 1,000 members—to push back against Myart-Cruz. Some parents have gone so far as to file lawsuits, claiming that the teachers’ union has been disregarding science and slow-rolling school reopenings. “Rather than allow its members to return to class and resume teaching,” one suit alleges, “UTLA and its president Cecily Myart-Cruz have held the current well-being and future prospects of LAUSD students hostage.”
The state of public schools is absolutely wretched. For the record, Stephen Kruiser says L.A. is a lost cause and there isn’t anyone there who will risk angering the mammoth union boss and her gargantuan union. So maybe L.A. is not salvageable, but your town probably is. Always fight for right-to-work laws and get organized locally on your school boards and town councils. The only way to beat these people is to not let them get so entrenched that you end up like L.A., where the most powerful person is an unelected buffet slayer high on Crisco and power.
*This is an opportune moment to draw attention to Myart-Cruz’s name and debut my hyphenated name theory—which I have kept to myself until now even though it is totally accurate. Always assume a female with a hyphenated or otherwise complicated last name is a far-left kook unless proven otherwise. Famous examples include Christine Blasey Ford, Carol Moseley-Braun (or Carol Mostly-Fraud as we call her in Chicago), and Hillary Rodham-Clinton. The only reason Lena Dunham only has one last name is because she hasn’t managed to find anyone foolish enough to marry her yet.
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