By Cameron Hilditch
Thursday, October 29, 2020
American taxpayers have been hoodwinked by the whole idea
of “public
schools.” No other institutions get away with such bad behavior on the part
of some employees who staff them. We’ve been putting more and more money into
the system for decades without reaping more returns for the nation’s children.
Just this week, the national 2019 results for 12th grade student achievement
were released, showing an average score of 37 percent reading proficiency and
24 percent math proficiency. These numbers are appalling but unlikely to
improve as long as public teachers unions continue to behave like the nation’s
most lucrative and powerful racketeering ring.
They get away with it in part because of the terms we’ve
all been trained to use when speaking about them. Political language is often
used to preempt political debates in this way. A case study would be the way
the words “private” and “public” are used in political discussions. We speak of
a private and a public sector; private and public land; and, of course, private
and public schools. These terms stop us from thinking clearly.
The word “private” smacks of a desire to shield something
from other people. It describes things that concern self rather than society
and it’s almost always used in a defensive way. When we lift a book off a
friend’s shelf and hear them shout, “That’s private!” we know we’ve been told
to retreat from an unwanted advance into guarded territory. It’s a word used by
individuals to make claims on their own behalf against the claims of others.
For this reason, it’s at a distinct disadvantage in a democratic society.
The word “public” fares much better in majoritarian
politics. It describes things that concern everyone rather than things that
pertain to specific individuals. At a time when loneliness and social isolation
are rampant, it conjures up associations with community, solidarity, and
collective effort.
Neither of these terms are fit for the purposes they
serve in political discourse, but the common use of “public” is the more
pernicious one. By defining a given interest or industry as “public,” we give
the impression that it benefits everyone in society instead of just a few
individuals. This creates a blind spot in our discourse. It prevents us from
recognizing the fact that the people who staff “public” institutions or those
who sell their political prescriptions as salves to be applied in “the public
interest” are just as nakedly self-interested as everybody else.
The saddest and most salient example of “public”
institutions that are nothing of the sort in the United States is our “public”
education system. These schools are advertised to taxpayers as institutions
that serve every child in the nation. In reality, they serve the interests of
no one other than the small group of Americans who work in these schools as
teachers and administrators. This should not surprise us. We expect workers in
the “private” sector to pursue their own financial gain. When “private” sector
unions go on strike, they do so not for any altruistic reason but in pursuit of
higher wages and better working conditions, and they do so unapologetically.
But “public” sector unions operate within a different rhetorical framework that
puts them at a distinct PR advantage when compared with their “private” sector
counterparts. Since the teachers unions can shield their own avarice with
claims of “public service” to children, they can manipulate the actual public
into thinking that more money, job security, or political power for themselves
is in everyone’s interest instead of their own. They can claim that the hopes
and dreams of America’s children are somehow mystically present in their paychecks
and their extended holidays as if the funds in each of their bank accounts
amount to some sort of progressive eucharist of which the entire nation
partakes. But a look at graduation rates, test scores, and graduate
employability calls this into question.
We’ve seen a ramping-up of their special pleading during
the pandemic as union leaders have identified the crisis as an opportune moment
to blackmail students and parents for more concessions. The mafia-style
protection racket proceeds apace even as I write this. Just this week, the
Fairfax Education Association, a union that represents teachers in northern
Virginia, announced its refusal to return to in-person schooling until August
2021 at the earliest. This is in spite of the fact that K-12 schools across the
nation that have reopened have managed to avoid
coronavirus surges so far.
In typical fashion, the teachers unions are arguing that
their actions are meant to protect the health of both teachers and students.
All this proves is that they either don’t know or don’t care about the
extremely concerning negative effects that long-term distance learning is
having on the neurology of children. My colleague Madeleine Kearns recently
conducted an interview
with the child psychiatrist Allan M. Josephson for National Review in
which Dr Josephson details the disruption to childhood brain development that
the policy of the teachers unions could bring about. Face-to-face interaction
with other kids is critical if children are to develop the interpersonal
problem-solving skills that will be required of them as adults. Clearly, no
child psychiatrist was consulted when the Fairfax Education Association was
putting together its list of demands or, if one was, he or she was summarily
ignored.
Becky Pringle, the newly elected leader of the National
Education Association (the country’s largest union) recently spoke out about
what the policy of her 3-million strong organization would be if Donald Trump
is reelected and Betsy DeVos kept on as secretary of Education. She said that
“we will lift up all of the things that they are doing to destroy public
education, to dismantle it, to hurt our educators’ rights to organize and have
a voice to advocate at work for our students and for their community.” Notice
the sentence structure. It isn’t “our students and … their community” whose
“rights” are being “hurt.” It’s “our educators,” who stand in as middlemen
between taxpaying parents and their children in order “to advocate at work for
our students and for their community.” They claim the mantle of “public
educators” when they should be called “taxpayer-funded educators.”
Political language is never more powerful than when it
circumvents arguments by generating assumptions instead. The assumption that
government-run schools operate in the “public interest” has prevented us from
noticing the many ways in which teachers unions operate in their own
self-interest. When all is said and done, the pandemic ought to have robbed the
idea of “public education” of all its rhetorical currency. But as long as they
have the language of the “public”-“private” divide to draw upon, they’ll
probably succeed in convincing themselves and a good deal of voters that they
are the selfless ones.
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