Yeah, you remember sweet Betsy from Holland, Michigan, the billionaire busybody who came to Washington, DC as secretary of education to serve Jesus Christ and Donald Trump, and not coincidentally wreck the American public school system? Well, sweet Betsy didn’t make much headway with her scheme, but Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has gone a long way in the last couple of years to make Betsy’s dream come true, by making it clear to the American people that America’s public schools are run for the benefit and convenience of America’s hard-working public school teachers, goddamnit, and not your goddamn kids, who should be thankful, goddamnit, that we condescend to give them the goddamn time of day! Any more questions? I fucking hope not!
It’s true that Randi has had a lot of help in, you know, engineering the stunning beatdowns Democrats endured in the off-year 2021 elections in Virginia, where the Democrats lost just about everything there was to lose, and New Jersey, where a “dead cert” gubernatorial race turned into “Jaysus that was close!”
Randi, and her pals at the National Education Association and the National School Boards Association, who recently demanded that parents who yelled at them be declared “domestic terrorists”, a charge so disgusting that they took it back—even though Attorney General Merrick Garland proved to be made of sterner stuff, keeping the G-men on the case regardless of the NSBA’s sissy-britches retreat, causing me to exclaim I sure wish Merrick Garland were on the Supreme Court. Because then he wouldn’t be attorney general—have whipped up a Category 5 “perfect storm” of arrogant self-righteous self-indulgence, combined of equal parts school closures due to COVID 19, which teachers are finding so attractive that they may never go back to work, critical race theory, and transsexual rights, utterly transforming the “normal” way of doing things that prevailed only three or four short years ago.
As Reason’s Matt Welch reports, this transformation is being carried out with maximum feasible hypocrisy, every criticism being rejected, with infinite scorn, as manifestations of the omnipresent white male privilege, pure and simple. They hate us because we are so much better than they are!
The proliferation of phone it in Fridays demonstrates just how little public school teachers care about the kids they claim to care most about, low-income, low-performing kids in particular, who are the most likely to suffer the most from “long-distance learning”. At the same time, the doctrine of “extreme” critical race theory that labels as racist any test showing black students performing below their white or Asian peers is increasingly being seized on as a way to eliminate embarrassing evidence that schools are failing to provide a quality educational experience for black students. Why bust your ass to eliminate the performance gaps when you can just eliminate the tests that show the gaps? It’s a no brainer! Literally!
The rush to embrace politically correct positions on transsexuality, which seem to change hourly, is perhaps most blatant of all of the many manifestations of virtue signaling, going back to the absurd overreaction by America’s cultural elites to the notorious Vanity Fair cover of Caitlyn Jenner, which “proved” that money can buy beauty—and nothing else. The orgy of moral posturing that followed was the most grotesque/hilarious example of the pathetic Big Apple/LA obsession with “panache” to come down the pike in a decade. If you see the “real” Caitlyn Jenner, well, she looks, unsurprisingly, like a 60-year-old guy in a dress. Well, why not? There’s nothing surprising or wrong with that. But “reality” isn’t enough—or, rather, it’s too depressing for the S Class crowd. Life should be an event! And so transgenders have to be “stunning” as well, like everything else that counts—which, of course, they are very unlikely to be.
Ever since that cover, the woke folks have been breaking their necks to be the most understanding—and most supportive—of a tiny segment of the population, whose “true” nature is entirely undetermined by “science.” I have read a number of first-person accounts of transgenders, which struck me as entirely honest and believable—but I saw no grounds for deriving absolute lessons from those accounts that could be applied to anyone other than the authors themselves. Yet woke school boards across the country are striving to outdo one another in their progressiveness, striving, really, to provoke the unwashed as a measure of their virtue—until, of course, it actually works, and they get the reactions they courted, at which point they call their critics terrorists and want them investigated by the FBI.
The ultimate danger of phone it in Fridays and “no stress/no test” education is that it’s going to drive the upper middle class—the top 20%—out of the public school system entirely. These people have fewer kids, and more money, than ever before, and they are not going to sit still and watch their kids go to second-rung colleges because their public high schools eliminated Advanced Placement or other enriched programs, or eliminated competitive exams for high-performance schools, or more generally encouraged kids not to worry about grades—that being, you know, so racist and bourgeois! We will end up with a system like the United Kingdom, where everyone who counts will send their kids to private schools. Funding for public schools will inevitably decline, as wealthy people will inevitably find ways to avoid paying taxes. Teachers unions will inevitably become more bitter and “passionate” and frustrated, and no one at the top will care. And Randi Weingarten, if she lives long enough, will wonder why no one is afraid of the AFT and the NEA and the NSBA anymore.
UPDATE
Over at the New York Times, Michelle Cottle has a long, entirely favorable take on Weingarten, Can This Woman Save Public Education, whose title nonetheless suggests that Cottle is aware of just how unpopular both public schools and teachers unions have become since the COVID struck.
