Each week Liberty Nation straps on its Personal Protective Equipment and dives into the TwitterZone to bring you the biggest news, the most outlandish arguments, and the real Zeitgeist of what is taking place in the internet's wildest frontier.
Teachers Unions have been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons this past week. Since the start of the pandemic, these unions have been rigid in their opposition to schools reopening nationwide. Across the country, they have been holding children's education hostage as a method of achieving their own political goals. But one Chicago Teachers Union vice president is trending on Twitter – and not in a good way. After tweeting about the pandemic's dangers and calling for special education teachers not to show up to work, she posted pictures of herself on vacation in Puerto Rico.
The Chicago teacher's story drew the ire of many conservative Republicans, though countless messages of support for the teacher also showed up from the usual woke left. Dismissing her prior rhetoric about the dangers of the pandemic, supporters argued that vacationing poolside without a mask in public was okay since no others were present in her picture posted to social media. Yet, the radical left, ever-obsessed with lockdowns, has insisted for months that nonessential travel, especially on airplanes, should be discouraged and halted completely.
Too Much Power?
Like almost all recent instances of the left's COVID hypocrisy, the Chicago teacher pushed her own views onto other adults that needed to work to support themselves or their families but appeared dismissive of the dangers of COVID-19 when it came to her vacation time. Most conservative Republicans are not against the act of somebody enjoying the outdoors or vacationing away from others but resent the blatant hypocrisy that continues to come primarily from the left regarding proper behavior during the pandemic.
Most notably, the Chicago Teacher's Union previously asserted that the push to reopen schools was "rooted in racism, sexism, and misogyny." Somehow, this same organization has been granted the power to control the education of America's children.
More in-depth insight into the power of teachers' unions to control health and education policy was on display when an article about the failed reopening of Washington D.C.'s schools was released and began trending on Twitter. The school system had data proving that the district's children were falling further and further behind. All the seeds were planted to plan for school reopening to occur in the city, pending union cooperation that would ultimately never happen.
The teacher's union changed its list of demands twice after already accepting proposals from Mayor Muriel Bowser (D), and a lack of public attention to the issue allowed teachers to demand the absurd – an end to teacher evaluations and standardized testing and making part-time in-person teaching entirely optional for all teachers regardless of age or health status. The selfishness and incompetence demonstrated were matched by Mayor Bowser's refusal to work with school district officials unaffiliated with unions. In the end, thousands of homeless and low-income students have suffered the most, with a lack of access to Wi-Fi and laptops, further exacerbating the education gap between low-income and high-income students in the city.
Union Self-Interest
In general, the narrative on Twitter and in American society is that teachers are underpaid, overworked, and victims of a suffering, under-funded education system. But do many teachers belonging to unions often have only their self-interest in mind, especially as they continue getting paid to teach classes online half-heartedly? The COVID-19 pandemic has only further exposed the corruption within American education nationwide, with teachers' unions holding children hostage if it helps their bottom line.
As the damage of the COVID-19 pandemic started being recognized across the country around March and April, the lack of data on the importance of in-person teaching had cast an understandable sense of doubt on the value of reopening schools while risking mass virus transmission.
The woke crowd on Twitter insisted that sending children back to school meant certain death for anyone involved, even as follow-up data demonstrated the opposite. With this plan of attack failing, the woke left is instead hiding behind teachers' wellbeing as the main issue behind reopening schools.
The vast income inequality and wealth gap will balloon for this generation of children if public schools remain closed, so who's really looking out for the future of America's children?
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Read more from Jose Backer.
