As much as I admired President John F. Kennedy during his administration when I was in junior high school, I believe he erred in allowing government employees to unionize, particularly teachers, for the simple reason that, as Transit Workers Union President Michael Quill said in the 1970s, “We’re the only workers who get to elect our own bosses.” (Note that even FDR thought the unionization of public employees “unthinkable and intolerable.”)
The validity of this conclusion was nowhere more evident than during the Covid scare of 2020-22, when the teachers’ unions – the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) – used their leverage as major funders of the Democratic Party to keep the public schools closed for two years. In effect, they had a two-year paid vacation, teaching from home and taking trips to the Caribbean and other resort areas (for which the unions instructed them not to post photos on the Internet), while their students, for the most part, lost two years of learning and just ignored the lessons.
Ironically, it’s minority schoolchildren, whom teachers claim to care about, who have been the biggest losers. Dr. Lance Izumi, senior director of the Center for Education at Pacific Research Institute, wrote in 2022, during the Covid school shutdown, “According to the Los Angeles Unified School District, nearly a quarter of both African-American and Latino students have received Ds or Fs in classes in grades 9-12 since the start of the current school year. In contrast, 13 percent of white students received Ds or Fs …[T]his gap has widened since [the] last school year.”
At the same time, there has been an explosion of antisemitism and anti-Americanism in K-12 schools. Writing in the Washington Free Beacon on July 7, 2025, Alana Goodman reported: “Since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, Philadelphia school officials have publicly defended terrorism, called for the release of convicted cop killers, claimed Israel is an ‘apartheid theocracy,’ and denounced the United States as a ‘criminal Amerikan empire.’ The Philadelphia school district settled a federal discrimination case with the Department of Education last year after students allegedly taunted their Jewish classmates with Nazi salutes, swastika graffiti on doors, and threats to ‘kill the Jews.’”
Goodman identified the director of the social studies curriculum for the Philadelphia schools, Ismael Jimenez, as a Hamas supporter who has called Israel a “terrorist state” and “a racist apartheid theocracy,” defended Hamas terrorism, and even claimed that it has been proven that Hamas didn’t kidnap anyone on October 7. Not surprisingly, the Philadelphia social studies curriculum reflects his extreme views. Goodman writes, “The [10th grade] U.S. History curriculum omits the Revolutionary War and the Constitution but includes subjects such as ‘Scientific Racism and Capitalist Exploitation’… In the 11th grade World History course, the Second World War goes largely missing …The Holocaust warrants a single mention in a link… The 12th grade Social Studies curriculum instructs the class to ‘use antiracism & intersectionality as lenses during our study of Social Science…’”
To top it all off, Jimenez and other Philadelphia school officials recently formed a “Racial Justice Organizing Committee” that lobbies for anti-American and anti-Israel programming in schools and has called for the release of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. (And speaking of the Holocaust, the NEA has issued a new handbook that makes no mention of Jews, just a generalized statement “recognizing over 12 million victims of the Holocaust of different faiths, ethnicities, races, beliefs, gender and gender orientation, abilities/disabilities, and other targeted characteristics.” Nowhere does it mention the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews.)
On the other hand, the handbook has a lengthy statement about the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) which misrepresents the events of 1948 as a historic injustice, the forceful, violent displacement and dispossession of at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland during the establishment of the State of Israel. It doesn’t mention the comparable exiling of Jews from their homes in the Middle East, nor does it mention the exchange of millions of Hindus and Muslims during the creation of the state of Pakistan. The handbook also calls upon teachers to teach that there is a distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism (which is really a distinction without a difference). Obviously, Philadelphia doesn’t extend brotherly love toward Jews.
The one positive aspect of this situation was that, despite the efforts of the unions to keep parents from observing the remote lessons, many did. The parents discovered for the first time that their children were being taught to hate America and reject its founding principles, to hate Israel and Jews (and often Christians as well), and to buy in to the DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) philosophy labeling all whites as racist oppressors and all people of color as powerless victims, the proposed remedy for which was a strict quota system in education, employment, bank loans, and other areas of business.
And that’s not all the teachers’ unions have done to take advantage of the crisis. As reported by Lee Ohanian writing on the Hoover Institution website (July 22, 2020), the Los Angeles teachers’ union made numerous policy demands before the public schools would reopen. “In addition to defunding of the police, they are demanding single-payer, government-provided health care; full funding for housing California’s homeless; a shutdown to publicly funded, privately operated charter schools; and a new set of programs to address systemic racism. To pay for all this, they want a 1 percent wealth tax, a 3 percent income surtax on millionaires, and increased property taxes on businesses. They also want $250 million from the federal government.”
Meanwhile, Chicago teachers wanted their maximum salary to increase to $140,000 a year, nearly as much as a member of Congress earns, as well as endorsing societal demands for affordable housing; sanctuary schools to prevent ICE raids; opposing excessive calls to police against Black students and compiling gang databases; and supporting “restorative justice” (whatever that means). Do we really want to pay teachers, most of whom promote activism rather than academics, like members of Congress? And what have they achieved to merit such salaries? David Strom, in an article entitled “Teachers’ Unions are Cults” on HotAir.com, summarizes thus:
“They use public money and time that should be devoted to students to elect Democrats – using your money against you – and have created a system where drunkards, sexual predators, and even drug dealers cannot be fired without years of legal battles.
“And, of course, it was the unions who worked mightily to keep the schools closed as children spiraled into mental health crises and lost years of educational achievement. Large fractions of our school kids are functionally illiterate, and many are so bad at math that they cannot make change at a cash register.”
None of this should come as a surprise. It represents the natural evolution of a doctrine proclaimed by the late American Federation of Teachers president Al Shanker. As noted by Strom in the aforementioned article, “Shanker once admitted that he would start caring about students when they started paying union dues – an admission that the unions were all about pay and benefits, not education.” I can confirm this comment through an incident that occurred some years ago when I was working as a substitute teacher. One day I entered a middle school’s back office and found a newsletter issued by the local teachers’ union (printed on deep pink paper) that was filled with complaints about having too many students, having to take turns doing duties such as monitoring students getting off or on the school buses, policing the cafeteria during lunch, and so on, without a word about anything they could do for students.
The preceding outrages are an outgrowth of the virtually total takeover by radical Leftists of public education in America and of the colleges of education that train teachers. In my view, our school system is too compromised to be saved. Parents – and not necessarily just Jewish parents – need to find alternatives to the public schools, whether charter, private, or religious schools, or homeschooling. For example, I once wrote a letter to the editor suggesting that Jewish day schools consider spinning off their secular instruction (and associated faculty) into a charter school, leaving only religious instruction to be financed by tuition. (See hebrewpublic.org for implementations in practice.)
There are doubtless other solutions to be found by thinking outside the box. But whatever you do, please take action. Dennis Prager wrote in 2019 that “today, to send your child to college is to play Russian roulette with their values. There is a good chance your child will return from college alienated from you, from America, from Western civilization and from whatever expression of any Bible-based religion in which you raised your child.” The same caveat is becoming increasingly applicable to K-12 public schools.
