Social(ism) Justice Lessons
Teacher union progressives seek to socialize our country, but the Koch brothers have other plans.
The recent teacher union conventions were full of self-pity, angst and anger over the Vergara and Harris legal decisions. Unfortunately that’s not all they concerned themselves with. The union avatars explored various progressive schemes with the intention of dragging us all into their brave new world.
The ugliest moment for liberty came during the “Social Movement Unionism vs. Corporate Reform: Winning Strategies to Turn the Tide” panel at the American Federation of Teachers’ convention. As reported by class warrior Lauren Steiner in the LA Progressive, “It featured six union officials from LA, New York, Houston, Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Paul sharing their efforts to bring the wider community into their organizing and the various successes they’ve had.”
What’s scary about this bunch is that not only do they work hard to keep many children from getting a solid education by demanding that 50s-era, industrial-style union work rules remain in place, they also envision a socialist America. Alex Caputo-Pearl, recently elected president of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, is perhaps the most radical of all. A proud community organizer, he has been active in various local issues and leftist politics. Within the union, he co-founded Progressive Educators for Action. His other “accomplishments” include working to kill a charter effort to reform wretched Crenshaw High School where he was a teacher, playing a role in building the national “Resisting Teach for America” network (TFA is a dangerous part of the privatization movement, doncha know) and as leader of the “Bus Riders Union” (and no, I did not make that up). Caputo-Pearl so believes in his mission and his own self-importance that he illegally ditched some of his teaching responsibilities while campaigning to become UTLA boss.
Randi Weingarten was not scheduled to be on the panel but showed up nonetheless. Excited by the collectivist bombast, she proclaimed that if the union can advance its progressive programs, it will make every child and parent say, “I need those unions and teachers to be what they are for us.”
The union boss then echoed her own socialist leanings, claiming that her goal is to “create an economy that works for all” and proceeded to outline essential policy proposals that the AFT would advocate for, which included,
… growing the labor movement and reviving collective bargaining; increasing retirement security; easing the burden of student debt; funding a higher minimum wage, paid family leave, universal early childhood education, and full, equitable funding for all schools ….
She also highlighted the AFT’s work “to invest union member pension funds in infrastructure and create 150,000 good jobs.”
Creating good jobs?! How ya gonna do that, Randi? Socialists aren’t very good at that sort of thing. They are good at redistributing money – taking it from Peter and giving it to Paul (and Robert and Joan and Bill and…), but not creating meaningful work for anybody. But I have just the solution, so please sit down or you may fall over. The answer is – are you ready, Randi? – the Koch brothers!
Unknown to many, the Kansas-based industrialists founded Youth Entrepreneurs in 1991. Its mission is to “provide students with business and entrepreneurial education and experiences to help them prosper and become contributing members of society.” Joy Resmovits and Christina Wilkie wrote “Koch High: How The Koch Brothers Are Buying Their Way Into The Minds Of Public School Students,” an extended piece about the project for Huffington Post, Despite the snarky title and several snide comments in the body of the piece, the article is actually quite informative.
In the spring of 2012, Spenser Johnson, a junior at Highland Park High School in Topeka, Kansas, was unpacking his acoustic bass before orchestra practice when a sign caught his eye. ‘Do you want to make money?’ it asked.
The poster encouraged the predominantly poor students at Highland Park to enroll in a new, yearlong course that would provide lessons in basic economic principles and practical instruction on starting a business. Students would receive generous financial incentives including startup capital and scholarships after graduation. The course would begin that fall. Johnson eagerly signed up.
In some ways, the class looked like a typical high school business course, taught in a Highland Park classroom by a Highland Park teacher. But it was actually run by Youth Entrepreneurs, a nonprofit group created and funded primarily by Charles G. Koch, the billionaire chairman of Koch Industries.
The official mission of Youth Entrepreneurs is to provide kids with ‘business and entrepreneurial education and experiences that help them prosper and become contributing members of society.’ The underlying goal of the program, however, is to impart Koch’s radical free-market ideology to teenagers….
Lesson plans and class materials obtained by The Huffington Post make the course’s message clear: The minimum wage hurts workers and slows economic growth. Low taxes and less regulation allow people to prosper. Public assistance harms the poor. Government, in short, is the enemy of liberty.
… During the 2012-2013 school year, YE’s credit-bearing class reached more than 1,000 students in 29 schools in Kansas and Missouri, according to the group’s annual report. Vernon Birmingham, YE’s director of curriculum and teacher support, told HuffPost that the course will be in 42 schools in the coming school year. An offshoot in Atlanta, YE Georgia, reported being in 10 schools in the 2011-2012 school year. Since 2012, YE has also launched three major new initiatives: an online version of its course, an affiliate program to help rural schools access the class, and an after-school program, YE Academy, which served more than 500 students in its first year.
While the Kochs’ program advances the notion that anyone can become prosperous, the left promotes victimhood and resentment as it blathers ad nauseum about the haves and have-nots, “two Americas” and the evil and greedy one percenters. What the left refuses to acknowledge is that we are still an upwardly mobile and fluid nation. As pointed out in an excellent piece in the New York Times,
It is clear that the image of a static 1 and 99 percent is largely incorrect. The majority of Americans will experience at least one year of affluence at some point during their working careers. (This is just as true at the bottom of the income distribution scale, where 54 percent of Americans will experience poverty or near poverty at least once between the ages of 25 and 60).
… Rather than talking about the 1 percent and the 99 percent as if they were forever fixed, it would make much more sense to talk about the fact that Americans are likely to be exposed to both prosperity and poverty during their lives, and to shape our policies accordingly. As such, we have much more in common with one another than we dare to realize. (Emphasis added.)
Hence, we have the Koch brothers trying to instill in its students a sense of independence, a can-do spirit, a solid work ethic and the importance of good business acumen. And our teacher union leaders are striving to enslave us by raising taxes, killing anything that smells of privatization and waging class warfare.
Now seriously, which lessons do you want your kids to learn?
Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.