The inexcusable failure of most American public schools to reopen public schools since they “temporarily” shut down a year ago has taken a heavy toll on the educational progress and mental health of America’s children and teenagers.
An $86 billion bailout for nearly 200 union pensions was included in the Democrats’ massive stimulus package, which President Joe Biden is expected to sign. The union bailout, among the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package’s provisions unrelated to the pandemic, rescues 185 pension plans across several states.
A Republican-led proposal that would limit unions from collecting fees from private sector workers is on the move again in the New Hampshire Legislature.
The head of a state teachers union compared the push to reopen “everything” to “white supremacy” during a school board zoom call on Wednesday.
On anything to do with K-12 education, the two big teachers unions own the Democratic Party, in Vermont and in Congress. They hate charter schools, which are almost all non-union.
With few exceptions, union officials have fought school reopenings tooth and nail. Their fierce resistance would be reasonable if COVID-19 posted a major risk to schoolchildren or to educators themselves. But the fact is that the risk to kids is very low.
Teachers unions largely won’t explain why they want to keep public education virtual, even though studies have suggested that schools aren’t coronavirus super-spreaders as originally expected and that students’ performance have suffered in remote environments.
Education budgets also generally are approved routinely. This is the year that this habit absolutely must change. Vermont’s economy is in dire straits. The local education budgets must be scrutinized and challenged before they are approved.
At least 58 of these lawsuits involve attempts to obtain refunds for fees that employees had to pay to unions prior to Janus. At least 57 involve challenges to membership withdrawal procedures (namely, laws or policies that allow union members to resign their membership only during specified periods of times).
President-elect Joe Biden campaigned on a series of labor policies, which would dramatically cut back on state right-to-work laws and potentially empower fading labor unions, experts said.
If the former vice president prevails in the ongoing fight over vote counts in the 2020 presidential election, a “lot of speculation has focused on Biden nominating” Weingarten or her partner in perpetuating school closures, just-retired NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia, to be his education secretary.
One Trump Supreme Court appointee joined two Obama Supreme Court appointees in condemning the actions of Vermont state employees, suggesting that the rule of law can overcome the partisan divide.