Big-city US teachers unions are looking drunk with power — risking one doozy of a hangover as the public realizes how anti-education they’ve become.
Last year, the Chicago Teachers Union won pay hikes above 4% a year for four straight years; the city already spent more than $30,000 per student, but then the CTU got one of its own elected mayor, and Brandon Johnson has stacked the Board of Education to give the union whatever it wants — despite Chicago’s near-$1 billion budget deficit.
Cali teachers mean to catch up; the arrogant California Teachers Association has been orchestrating strike threats from San Diego to San Francisco.
’Frisco teachers got a 6% raise over two years; the Oakland union got raises of at least 11% raise over two years.
And the United Teachers Los Angeles union announced Wednesday that it will strike — the second one in the last three years, and the third since 2019.
Strikes are terrible for children, for families, and for the community — harming poor and middle-class families most, since working parents have few options for child care.
The union wants a whopping 17% pay hike over the next two years. The cash-strapped LA Unified School District is offering to meet it halfway, with an 8% rise — still better than most private-sector workers, with far fewer benefits and less job security, can expect.
It sure wouldn’t be a merit pay hike: District student scores in English and math are below state averages (which themselves are still below pre-COVID levels); under half the kids are proficient in English, barely more than a third in math.
Two-thirds of black students are below grade level in reading; three-quarters, in math.
And nobody in the system — certainly not the union — even pretends these schools will do much better anytime in the foreseeable future . . . even if the union gets its wage demands.
But union power has its limits.
Look at Kentucky, where Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, vetoed a bill to help the state’s kids by letting them accept scholarship funds from a new federal program.
Beshear bowed to his teachers unions, who hate how that promotes school choice and competition — but the GOP-controlled Legislature overrode his veto.
That’s not possible in deep-blue states like California and Illinois, where unions mobilize to keep Democrats in power.
Yet the school-choice movement is burning up the nation: Too many families are now wise to what a racket union-controlled public schools have become.
Choice is no cure-all, but at least it gives students an escape from a monopoly system run with zero regard for their interests.
Freedom will likely come last to the big cities where teachers unions wield so much political power, but the grotesque greed of gangs like the CTU and UTLA is bringing the revolution closer.
