by Walter W. Murray, reporter
Teacher strikes around the nation have hurt children, denying them of precious classroom time and putting working parents in a bind. Some have had no choice but to leave their children home alone!
A new report has surfaced that exposes the ugly hypocrisy of one of the leaders of those strikes.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten was overheard on a train plotting a move to devastate families in Puerto Rico with a secret strike!
“Let everyone call in for a personal day so they can’t open schools,” she said in the chat overheard by The Washington Free Beacon. “Let them call in for a sick day. They’re sick to death about the schools. They’re so anxiety ridden about the schools.”
Weingarten – speaking from the ritzy first-class car of the high-speed Acela train – was heard barking off orders that would hit the island like another storm. She collects an estimated $530,000 annual salary.
Clearly knowing how ugly that would look, she made sure whoever she was speaking to wouldn’t call it a “strike.”
“We should be careful about the words we use,” she was heard saying.
She was calling for the action not because of core issues like salaries and safety.
No, it’s a completely selfish issue – a move to protect entrenched establishment teachers from the threat of a little honest competition.
As enrollment in Puerto Rico drops due to the large number of families who left after Hurricane Maria, schools are being shuttered and consolidated.
The island’s financial crisis has also forced some belt-tightening.
“We know it’s a difficult and painful process,” Puerto Rico’s education secretary, Julia Keleher, told the Associated Press. “Our children deserve the best education that we are capable of giving them taking into account Puerto Rico’s fiscal reality.”
Indeed, they’re not simply shutting down schools to save money.
Under the new plan, 10 percent of schools would have charter school pilot programs that would be independent of the districts, along with private school vouchers for 3 percent of students, the Washington Post reported.
Kids love the programs, often finding a new chance to excel. Parents of course are thrilled by them.
Who doesn’t want a better education for their kids?
Teachers don’t hate these programs, either, with many fighting to join charter schools.
Only the unions oppose them because of the threat they represent to the entrenched system of mediocrity.
Amazingly, Weingarten didn’t deny her explosive, irresponsible and reprehensible comments.
“It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that I would be talking about how to fight back against the attacks on public education in Puerto Rico and that educators want to act as a human shield to protect public schools and their students just as they’ve done in West Virginia and Oklahoma,” she told the Washington Free Beacon.
She added, “It’s too bad whoever was listening to my phone conversation didn’t get it right and the Free Beacon would rather cover what people overhear on trains instead of what’s happening on the ground in Puerto Rico in terms of the school closings and the all-out assault on public education on the island. What the governor is doing is destroying what the hurricane didn’t destroy and escalating the exodus. It is a catastrophe.”
The natural disaster to strike Puerto Rico was a catastrophe, as she points out.
No one denies that.
But it looks like there’s a second calamity that could devastate the island’s children, and it wasn’t made by nature.
It was created by man… or in this case, a woman.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”