Dick Magee: It’s just the way it is

You just can’t get around it. The No. 1 goal of the powerful teachers' unions that hold sway across the country is to stamp out any aspect of school choice. It’s an almost hysterical need to avoid competition and maintain a rock-hard monopoly in the classroom — where the majority of students fail to meet the minimum standards in reading and math set by the state.

Once in office, governors and mayors who took millions of dollars from teachers' unions during election campaigns are loath to go against the unions’ wishes during contract negotiations. You don’t stiff those who brought you to the dance. For the unions, it’s payback time. A union win in negotiations can lead to a learning loss in the neighborhoods.

We need look no further than Illinois for an example. The state’s “Invest in Kids” program provided a seventy-five percent state tax credit for donations to help families afford private schools. It granted scholarships to 9,600 low-income — and mostly minority children — to attend these schools. At any one time, the program had more than twenty thousand students on its waiting list.

The union claimed the tax credit took money from the public schools even though funding had increased by nearly two billion dollars since the inception of the Kids program. Billionaire Democrat Gov. J.B. Pritzker acceded to the views of the union. He’s “phasing out” the program.

Pritzker’s Family Foundation donated $8.3 million to the Milton Academy, an expensive boarding school he attended — $2.5 million to Duke University — and $100 million to Northwestern’s Law School which is now named in his honor.

I find no evidence that a penny of Pritzker money was donated to help the low-income students of his state.

It gets worse.

Chicago has eleven public high schools that rate academically among the best in the state and the nation. They are “selective-enrollment” schools. Applicants must apply for admission. The aim of the schools is to provide high-achieving students with a challenging and enriched college preparatory experience. Enrollment data shows more than half of the students enrolled in these schools come from low-income families. Seventy percent are Black or Hispanic. Last year close to 25,000 applicants competed for 3,600 open seats. Over 15,700 students were enrolled in these schools last year.

Last December Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson ordered his hand-picked school board to close the program!

Why? Because the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) wanted him to. The union declared the program had created a new form of “educational apartheid” where selective-enrollment schools “uplift the few and usher in inequities to the many.” The definition of inequities is unclear. And the claim that selective enrollment schools succeed at the expense of neighborhood schools is false. In truth, even after the demise of the selective enrollment schools, the neighborhood schools will continue to fail.

The Editorial Board Newsletter writes, “The scandal reflects the bloody-mindedness of the union that wants to snuff out competition to retain its monopoly. And it reveals how little most Democrat politicians care about the children they imprison in these factories of failure.”

CTU President Stacy Gates sends her son to a private school.

Johnson says he decided to chop the program because he worries about how black students who fail to meet the entrance standards feel. Oh, brother. What about the students, Black and white, who do meet acceptance standards but are denied the opportunity to excel? It’s another example of dumbing down a school system that over thousands of students must suffer through. Instead of killing the program, Johnson and the union should find ways to expand it.

The Chicago School Board, with CTU pulling the strings, has also disallowed leasing empty school buildings to charter schools looking for larger quarters to serve an expanding student base. That’s how the Chicago School Board handles competition. Competition can improve performance. But it hasn’t a chance in Chicago schools. Perhaps it’s time to apply a version of the Sherman Antitrust Act to Chicago schools.

Of course, the real reason for Johnson’s decision was to thank the coalition of teachers unions who contributed $5.6 million (half the total) to his mayoral campaign.

And what about Gov. Whitmer in Michigan? I suspect she’ll follow the dictates of the teachers' unions, too. Look at what just happened. She vetoed a program designed to give $1000 scholarships to elementary students failing in reading. The scholarship was for private tutoring. Union-backed opponents of the bill claimed the scholarship was really a voucher in disguise — and as such — must be denied in Michigan. Whitmer, adhering to the views of the union whose members had failed in teaching the subject in the first place, vetoed the bill.

Michigan law requires kids who fail to meet reading standards by the third grade be held back a year. But few are. And they face a hard road in the years ahead. So, in Michigan it’s OK to hold a student back — or to push one ahead, unprepared into the future — but wrong to invest in one needing extra help.

Such a decision doesn’t meet the aims as described in the lofty mission statements of schools, states or teachers' unions.

What we see happening in Chicago and Michigan, is duplicated in big blue cities. It’s the students and the families there who pay the price in the short term — and the country in the long term — as our ability to compete on the world stage diminishes.

So, it’s no surprise that the need for and acceptance of school choice alternatives is growing dramatically. Families across the board are pushing back against political decisions that hamper instruction. They are refusing to be locked into failing schools or having little voice in programs and methods of instruction. The desperate need for unions to fight against any form of school choice will eventually lead to their undoing. Pressure from the public at large will eventually overrule the power of the union to unduly influence educational processes. The tide is beginning to turn — from the universities to the schools down the block.

It’s just the way it is.

— Dick Magee is a resident of Klinger Lake and a frequent columnist for the Journal’s opinion page.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Dick Magee: It’s just the way it is