Parents Fear Union-Backed CRT in Schools, Elina Kaplan Takes a Stand
Forced Unionism Abuses Exposed – the facts Big Labor Bosses would rather you didn’t hear about.
“[C]ompulsory unionism and corruption go hand in hand . . . .” – U.S. Sen. John McClellan (D-Ark.)
Today millions of citizens, including many mothers and fathers of school-aged children, are up in arms about extremist propaganda being foisted on kids through school curricula under the guise of “anti-racist education.” One example is Californian Elina Kaplan. A former high-tech manager and a mother of two grown sons who lives in San Mateo County, Kaplan became a grassroots activist against the imposition of so-called “critical race theory” (CRT) in government primary and secondary schools when “friends started sending her links to California’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum,” according to a July 26 report published in Politico.
Kaplan was disturbed by a number of things that she saw, including repeated attacks on the free-market system, which as most Americans recognize has both helped preserve our political liberty and made the U.S. the richest country in the world. As an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, Kaplan was offended by the model curriculum’s “suggestion” that schoolchildren study how the free market “has been used to oppress people”!
Today Kaplan heads a nonprofit group, the Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies, that opposes CRT propaganda schemes.
Top teacher union bosses like Becky Pringle, the president of the 2.3 million-member National Education Association (NEA), and Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers (AFT), have a message for people like Kaplan: We’re going to use dues money forked over by hardworking K-12 educators across the country to drag your names through the mud.
At the NEA’s virtual representative assembly this summer, union militants passed a resolution to fund opposition research targeting critics of CRT, including grassroots organizations, and furnish resources to other groups and individuals who are willing to attack concerned citizens like Elina Kaplan.
And Weingarten is exploiting the platform she holds as the head of a nationwide union that, together with its subsidiaries, wields monopoly-bargaining power over the pay, benefits, and work rules of hundreds of thousands of educators, to smear CRT critics as wanting to ban schools from “teaching history” and “discussing racism.”
The fact is, one of the most outspoken opponents of California’s CRT-based ethnic studies model curriculum is Clarence Jones, a former legal counsel and speechwriter for Martin Luther King, Jr. In an open letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom, Jones has decried the curriculum’s “glorification” of violence and rejected it as “morally indecent and deeply offensive.”
As even Amanda Litman, the founder of an organization that frequently helps union boss-aligned candidates get elected to school boards across the country, admits, “[P]eople are scared about what their kids are learning” as a consequence of the infiltration of CRT into school curricula.
But teacher union officials insist they know better than parents, voters, and elected officials who are accountable to the public about what schoolchildren should be taught.
The advocacy of Pringle, Weingarten, and their cohorts for indoctrinating schoolchildren with socialist ideology and treating advocates of “revolutionary” violence as role models is infuriating.
But it would not matter so much if politicians in more than 30 states hadn’t passed laws granting union bosses monopoly-bargaining power over how teachers in public schools are compensated and managed.
The top officials of the NEA and AFT unions are political powerhouses largely because most local elected officials across the U.S. cannot make necessary and appropriate changes in how schools are run without teacher union bosses’ acquiescence.
A second key reason these government union chiefs wield such inordinate clout is that most public school teachers, even if they choose personally not to be union members, have no choice but to allow the union to speak for them on key matters regarding their professional lives.
Repealing state laws that authorize and promote union monopoly bargaining in public education is the best and most effective way to wrest control over public education out of the hands of Big Labor bosses and restore control to parents and other taxpayers.
If you have questions about whether union officials are violating your rights, contact the Foundation for free help. To take action by supporting us and fueling the fight against Forced Unionism, click here to donate now.
