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L.A. teachers union proves yet again it’s not about the children

March 22, 2023

Since seizing control in 2020 of the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) in a maneuver characterized by even the uber-liberal LA Magazine as a “hostile takeover,” Cecily Myart-Cruz has made little secret of her desire to leverage the union and its vast resources as a vehicle to advance a radical, socialist, anti-Semitic political agenda rather than advocate on behalf of teachers, let alone students.

And now, right on schedule, she’s teamed with Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to involve her own union’s members in a three-day strike the Los Angeles Times is calling the “largest and longest full disruption of education in the nation’s second-largest school system since the six-day teachers’ strike of 2019.”

The work stoppage began on March 21 and is being orchestrated by SEIU 99, which represents about 30,000 bus drivers, teacher aides, campus security aides, special education assistants, custodians, gardeners and cafeteria workers. The union is seeking a whopping 30% across-the-board pay raise on their behalf and, true to form, Myart-Cruz is pressuring her own members to walk out in sympathy.

But, of course, wages, benefits and working conditions are just a starting point for someone who, in a 2020 interview, asserted, “The union has to be about social justice.”

Myart-Cruz’s stewardship of UTLA began three years ago, when only 5,300 members ⎯ about 16% of its dues-paying total ⎯ participated in the union’s leadership election. She got 69% of that 16% running against a candidate who wanted UTLA to concentrate on actual teacher concerns rather than partisan politics.

In the years since, Myart-Cruz has used her position to embroil UTLA in a laundry list range of radically liberal causes having nothing to do with education, including:

“Racial justice”:Medicare for all;The millionaire tax:Financial support for undocumented families; and,Rental and eviction relief.

Even more inexplicable was Myart Cruz’s bizarre insistence that UTLA boycott Israel over its conflict with Hamas.

But nothing more vividly illustrates her contempt for everything ⎯ including students and her own membership ⎯ that might stand in the way of her socialist agenda than her callous determination to keep L.A. schools closed during the COVID pandemic while she grandstanded for her personal objectives.

In early March 2021, for example, when feckless California Gov. Gavin Newsom tried to bribe teachers back into classrooms by promising $2 billion worth of incentives for schools agreeing to reopen before April 1, Myart-Cruz brushed aside his proposal as a “recipe for propagating structural racism.”

While her district’s students languished at home grappling with an epidemic of depression, substance abuse and even suicide, Myart-Cruz stubbornly refused to capitulate, waiting until late April to only partly reopen for hybrid, part-time learning.

When parents complained, pointing to the low incidence of COVID cases in schools that had fully reopened, the race-obsessed Myart-Cruz dismissed their concerns as the product of unexamined privilege.

A year later, Smarter Balanced Assessments found the percentage of LA Unified School District students meeting or exceeding state standards in English dropped by about two percentage points compared to the pre-pandemic 2018-19 year ⎯ falling from 43.9 to 41.7%.

In math, the drop was steeper, falling by five percentage points from 33.5 to 28.5%.

But for Myart Cruz, the physical, emotional and educational devastation wrought by her hard-line stance was simply collateral damage.

“There is no such thing as learning loss,” she retorted when confronted with her own record. “Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.”

Could it be more clear that UTLA finds itself in the grasp of an unhinged zealot who thinks of LAUSD’s 600,000 K-12 students as nothing but pawns to be traded for political victories?

And now she’s at it again, in a strike that doesn’t even directly affect her members.

Whatever else the ongoing work stoppage may be about, for Myart-Cruz and her allies at SEIU 99, the school district’s workers, students and parents are irrelevant. Stripped to its essence, this is all about the larger goal of imposing by bullying, blackmail and backroom deals a failed political philosophy they know would be rejected at the ballot box even in loony, leftist California.

Aaron Withe is CEO of the Freedom Foundation,.

Orange County Register

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L.A. teachers union proves yet again it’s not about the children

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