By Dawn Collier
Just-released state test scores show California’s K-12 students are suffering under (what your Marxists would call) the jack boot of totalitarianism.
“We have unacceptable rates across the board, with a persistent, continuing problem in math,” a state education consultant told EdSource, the media outfit that forced Gov. Gavin Newsom and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond to release results of the state’s Smarter Balanced test. “It existed before the pandemic, and the pandemic’s impact was most acute for those who needed the most help.”
Newsom and Thurmond tried to bury the state’s test results, initially promising to release them after Election Day. Now that they’re out, a slightly deeper dive suggests the results are worse than the terrible headlines would suggest.
Consider Los Angeles Unified, where the vast majority of kids tested cannot read or do math at grade level. But those scores don’t tell the whole story. Fully 4.4 percent of the district’s students failed to finish enough of the test to earn any score at all. The state does not factor that number into its final, dismal result.
You’d be right to ascribe this massive, systemic failure to the teachers unions that run our public school system. But they have excuses. Blame “racial, economic and other inequities that have long existed in our public education system,” said Toby Boyd, president of the California Teachers Association. Blame a “worldwide pandemic,” not the fact that his union spread false information about Covid and demanded school closures long after other states opened classrooms for learning. “There may be those who seek to divide and politicize these test scores for their own political gain,” said the man who seeks to divide and politicize. “That would be a mistake.”
The state’s largest district teachers union had a slightly different spin on the test results: don’t blame Boyd’s “worldwide pandemic.” United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) tweeted: “Don’t buy into the narrative that COVID-19 is solely responsible for drops in academic performance. It’s convenient political cover for inaction. What we’re seeing is the result of decades of underinvestment in teacher pay, student resources and school infrastructure.” A convenient narrative, no doubt, but hollow in light of the fact that the state has been boosting school funding for years.
But here are two inconvenient truths for UTLA:
LAUSD schools spend “about $26,255 per student — a whopping 69 percent increase from the $15,630 Los Angeles spent per student” in 2019.
And though the district’s charter schools operate on lower funding than their union-run counterparts, they dramatically outperformed UTLA-run classrooms. LA charters outscored UTLA-run schools by 10 percentage points in literacy and six percentage points in math.
The test results are clear: our problem isn’t “inadequate funding,” “COVID,” or “inequality,” though each of these factors ought to be part of the conversation. The problem is a teachers union whose mission is to make money to play in politics. If education actually happens, it’s because good teachers work against the odds.
UTLA clearly doesn’t care. While students were forced out of schools and into remote learning, UTLA was demanding things like defunding the police and single-payer healthcare in order to return to the classroom. In response to concerns over students’ learning loss, UTLA president Cecily Myart-Cruz told Los Angeles Magazine in August of 2021 there was “no such thing.”
“Our kids didn’t lose anything,” Myart-Cruz added. “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.”
The test scores suggest students did not en masse learn “resilience,” “survival” and “critical-thinking skills.” And for those who did, it was despite UTLA’s best efforts.
We leave you with this image: the union’s own website and social media accounts prominently feature the graphic of an activist screaming into a bullhorn, not a teacher standing in front of a classroom.
This is what systemic racism looks like. UTLA and teachers unions throughout the state are the aggressors in a war for even more funding — funding they’ll use to turn California’s K-12 public schools into indoctrination camps for the unions’ radical politics. Unfortunately for students, these unions aren’t concerned with winning in the classroom.
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