Recently, Senator Elizabeth Warren released her education plan titled “A Great Public School Education for Every Student,” but the scheme should have been named “My Big Fat Payoff to the Teacher Unions.”
The publicity splash in Warren’s plan is her call to quadruple funding for the federal Title I program, which funnels money to disadvantaged students, to the tune of a whopping $450 billion over a 10-year period.
Warren claims that she wants to ensure that these new federal funds “are reaching the students and schools that need it most,” but it is obvious that a lot of those new tax dollars will be going to Warren’s powerful teacher-union friends.
Thus, she says, “My plan to quadruple Title I funding incentivizes states to shift their funding formulas to better support students in critical ways, such as by increasing teacher pay” and also raising the pay for “paraprofessionals and other education support professionals.”
Warren then describes how this teacher-pay increase can be accomplished.
“One of the best ways to raise teacher pay permanently and sustainably — and to give teachers more voice in their schools — is to make it easier for teachers to join a union, bargain collectively and to strike like educators did across 14 states in 2018-19.”
So, essentially, Warren’s plan is to increase federal education spending by a massive amount, direct much of that money to teacher pay hikes, and then to ensure that teachers are unionized so they can go on strike.
But Warren isn’t finished shilling for the teacher unions.
“I have led the effort to eliminate the ability of states to pass anti-union ‘right-to-work’ laws, and I will make enacting that change a top priority.”
In other words, Warren wants to eliminate the freedom of disaffected public workers including teachers to be able to choose whether or not to be a member of a public employee union, which right-to-work laws guarantee.
And to top it all off, Warren wants a federal law that will make it easier for unions to unionize teachers and staff and, very important, that will make it easier to collect “fees to support a union.”
Her final kowtow to the unions is perhaps the most disgraceful.
In response to the unions’ jihad against charter schools, Warren lays out a death plan for charters.
First, she wants to eliminate the federal program that promotes new charter schools.
“As president, I would eliminate this charter school program and end federal funding for the expansion of charter schools.”
Further, she wants only local school boards, which are often controlled by union sycophants, to have the power to authorize the establishment of charter schools.
That position is to the left of even California governor Gavin Newsom, who recently signed a bill that gave charter-school organizers the ability to appeal adverse local school board decisions to the county board of education.
To underscore her placing of union priorities above all else, Warren’s plan adopts the tone and language of a union flyer: “My administration also will crack down on union-busting and discriminatory enrollment, suspension and expulsion practices in charter schools.”
All those accusations are union talking points that have been discredited by research, but, for Warren, the facts be damned.
Sadly, also damned are the children.
A massive Stanford University study of more than 40 urban areas in the country found that low-income African-American and Hispanic students who attended charter schools had higher achievement rates in math and reading than their peers in regular public schools.
But, for Elizabeth Warren, ideology, special-interest politics, and the blind pursuit of power trump any concern for parents who want a better education option for their children.
Elizabeth Warren, who used to support school-choice vouchers and charter schools, has become the education picture of Dorian Gray.
