Maybe Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson hoped the media wouldn’t pick up on his recent appearance at a book event for Randi Weingarten’s Why Fascists Fear Teachers. There was a good chance journalists wouldn’t be looking — after all, between the government shutdown we’ve all forgotten about and Donald Trump’s Middle East peace deal, there’s a lot to pay attention to.
More likely, he didn’t care, which is why he had no problem saying the quiet part out loud:
“I believe Rahm Emanuel referred to the Chicago Teachers Union as a socialist conspiracy,” he told an audience last week. “Did I get the words? But little did he know, there was no conspiracy. We were just doing it.” (READ MORE: Brain Rot and the Crisis of Digital Late Modernity)
Perhaps it’s a sign of just how loud the quiet part has gotten that Johnson’s comment didn’t make waves — other than in the editorial pages of the Chicago Tribune. The socialist bent of teachers unions (and not just Chicago’s specifically) hasn’t been a secret since the 1950s, when Bella Dodd testified on the matter to Congress.
Johnson’s comment is only newsworthy because, despite our knowing that many of the nation’s public educators have been socialists for the last 75 years, nothing truly substantial has been done about it.
To call that turn of events “unfortunate” would be to undersell it. Just a day after the Chicago Tribune complained about Chicago’s classroom socialists, the Atlantic published a seemingly unrelated piece about the abject failure of the American public education system to do the one and only thing it’s tasked with doing: educating children.
“By some measures, American students have regressed to a level not seen in 25 years or more,” Idrees Kalhoon reported. According to recently released test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a third of eighth graders are “reading at a level that is ‘below basic’ — meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea.”
Additionally, the gap between high-performing students (who are doing about as well as they’ve always done) and low-performing students has grown to be about as wide as it’s ever been: “The bottom tenth of 13-year-olds [eighth graders], according to NAEP’s long-term-trend data, are hitting lows in reading and math scores not seen since these tests began in 1971 and 1978, respectively.”
Kalhoon wisely rejects the common lines touted by our educators. No, he says, the problem doesn’t seem to be COVID-era disruptions or the widespread use of smartphones among students in school — although those factors may have contributed to the problem. It’s not even that schools aren’t getting enough funding — a complaint teachers’ unions have repeatedly fallen back on, even as federal funding for schools has risen (and promptly been spent on HVAC systems and electric school buses).
No, the issue is that schools and teachers simply expect less of students.
Need evidence? Mississippi — which spends half as much per student as Massachusetts — has totally bucked the trend. How? By requiring students to pass exams at certain milestones (third grade, for instance) in order to advance to the next grade. In other words, Mississippi schools have standards for the fourth grade, basic literacy being one of them.
There’s something else strange about Mississippi and the southern states following in its footsteps: It’s run by Republicans, and its teachers “are among the least unionized in the country.”
Correlation hardly proves causation, but it does indicate that a little digging might be in order.
The fact is, school districts run by educators who take part in the kinds of unions currently planning to go to bat for teachers who celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk and who are promoting maps erasing the state of Israel following Donald Trump’s landmark peace deal are failing to educate the kids. It seems fair to wonder if the ideology might have something to do with it.
After all, Weingarten’s latest book doesn’t tell teachers that defeating fascist ideology requires reversing the current literacy trends, it tells them they need to create “safe and welcoming classrooms” while “promoting tolerance.” This, despite the fact that her thesis seems to be that so-called fascist ideologues fear teachers because they “foster an educated and empowered population that can see past propaganda and scare tactics … [and] teach young people how to think for themselves.”
Weingarten is, of course, correct in arguing that ideology loves illiteracy. However, the dominant ideology infecting our schools isn’t fascism — a label the Left unjustifiably applies to its opponents without defining, and which it has been careful to stamp out. Nor is it the case that these educators are careful to instill a widespread suspicion of all ideology resulting in some form of non-ideology.
Instead, the system of thought at fault for our kids’ inability to read a book critically or solve a math problem is probably the socialism that Johnson celebrated Chicago teachers for “doing.”
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