Teachers’ union propaganda is creeping into California’s public school curricula.
To say California’s teachers’ unions wield
outsize influence over state education policy is hardly novel. From
setting tenure rules to rewriting dismissal statutes and blocking
pension reforms, the California Teachers Association and the California
Federation of Teachers roam the halls of the legislature like varsity
all-stars. But less well known are the unions’ efforts to remake
curriculum—and thereby influence the next generation of citizens and
voters.
According to labor expert
Kevin Dayton,
organized labor has been trying to get its collective hooks into
classroom content since 1981, when the City University of New York
developed the “American Social History Project.” The idea was to present
the history of marginalized and oppressed groups—including labor
unions—to a “broad popular audience.” In California, the project took a
great leap forward in 2001, when Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg cooked
up the Speaker’s Commission on Labor Education, which, as Dayton
explains, was established “to address issues of labor education in
California’s public school system.” At the commission’s behest, Governor
Gray Davis signed
a bill that
encouraged school districts to set aside the first week in April as
“Labor History Week” and “commemorate it with appropriate educational
exercises to make pupils aware of the important role that the labor
movement has played in shaping California and the United States.”
By 2012, labor’s “week” had morphed into “
Labor History Month,” and California’s teachers’ unions began advancing their politicized agenda. The CFT’s
elementary curriculum includes a story about a “
mean farmer”
and his ticked-off hens that organize against him. The CTA meantime
offers up a passel of lessons with a heavy emphasis on issues such as “
tax fairness.” The University of California’s
Miguel Contreras Labor Program joined in, adding an anthology of stories promoting the
IWW, a radical union noted for its ties to socialism and anarchism, as well as a biography of America’s singing Stalinist,
Pete Seeger.
The unions were on the move again in 2014, as the California Department of Education began its periodic
review of the state’s history framework. In November, the CFT sent a
proposal
to the Instructional Quality Commission, an advisory body to the state
board of education on matters concerning curriculum, instructional
materials, and content standards. The union’s suggestions included
downplaying the Second Great Awakening—the eighteenth-century religious
revival that had a profound effect on the temperance, abolition, and
women’s rights movements—in favor of greater emphasis on anti-Muslim
discrimination after the 9/11 attacks. The union also wants the United
States described as an “empire” that regularly “dominate[s] other
civilizations,” despite the nation’s record of rebuilding countries we
have defeated in war, such as Germany and Japan after World War II.
Naturally, the CFT makes a case for a “Labor Studies” elective. California is considering a
lesson
that would let students “participate in a collective bargaining
simulation to examine the struggles of workers to be paid for the value
of their labor and to work under safe conditions. They can examine
legislation that gave workers the right to organize into unions, to
improve working conditions, and to prohibit discrimination.” The
Speaker’s Commission on Labor Education co-chairs, Fred Glass and Kent
Wong, weighed in with a
letter of their own urging the Instructional Quality Commission to establish the labor studies elective.
Will the unions advocate a full and fair treatment of labor’s
history, including routine episodes of union violence and intimidation?
Can students expect thorough exploration of labor economics, including
how collective bargaining lowers the pay of many workers due to wage
compression? Probably not. It’s even less likely that students will hear
anything about the teachers’ unions twenty-first century political
ventures—such as how the CTA spent more than $26 million in 2000 to
defeat a school-voucher initiative that would have let families escape
failing schools, or how, in 2012, it successfully lobbied to defeat
SB 1530, which would have simplified the process of firing pedophile teachers.
The teachers’ unions are clearly lobbying for changes to a curriculum
they believe presents a sanitized version of U.S. history, but they
would simply replace disfavored “myths” with their own versions. As an
American history teacher for much of the last decade of my career, I was
faithful to the state framework and taught extensively about slavery
and other injustices in our collective past. Most other history
instructors I knew did the same. We didn’t browbeat the kids, however,
into believing that American history was riddled with treachery and
malevolence. If parents and citizens don’t take action, a bundle of
America-bashing lessons, distorted history, and indoctrination into the
glories of collective bargaining may become a part of the Golden State’s
curriculum.
