Teachers Union Holds Schools Hostage Until Police Are Defunded, Charter Schools Shut Down

The United Teachers Los Angeles has released a list of demands that it argues must be met before schools can reopen in America’s second-largest city.

While some of the proposals might seem reasonable in light of the coronavirus pandemic, others sound like they were crafted by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Members of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s teachers union apparently have adapted Rahm Emanuel’s phrase “never let a good crisis go to waste” as their slogan.

At the very least, the policy paper put together by the United Teachers Los Angeles containing its insane demands illustrates just how political teachers unions have become.

The 35,000-member teachers union sees the coronavirus as a perfect opportunity to demand the enactment of a far-left agenda that it supported long before COVID-19 arrived in America.

According to the political activists at the helm of UTLA, “The Safe and Equitable Conditions for Starting LAUSD in 2020-21” include the defunding of police, a federal bailout of LA schools and the abolition of charter schools.

While the document acknowledged that “the CARES and HEROES Acts provided funding for K-12,” it complained that the district still needed more money. In addition, the section on the desired “Federal Support” for reopening LAUSD schools included a demand for “Medicare for All.”

As for the section on “State Support,” the document calls on the state of California to implement a “millionaire’s tax” and a “wealth tax.”

While the teachers seem quite confident that the massive redistribution of wealth would result in much-desired revenue, they failed to take into account the fact that many millionaires would flee the state the second the higher taxes were imposed.

UTLA Conditions by The Western Journal on Scribd

The most ridiculous demands came in the section on “Local Support.” Calling on local leaders to “defund police,” the brains behind the left-wing wish list urged elected officials to “shift the astronomical amount of money devoted to policing, to education and other essential needs such as housing and public health.”

Apparently, the people behind the UTLA paper aren’t bothered by the fact that homicides in their city rose by 250 percent in the first week of June as anti-law enforcement sentiment first swept through major American cities.

This shouldn’t come as much of a shock. Last month, Cecily Myart-Cruz, the union’s president, described the police as a symbol of “white supremacy” that needed to be dismantled.

Not surprisingly, the document had few kind words for charter schools, which teachers unions see as an enormous threat to their monopolistic power.

UTLA said it wants a “charter moratorium,” but this radical list of demands should make Los Angeles parents who do not subscribe to the dictates of cultural marxism want to send their children to charter schools more than ever.

No document filled with left-wing demands would be complete without a call for “Financial Support for Undocumented Students and Families.”

It looks like President Donald Trump had it right when he declared that “the Democrats don’t want to open schools in the Fall for political reasons.”

This document should make Americans eternally grateful for the 2018 Janus decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that “public employees will no longer be required to pay involuntary agency fees to special-interest groups.”

Nothing epitomizes the phrase “special-interest group” like a teachers union, which uses those agency fees to fund far-left groups such as the Center for American Progress and Media Matters.

The release of the UTLA demands comes just weeks before school is set to resume in Los Angeles on Aug. 18.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has made it clear to the nation’s governors that at the beginning of the next school year, “School must reopen, they must be fully operational.”

For the most part, she is right. Schools should reopen in the fall.

However, in a place like Los Angeles, where advancing a political agenda is more important to the teachers than educating the next generation, parents should seriously consider homeschooling or sending their children to a charter or private school.

Only then will liberal activists moonlighting as teachers in Los Angeles and other parts of the country get the message that many Americans do not support the push among some schools to reject “objectivity” in favor of indoctrinating America’s students with left-wing propaganda.