Chicago teachers union chief blames conservatives for failing students (06-20-2024--Hour3)

[00:00:00] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily

[00:00:17] show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to the Pete Kaliner show.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. We have been talking about education.

[00:00:32] Last hour, I was going over a piece that appeared at Scientific American, sorry, the publication formerly known as Scientific American, scientificamerican.com, a piece by the editors calling for federal government intervention in homeschooling.

[00:00:49] They want the feds to rein in and monitor and hold accountable all these parents that think they can educate their own kids or something. Many parents are attracted to homeschooling because they want to have more say in what their child learns and what they do not, right?

[00:01:09] They disagree with the curriculum. And in order to get curricula changes, right, they have to win public office, they have to hold these positions in order to get, you know, blanket changes across entire school districts. And that's, that's way harder.

[00:01:27] And all they want to do is just make sure their kid gets a good education as they define it, as the parent defines it. And sometimes those parents are going to be wrong. That happens. People are wrong all the time.

[00:01:42] The answer is not to have the federal government basically create a certification program and a testing regime for homeschoolers. They say some kids may not be getting any instruction at all. And they're worried about this.

[00:01:58] So therefore, we got to have the government do it because we all know all the government schools they're doing fantastic in educating all the children, right? I mentioned earlier, 55 schools in Chicago have not one single student at grade level,

[00:02:11] not a single, not a single kid reading or doing math at grade level. My view is you blow up the entire K-12 government model. But I recognize that that's a bit radical. I recognize there are a lot of people that they've got nostalgic reasons and you know,

[00:02:31] they had a great experience in school and so they think it's going all just perfectly. And maybe they are in a good public school and they don't want to make any changes. And so my compromise position is vouchers.

[00:02:44] Let kids leave, let parents pull their kids out and send them someplace where they're going to be happier and they're going to thrive more than they are at whatever school they're attending. But no, you can't have that.

[00:02:56] You got the government school model defenders can't have any of that choice. They have to have the same standards as we do. And that's an assumption that their standards are effective, that their standards work and they produce the best outcomes for all of these kids.

[00:03:12] And the evidence does not support that. They say in this piece at American Scientific American, um, studies of different homeschool populations have shown that children's success depends heavily on their parents' educational background. Despite this in 40 states, parents do not need to even have a high school level education

[00:03:34] to educate their children at home. So you're going to require degrees for, for parents to homeschool. Think about the mindset you have to have in order to advance the proposition that the government is going to require things of parents in order to allow them to teach their kids.

[00:04:01] Well, why stop at just reading, writing, arithmetic and math or in history? Right. Why stop there? How about character traits? Right. That's, that's, that's a big fad nowadays where the schools are teaching, you know, character traits.

[00:04:19] They come down, they talk about, you know, today's or this month's character trait is honesty and they read him some essay that a kid wrote to the school board. Right. Why stop there? Maybe we need to have government intervention and effort.

[00:04:31] Like, how do we know that parents are training their children and teaching their children? You know, how to, I don't know. I was going to say, you know, balance a checkbook, but you know, we haven't done that forever. So like check out at a grocery store.

[00:04:43] What about that? Not talk during a movie at a movie theater. Like, why are we stopping at just these, these core subjects? Right. They say the federal government usually leaves issues of education for states to decide and homeschooling is no exception.

[00:05:02] Yes, the federal government should stay out of this. Stay out of it. At the very least state, federal governments stay out. States are doing different things and, oh, we got all these different states doing different things.

[00:05:15] Yes, that's as it should be because now we're going to find different things that work, different programs that work or don't work or whatever. This again, this mindset is, it's a collectivist mindset.

[00:05:28] It is this belief that if, if I can just control it, if we just get the right experts in charge and we can control all of these decisions, then we will achieve perfection. And that's not achievable. It's just not.

[00:05:45] And in the process you rob people of agency, you infantilize them, you enslave them. Let me go to the phones here. We got a, this is Shirley. Hello, Shirley. Welcome to the show. Hey Pete, how are you doing today? Hey, I'm good. What's going on? Good.

[00:06:03] Listen, I just wanted to circle back to the previous gentleman's call regarding there not being non-Christian private schools in town, and we've got, just top of mind comes Providence Day, Country Day, Charlotte Latin, none of which are Christian schools, all of

[00:06:18] which are huge, well-established private schools that don't have Christian days. So there's at least those. I know there must be a lot others. As far as equity goes, I'm just thinking vouchers would increase equity and give kids who are

[00:06:34] out of a tough background an opportunity for a stellar education that these or some of the better Christian schools do provide. So I think it's a hand up to kids who are stuck in one of the zillions of bad schools

[00:06:49] we've got in Charlotte-Mecklenburg no matter how much money we shovel into them. Also, I think that by and large, homeschooled students do outperform public school students in standardized tests. And I would be in favor of the standardized test always being in place to measure what

[00:07:08] is being accomplished, but I would take great exception to the fact that those kids aren't getting educated. I think they outshine public school kids every day academically. Right. Well, and they do take these types of tests also. And this was the point of the SATs, right? The PSATs.

[00:07:28] You take those tests in order to get into college. And so why wouldn't you use those tests to judge whether or not the child learned? Of course, they would say, I guess, you want to test early so this way you know.

[00:07:41] But I also find it kind of comical when I hear these arguments being advanced by educrats who for the last 20 years have been saying that we can't teach to the test. Some kids don't test well and we've got to figure out all these different ways to measure performance.

[00:07:55] But when it comes to the homeschoolers or it comes to private schoolers, then it's like, well, we need testing. We need the same testing in order to make sure that they're at the same level. And what happens if they're way above you guys? Then what?

[00:08:07] What's the penalty you guys are going to pay for that? Right. Well, good luck. That was all I had for you. I appreciate it, Shirley. Thank you for the call. It's a great point.

[00:08:18] I was trying to get into the weeds on counting schools with the caller because he was like he was trying to make a larger point. And that's what I wanted to get at, because I got the sense that there was a there was

[00:08:27] a philosophical argument that he was trying to make. I don't know if he did it. Well, I do know he didn't. But I also think that I'm not sure if he's misled or uninformed or if he was trying to mislead.

[00:08:42] So I will just assume that he just didn't know. And that's the thing is a lot of the arguments against vouchers and homeschooling are based on that same sort of lack of information. They don't know.

[00:08:57] All people know, a lot of people know, are the models that they grew up with and they worked in or their spouse worked in or family worked in or whatever. Their kids went through. That's the model they know.

[00:09:10] And when they hear the people in this model that worked for them say that this other thing is a threat, then they just automatically kind of get defensive and agree that, oh, that's a threat. And so they just kind of adopt these slogans.

[00:09:24] And it's, you know, I said it yesterday, intellectually flabby. They're not well conditioned arguments because they haven't been put to the test. Resistance to pressure builds strength. And so their arguments are not strong because they don't face any resistance when you're in your echo chamber.

[00:09:45] You know, let me read this email from Ian to Pete at the Pete calendar show dot com. When we lived in Louisiana, we're sending your kid to a government school was child abuse. My daughter was the only Jew at Ascension Episcopal School while teachers there treated her well.

[00:10:02] The spoiled, ignorant little kids in her class made her life hell. Fast forward to Weddington High last fall, where my daughter heard venomous anti-Semitism after October 7th and had to break up with her boyfriend when she learned he was one of a dozen or so Nazis.

[00:10:20] The caller was perhaps the mayor. That previous caller at the last hour was perhaps the mayor of Simpleton. But I get his angst. I do, too. But that's again, that's up to the adults to police that and to stop the bullying and

[00:10:35] harassment, whether it's a public school or a private school. Either way. And Melissa said that caller knows nothing about religious schooling. All are welcome. The only the only thing asked is that the non-Christian have respect for the religion taught.

[00:10:51] My Hindu co-workers all attended convent schools because the school better prepared them educationally. All right, let me go over to Ed. Welcome to the show. Ed, how are you? Hey, Pete. Thanks for letting me say my piece. Yes, sir.

[00:11:08] We homeschooled three kids and one of which went to college at 14 and graduated at 19. So we've had a variety of experiences. And I just wanted to relate to people the reason that homeschooling works so well is

[00:11:23] because because you put the illness and responsibility of the positive outcome of an education closest to the point of impact. And by that, I mean, like if the kids understand what's at stake, they gobble it up.

[00:11:37] I mean, they will they will eat as much as they can and get the best education they can. But if the kids aren't as vested, the parents take on some of that responsibility. And so you're closest to the two.

[00:11:52] And so the reason that no child left behind doesn't work in a public school system is simple. It's because there's 24 kids and one or two teachers in a homeschool setting. You can really crack down on what that one child needs and you can feed it to them.

[00:12:09] And they can excel or take extra time for information they need. They need to really buckle down on. Yeah, it's like it's tutoring. Yeah, it's tutoring. But if it's done right, I mean, then you get to teach history without dates. You get to teach history with stories.

[00:12:26] You get to make math fun instead of just jingoistic. Okay, now I'm not now I don't now I don't believe any of this. You make math fun. That's just... No, math can absolutely be fun. I can't, I can't, I can't.

[00:12:41] And one of the reasons I say this is we have a unique perspective not only to my wife homeschool, but she also substituted some in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg system, which is the worst. I'm just going to pause for impact. It's the worst. And it costs so much money, Pete.

[00:13:00] I know you've preached and preached about failures in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, but some of the schools are just so not in touch. Like the teachers, the teachers are overwhelmed and the ones that care, they can't have the time to care. And so they just skip them through the system.

[00:13:19] Yeah, no, I hear you. Ed, I appreciate the call. Thanks for the story of a positive reinforcement for homeschooling. I agree. I agree. Hey, Grant. Hey, Pete. Thanks for taking my call. Yes, sir. I'm kind of like Ed. I have a unique perspective.

[00:13:38] I just finished my 33rd year in public education. I'm a really kind of a strange combination. I grew up going through public education, went to public university. I've been in five school systems. I'm now retired from North Carolina and work in South Carolina.

[00:13:56] And so I've seen a lot, but you're right. And to kind of clarify what Ed's point was, it comes down to value. The reason that private schools and charter schools work better than public schools, and

[00:14:13] I know charter is part of the public system, is because the customer values the education. One of the problems we have in education is that we try to force everybody to take what we're giving them, and not everybody wants it. They don't value it.

[00:14:32] And so as a result, they don't work well. And so all the... In fact, my kids, one of them is going to be a senior at a Christian school this coming year and they haven't graduated from Christian school. And it's not that great.

[00:14:53] In fact, there have been things that I've been very disappointed in and upset about. And I would have taken my children out except for my children really wanted to stay for some legitimate reasons, but private schools don't necessarily teach better.

[00:15:11] In fact, they don't have to have certified teachers. They can just pull anybody in off the road that wants the job that they think can do the job. But the reason that it works is because parents force their students, their children to value the education.

[00:15:29] You know, whether the student has it intrinsically or not, or whether it's just mom and dad are forcing you, there's a value on education. In public school, what's wrong is that not everybody values education.

[00:15:45] And while No Child Left Behind is a great idea concept-wise, hey, we don't want to leave anybody behind. Some people don't want to get on the train and you can't make people do something they won't want to do.

[00:15:56] And I'll tell you the other thing, and I'll get off the phone here, is I spent the end of my career in North Carolina doing dropout prevention and trying to get students back in school.

[00:16:08] And so, you know, it's like trying to drag them or push them into the system they don't like. And sometimes they don't like it for good reasons because they had a bad experience. And that is our fault. You know? No, Grant, I gotcha. I agree.

[00:16:24] I appreciate the call. Here's a message. Pete, government is bad at reading signals, market signals, because they never suffer the consequences of their failures. That is correct. If they ran Coca-Cola, they would have doubled down on that new Coke idea and just kept raising

[00:16:42] prices until the company completely collapsed. That's what they do with all of their other policies. Just we can't decide to stop paying them. Tearing down the system isn't radical. I said, you know, I'm for tearing it all down, but I know that that's a radical thing.

[00:16:57] Russ says that's not radical, it's rational. If more than half of your house is eaten up by termites, you wouldn't keep patching things. So I'm for you to tear the whole thing down, eradicate the problem, and rebuild with measures to prevent the same problems from happening again.

[00:17:14] Kelly says, I can't help but wonder where teachers in the 55 Chicago public schools that didn't have a single kid at grade level, where those teachers received their degrees. Oh, by the way, as I understand it, conservatives have now taken over Chicago public schools. I think they're in charge.

[00:17:35] I was not aware of this. According to the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, during a radio interview, she said that conservatives don't want black children to learn how to read. And considering the results that we see in the Chicago system, that must mean that the

[00:17:56] conservatives are in charge. That's the only thing I can think of. Stacey Davis Gates made an appearance on WBBM's 780 AM to defend the union's contract demands. She claimed that conservatives who expressed criticism of those demands, quote, don't even want black children to be able to read.

[00:18:19] That's literally what you're doing. The only people not teaching black kids to read is you. This is projection, the iron law of woke projection right here. They're guilty of that which they accuse you. Here's what she said, quote, remember, the same conservatives are the conservatives who

[00:18:39] probably would have been championing black codes during Reconstruction or thereafter. Um, no, those were the Democrats. That was Jim Crow. KKK. Those were the Democrats. Forgive me again if conservatives pushing back on educating immigrant children, black children, children who live in poverty doesn't make my anxiety go up.

[00:19:09] That's what they're supposed to say. That is literally a part of the oath that they take to be right wing. I so I did not get the oath. I was never administered an oath. I'm not sure what the oath states.

[00:19:23] I would not take an oath that said we refuse to teach kids to read. I think that's a that's a pretty bad oath to take. I mean, what if just by accident, like you're driving down the road, you see a stop sign

[00:19:37] and you stop and a kid says, why did you stop? And you're like, oh, because the sign says stop. Like, oh, no, I violated my oath. Like I don't know, even know what the penalty would be for violating that oath. Are they going to dismember me?

[00:19:50] I don't know. The union's demands include a number of climate related provisions, including electric school buses, expanded use of heat pumps and solar panels, as well as the creation of, quote, climate champion positions. They want climate champions at all of the schools or in the school district.

[00:20:16] Gee, I wonder why conservatives are opposed to your union demands. So is that really because they don't want black kids to read? Or is it because you've got a whole bunch, a whole bunch of climate alarmist crap in your demands? No, look, it's it's a negotiation.

[00:20:37] And so, you know, maybe the union is, you know, pitching all of this stuff first, knowing that they'll they'll, you know, cut it all out in order to get some other stuff.

[00:20:49] You know, you come in with the big ask up on the front end and then, you know, you're going to cut some other stuff out so you can get to a number that you really are okay with.

[00:20:59] But you don't want to give them that number, because if you give them that number, then they're going to demand that you go lower. So you come in with all this stupid stuff and they're like, cut out the stupid stuff and

[00:21:08] we'll fund the rest and then you get what you want. So maybe it's just a negotiation tactic, because otherwise, then I would submit Stacey Davis Gates. She is entering the zone of dumb assery. She is now a candidate for the 2024 Dumbass of the Year Award for these statements.

[00:21:32] Congratulations to Stacey Davis Gates. By the way, testing results for 2023 showed that 83 percent of Chicago public school students are not proficient in math. 83 percent. 75 percent cannot read at grade level. You guys got to stop hiring conservative teachers, it seems like.

[00:21:58] Quote, if anybody knows about students not being able to read, it's the Chicago Teachers Union. Federal statistics reveal 85 percent of black and 78 percent of Hispanic fourth graders in Chicago are not proficient in reading, even though the district has spent nearly $30,000 per child this year.

[00:22:17] Think about that when you hear all of the arguments in North Carolina budget debates about raising the amount of money we spend per pupil. We got to get to the national average and blah, blah, blah. They're spending $30,000 per student in Chicago and 83 percent are not proficient in math

[00:22:36] and 75 percent are not proficient in reading. They're not at grade level. Ms. Gates, this is according to Nikki Kelly, she is the president and founder of Parents Defending Education, and she told the Daily Caller News Foundation, quote, Ms. Gates heads

[00:22:53] the union that said in 2020 that the push to reopen schools is rooted in racism, sexism and misogyny, end quote. That's what the teachers union said. Despite the fact, Nikki or Nylee, she goes on to say, despite the fact that school closures

[00:23:09] disproportionately hurt the low income students that she claims to care about, Ms. Gates should spend less time stoking division among residents and more time getting her members to actually teach children. This is an example of losing your focus on the core mission.

[00:23:27] Losing focus on the core mission when organizations, whether it's corporations, but usually most obviously it's in government, initially started to do a few things and then they just keep creeping, creeping, creeping, expanding, expanding, expanding. They lose focus of the core mission.

[00:23:48] When your city is in patching potholes and the justice system in your town is not able to arrest and convict violent offenders and such, they've lost sight. They're doing all of this other stuff, just like this teachers union is promoting all of this climate change stuff.

[00:24:04] They've lost sight of their core mission and the statistics bear it out. The kids in Chicago are not learning. Okay. If you're listening to this podcast, you are obviously paying attention to the world around us.

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[00:25:02] Will you be ready when the lights go out? Email from Richard to Pete at the Pete calendar show.com. Really Pete, it's the conservatives in Chicago. Yeah. The leftist unions have controlled the schools for decades and almost every one of them and our kids are behind.

[00:25:20] CMS has over 30,000 elementary kids that don't read at grade level, but they can tell you the ice caps are melting. Well, see, because only one of those courses of instruction creates little radicals for them. That's really the important thing.

[00:25:43] Russ says, whoa, Pete, you never told us you didn't take the oath. I've been listening for years and I never knew you weren't even official. Well, I figured I would come clean. Yeah. I mean, look, either the Chicago teachers union leader, right?

[00:25:59] She is either telling us that the Chicago public schools are controlled by conservatives at this point or, and I'm just spit balling here, or she's lying. Actually, I think that is probably the, yeah, that's probably the more likely explanation is that she's lying. Yeah.

[00:26:21] And then a related story. Joe Biden has an election strategy to spend your money to cancel student loans so he can buy the votes of the people that had their loans wiped away. And yesterday on Twitter, formerly X, a Democrat comms staffer on Capitol Hill posted a picture,

[00:26:47] including his address, which is a pretty stupid thing to do, but he posted a picture of the letter that he received announcing his debt, quote, forgiveness. And here, by the way, here's the thing about forgiveness. Somebody always has to pay.

[00:27:03] There's always somebody that has to pay when something is forgiven. Okay. And Joe Biden isn't paying. Taxpayers are, right? Well, okay. Future people that probably aren't even born yet, they're paying. Right? So in any kind of scenario where you're asking for forgiveness, somebody has to pay that price.

[00:27:26] Whether it's the person that was harmed and they have to just kind of eat the cost like, oh, mom always said don't play ball in the house. And then you broke the lamp and you may be very sorry and beg forgiveness and mom may

[00:27:40] forgive you, but the cost of that lamp is still being borne by mom unless she makes you replace it. And the cost is borne by you. Right? Okay. So the guy's name is Ben Kamens. And what this does in this letter here, it says, get this, Benjamin, congratulations.

[00:28:00] The Biden-Harris administration has forgiven your federal student loans listed below. And there were two different loans that were taken out apparently in 2010 and the two of them total $8,250. And he posts this and celebrates it and says, yes, thank you. Elections matter and elections have consequences and all this.

[00:28:28] And then it gets worse. Somebody asks him, how are you so broke that you can't afford to pay that off? You're a comms staffer in DC and they make like over $90,000 a year.

[00:28:39] And he said, my job was paying it down for me ahead of schedule, but I'm happy to let the government cancel it instead of paying it off $400 a month and letting interest accrue. This guy isn't even repaying his loan.

[00:28:52] And by the way, people have combed through his Twitter feed and they find him going to all these baseball games and stuff. Yeah, he has all this disposable income to spend on the stuff that he wants to do to live his best life. Right?

[00:29:06] So when it comes to paying back his loan, his employer, us, the taxpayer, we're paying that back for him as part of his job. These vote buying schemes are just awful and you're going to get more of them, more and

[00:29:21] more of them because people are gradually becoming more and more accepting of it right and left, as much as I hate to say it. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening.

[00:29:31] I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepeatcalendarshow.com.

[00:29:44] Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.