Teachers plan strike on Friday... for the children! | Hour 1

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 and Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepeakclendershow dot com, make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet, And again, thank you so much for your support. As we always do. On Tuesdays at noon, we chat with Andrew Dunn. He is the publisher of long Leaf Politics. Longleafpol dot com is the website. Check out the podcast there as well and on all podcasting platforms, and he's also a contributing columnist at The Charlotte Observer. Andrew, how are you, sir? I am doing well. Great to be back with you. Yes, sir, thanks for joining us as always. And I guess are you taking Friday off? Do you have Friday off or how are you going to be coping with the big May Day strike? Well? My plan was I was going to bring all my kids to tour the WBT studios right. Dune on Friday. Nice, okay with you, right. Well, how quiet can they be? Oh? Not very, not very at all? All right, well maybe like at the breaks, at the fifteen and thirty breaks. All right, fair enough, fair enough, all right? So what are you gonna do? Like you are you going to take the day off or do you have to? Is your wife going to take the day off or something like? What do you all? How are you all gonna deal with the with school being out now? Yeah, well, we're still trying to figure all that out. We'll probably end up tag teaming it. But you know, I'm fortunate that I get to work from home most of the time. But there's a lot of parents here in Charlotte and around North Carolina who aren't nearly as fortunate, And I don't even know what they're gonna do. Yeah, the North Carolina Association of Educate tours the Teachers' Union, which I'm happy that they're at least calling themselves a union now. On their website they identify now as a union. Which for years, and you probably remember this, they always rejected this idea that they were a union. They kept they would always correct you and say, no, no, we're an association. So you have but you were chartered by the NEA, which is a union. Just because you can't collectively bargain in North Carolina, that doesn't make you not a union anyway. So they have this what I'm calling a strike because I think that is exactly what it is. They're calling it a mass walkout on one day on Friday, May first, so they can go down to Raleigh a have a Raleigh rally and scream at a building as I understand it. Yeah, that sounds about right, And I always whenever I talked about this, I want to be careful that I'm separating teachers from the ncaaes. I think those there are two very different groups. You know. I support teachers. I do not support the NCAE. Because what they're doing is not really about education. If they were really meaning to impact education policy, they wouldn't do things this way for a whole host reasons. Number one is May first is a Friday, and the legislator, the legislature isn't even going to be there, right, I don't know who exactly they expect to talk to. But second, you know, the reason why they picked May first is because it is the old International Workers Date. It is the old labor union. Holiday with all sorts of socialist undertones, but I think that kind of gives it away of what they're actually trying to accomplish here. Yeah, the day is the tell In fact, if you go to which I did, I went to the various websites of the NEA and the. NCAAE and when you. Go to their pages, they linked to a thing called may Daystrong dot org and this is linked to the ANYA site and then you go to the coalition page under may Day Strong and the coalition of groups and it is a massive list and just doing a control F search for socialists you get thirty five socialist groups that pop up in the coalition and one communist group, the Twin Cities Communist Party of the USA. So like the idea that this isn't you know, ideological, is absurd. Their list of demands are absurd as well at the national level, and it's like they're they've got a messaging problem. I think they're trying to piggyback off of the Bernie Sanders Democratic Socialists of America, you know, fight the Oligaukey and the billionaires and all of that, because they're framing it as the what are they calling it, kids over billionaires or kids over corporations rally. Yeah. Yeah, I always have to laugh when I see some of that messaging. Is in North Carolina, we have like three or four billionaires and they're all Democrats. By the way, but I don't know who they're who. You know they're they're setting up as their boogeyman. Here. You write in the piece you have two different pieces, one at the Observer and one at long Leaf Politics and the one at the Observers. Well, I guess you go a little bit more into like sort of the mobilization uh in politics on your on your long Leaf Politics site. But on the Observer piece you say, and I think you said this in both pieces, which I thought was really astute. You said, uh, for the NCAAE, that is not an unfortunate side effect. It is the goal, in other words, closing the schools down. And if school closures are the point, then this is not really about education, it's about power. And I think that's precisely it. It's because part of their May Day protest of these groups all across the country, part of the protest is also no work, no shopping, right, It's like the day without an immate bring kind of a thing. Like they want to apply pressure economically to try to force people to acquiesce to their demands. I don't know if it's actually I don't think it's going to work. But like and the fact that they are willing to close down your kids classroom and deprive them of a day of learning, particularly towards the end of the school year. Right, you're I think you said in one of your pieces that you're one of your kids is getting ready for the EOGs and now they're robbed of that prep day. That's not like you may have legitimate grievances or demands or you know, policy prescriptions, but you're you know, you're you're leveraging the wrong victim here. You're you're going after kids. Yeah, that's exactly right, and I think it. You know, how you measure success tells you a lot about what your what your goals are, and and where your values are. And you know, if the goal of here was, you know, we want to get you know, five or six meetings with key legislators and we want to present our case, that would be one thing. But what their goal is here and what they're they're pretty explicit about it is their goal is to shut down as many school districts around North Carolina as possible, and they really put pressure on teachers around the state to. Call and request off on this one day. And it kind of becomes a snowball effect because once they get a small group of people requesting off, then everybody else sees, oh, well if we all join in. You know, we have no interest in going to Raleigh, but if we join in, then we can get a free day. Off, don't I don't blame I don't. Blame them a bit, to be honest, I might do the same thing in their shoes. But that's why I lay I lay the blame on the leadership of NCAE. You know, they are clearly not interested in having a productive discussion on education policy. They just want the disruption, you know. Because they they depend on dues and they want to show activity, they want to flex their might. And the sad thing is is that I think it's going to be counterproductive. There's some real energy, especially in the House, around raising teacher pay and making some big investments, but I think stunts like this are just gonna make, you know, turn turn lawmakers off and not want them to go along with it. All right, So you just called it a stunt, and that's the title of your piece at long Leave Politics. When does a protest become a stunt? And you talk a little bit about real mobilization of people. That's a difficult thing to do in politics. But you also note that the organized left is far more comfortable with protests and pressure campaigns than the right is. Okay, so why is why is this the case in your opinion? Yeah, and I don't think either side gets it exactly right. You know, every campaign a movement and not a campaign, right, But that's one of the hardest things to pull off in politics, is to really have an honest to goodness movement on your hands. And so you know, the left probably is on one end of the spectrum is they want to turn everything into a mobilization effort. They want everything to be a public demonstration, and so it kind of loses its effect. The right, I think, doesn't. Try hard enough to organize and to create public momentum. The sweet spot is probably somewhere in. The middle, and I don't I don't have an exact prescription for it, but it's it's an interesting concept of striking that balance between your top down approach and your bottom up approach. Yeah, and you you say, the NCAAE example, here is a top down approach, and I'm thinking Tea Party was a bottom up approach. And then of course the GOP you know, quote unquote establishment like co opted it and just swallowed the whole thing up. And then probably the you know, Mega as a bottom up movement that the you know, the establishment did not want Donald Trump, and now we're trying to do the same that they did to the Tea Party, try to you know, swallow them all up. I don't know if they'll be successful. I think they end up angering a lot of those grassroots conservatives when they do that. Yeah, I think that's very true. You know, some of the years that I look at as kind of examples of real mobilization were you know. Back twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen on. The the I seventy seven toll lanes that was really very much a bottom up reopen NC to a large effect during twenty twenty. And then even when I look at some of the more local No Kings protests, you know, there were some of the top. Down staged ones, but you know, you still see some of the. More bottom up things happening around Charlotte and around North Carolina. And I think that is a good example of real organization. You could read his work at long Leaf Politics, long leaf pol dot com or at the Charlotte Observer, I should say, and at the Charlotte Observer, Andrew Dunn, thanks for your time, buddy, appreciate it. Thank you, and I'll see you Friday with all my kids. All right, this is a secure building. They'll bring IDs, all right, See all right, I take care. You know. Stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life. And our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video. Started in nineteen ninety seven and Minhill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories, all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creative video dot Com. From the text line, Mike says, Republicans generally don't go to protest. They go to work. They contribute to the economy. Instead of a drain on the economy, those who work less look for handouts from those who actually work more. It's sad there is I think there is also a a predisposition among most conservatives, actual conservatives, which is a leis a fair live and let live kind of attitude, right, And so I may not like whatever it is that you know that town nextdoor is doing or whatever, but I'm not going to go over there and protest that town. I'm just not going to live there, right, And if my town starts doing that stuff, I may go down and speak at a town meeting, But if they implement this thing that I really don't want, then I will probably just move if I find it to be so egregious. That's generally how conservatives. And I don't know if people become conservatives. I've never known this, Like are people do people become conservatives because they are sort of a live and let live mindset? Or is it the inverse, you know, I don't know. This is the first NCAE walkout of this kind since twenty nineteen, according to Andrew Dunn's piece at the Charlotte Observer. But it's not a fresh eruption of moral urgency. It's a rerun of the same playbook, he writes. Students lose class time, parents scramble for childcare, administrators reshuffle calendars, and NCAE gets exactly what it wanted, disruption big enough to command attention. They're doing it. For the clicks, for the media coverage. This is key for an organization that needs to continually recruit new members to survive, right, because you don't get to as they used to be able to do automatically enroll people in the union and now you can't do that. Haven't been able to do that for a while. So and they don't ever report their numbers, which is interesting, like nobody really knows what percentage of North Carolina teachers are actually members of the union. And Andrew makes a good point to differentiate that. You know, not all teachers are in the NCAE. In fact, the majority of teachers are not in the NCAAE. They're they're not in the union. But if you have a couple thousand across the state mainly cloistered in urban districts, then yeah, you can hold those districts hostage, and truth be told, the administrators in those districts are are usually on board with your efforts. Politically speaking, He goes on to say, any group that measures success by how many classrooms it can empty in the middle of a school week is not putting students first, correct, it's using them as leverage. An education association should want children in classrooms learning. The NCAAE keeps finding reasons to want them out. Like during COVID, I would add right Teachers' Union, the AFT, the NEEA, they were the ones who kept fighting the reopening of the schools, and people were pointing out, like, you got kids, they are not learning. They're not They're falling farther and farther behind. Right, they're not getting their free and reduced lunches and stuff. Right, there were all of these social harms. Right, the very people that criticize homeschooling for decades because of the lack of socialization. Right, because in order to be a fully socialized individual in our society, you got to roam the halls trying to avoid beatings and such. So the same people that criticized homeschoolers because their kids wouldn't be socialized appropriately were the ones who then said keep all your kids at home, and this week are saying keep your kid at home. I'm sure one day is not going to matter in the socialization. Don't worry. Your kid can be bullied on Monday when they come back. He goes on to say that this is the deeper problem with the organization, the NCAAE. It presents itself as a teachers group, but behaves like a partisan activist shop that happens to recruit educators. The common thread in its agenda is not student achievement, classroom order, or practical support for teachers. It's a left wing political mobilization with rules used as the moral cover. Is exactly right, I'm telling you, you keep sending your kids to these schools and the Teachers' union gets to keep using them as leverage. A serious teachers group, he says, would judge proposals on the merits and keep its focus on classrooms, students, and the practical needs of educators. And CAE does the opposite. It treats conservative reforms as a moral outrage while embracing causes that drift well beyond reading, math, discipline, and student achievement. It has attached itself to everything from abortion access to moral Monday protests to voting rights and democracy campaigns. Even as it claims to be speaking simply for teachers and students, they do not speak for students. The NCAAE does not speak for students. Their organization is the Association for educators, educators and kids, not students and educators. It's just educators. Then there's the article in the Charlotte Observer. Coincidentally timed for the May Day protest. The NEA has released its new rankings of teacher pay across the country. I'm sure it had nothing to do with trying to time this for the May Day strike. Right, of course it did, of course it did. Got a message from Ricky I was extremely proud of my then twenty two year old daughter, who at the time was a recent college graduate. She became and still is some twenty one years later, a school teacher. Under a lot of pressure to join the union when she was first hired, she refused to do so. She felt that at the union was such a great thing. Why would you pay union do us out of a meager salary of some twenty seven thousand dollars As I recall it, yeah, twenty one years ago, I'd say that's probably an accurate number, Rodney says. I say on the text line, Rodney says, I say, give teachers the national average pay. Then when the students do not achieve national testing standards, fire the teacher. I don't think that. I don't think you can. I don't think you could even fire a teacher except for like cause you know, it's it's very difficult to get rid of bad teachers. Seven oh four Numbers says something that's new to me. I did not know that teachers in North Carolina could be a member of the union. I was with the understanding that teachers and school employees could not be a member of the union in North Carolina due to the bogus at will status. At this state has correct me if I'm wrong. I mean, you don't mean the the misspellings in your text there seven oh four number. But yes, it's it's not a we are a right to work state, and there are there are no collective bargaining powers that unions have and public sector unions are not allowed to strike. So but you can join the union for some reason if you just prefer, like sending your money to an ineffective organization that then passes all of your donations on to Democrats after skimming some for administrative costs. Like I'm sure you you are free to make that decision. No, I'm sure they provide some sort of service to teachers, like if a teacher is like in trouble, then you can ask for your union rep like that kind of thing. So this from the Charlotte Observer coincidentally dropping just days before the big May Day strike. There was a report released by the National Education Association and it shows North Carolina ranks forty third in teacher pay last school year, the same as the prior year, so the same ranking forty three, but the new NEA report estimates that North Carolina has fallen three spots this school year to forty sixth out of the fifty. Okay, so I'm guessing they're saying that the real dollar figure is the same as the prior year. I'm not really following the way this is being reported, So I guess we were forty third, oh, forty third in teacher pay last year, forty third in teacher pay the year before, forty six this year. There we go. Okay. The report comes as the North Carolina Association of Educators has been encouraging teachers across the state to call out of work on Friday, in other words, to strike to join their protest in Raleigh. At least thirteen North Carolina school districts have canceled classes on May first, That's Friday, because so many of their employees have requested the day off. The NA salary rankings, I love this line have been used as a measuring stick by both legislators and education groups for decades to gauge the adequacy of teacher pay. That is not entirely correct. There was a brief moment a few years ago. I remember it well. North Carolina had moved up in the rankings, and we were somewhere in like the twenties. We had skyrocketed up after the Republicans implemented a whole raft of compensation reforms, mainly targeting the newer teachers, the rookie teachers, putting them on a fifteen step guaranteed increase salary schedule. So when they start, when they first rolled this out, they started every new teacher at thirty five K and every year you got one thousand dollars increase guaranteed. And that's in addition to any cost of living increase like a three percent, two percent whatever that they gave in addition, and the point there was to get the teachers in fifteen years, to get them to fifty thousand dollars in fifty years. And now under the Democrat leadership, the teachers had I think it was about four or five steps, and they were just really random times. It was like you get your first step increase in like year two or something, and then another one in year five, another one in year six, another one in year eleven or whatever, like it was just all over the place. And then of course they froze the step increases and then they furloughed a whole bunch of teachers because they had they had blown a massive deficit in their budget, and then they lost control of the General Assembly and Republicans came in and began reforming the salary schedule and it raised the teacher pay in these rankings. It was at that moment that Democrats and media but I repeat myself, said that we can't only look at this salary comparison. And I was like, wait, you guys have been telling us for the past decade that we have to keep up with the national number. We have to know what the national average is. We want to be at the top of this list and all of this. And as soon as we go up the chart and we are approaching, you know, breaking the top twenty here, now you're like, no, no, no, this isn't the only metric. We have to look at other things too. It was so disingenuous. But now that we are back down to forty three or forty six, now this is the benchmark once again to. Be looking at. Jane, Welcome to the show. Hello, Jane, yello, Jane, All right, good talk. Let me go over to you Dan. Hello, Dan, hi, p How are you? Hey? I'm good? What's going on? Okay? Hey, listen, my wife just retired. A couple of years ago after forty three years as a teacher as an educator, and when she first started teaching, she was in the inner city schools in Chicago, most particularly the infamous Cabrini Green And she was a union member only for the liability insurance coverage, the professional liability insurance coverage, and the union did that very well, and they provided also provided litigatory help if if somebody would sue her for something other than that. She had no use for the teachers union whatsoever. And that was mandatory. That's mandatory there, right, Yeah, I'm sorry they took it right out of your check. Yeah, yeah, that's what they were doing here in North Carolina until the legislature banned that. You can set up an auto pay for your union dues here now. But yeah, yeah, but I wanted to. I actually wanted to get a forty five automatic. But they wouldn't let her carry that in the classroom. Yeah. Well, that's because they're gun free zones. They're so safe, you know, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, Dan, I appreciate the call man Chicago. It's Chicago. It's part of the people's Republic of Illinois. That's right, all right. I got you man, I appreciate the call. Congrats to your wife on her retirement as well. Back to the Charlotte Observer story, the lack of a state budget meant, Okay, we do have a state budget. This is so frustrating. There is a budget, it's last year's budget. It just carries over. We don't have a new budget for this fiscal year. People say, oh, we don't have a budget. We have a budget, but the lack of a new budget means that the raises that are in the new budget have not been approved yet. A report released in March by the state Department of Public Instruction showed average teacher pay had dropped one percent this school year. The salary report was released the same day the state's Blue Ribbon Commission on Public Education held its very first meeting. Is a bipartisan commission. It was formed by the governor and the GOP legislative leaders to make recommendations on how to improve public schools. Will it work? I'm not holding my breath. A bit of breaking news here from Bill Malujin Fox News. The DOJ confirms that the FBI and Homeland Security Investigation Agents are currently raiding twenty plus locations in the Minneapolis area in relation to ongoing federal fraud investigations. Sources tell Fox the locations are largely Somali linked businesses, including the infamous Quality Leering Center. I'm told these are court approved search warrants being served and they are tied to fraud, not immigration enforcement. Twenty two search warrants were executed in Minnesota this morning, according to Bill Malugin. So there is that, Trent says here in Bunkhom County, they took the day of the teachers. The school district closed for the day, but we're already in the red for the year. So then they're adding on an extra day at the end of the school year to make up for their Communist protests. Wow, you already. Blew through all of your snow days, teacher workdays and stuff, and so now you've got it because and you know, there's a lot of learning that goes on in that last day at the end of the school year that they tack on, right, lots of learning going on on that day, all right. So, according to the NA Data, North Carolina's estimate estimated average teacher salary this school year fifteen fifty nine seventy one dollars, so just under sixty k average teacher salary in the state. That includes state pay, local pay, so the supplemental funds and bonuses. By the way, there is also something to point out here. Teachers unions have a vested interest in getting their members paid more because then they can charge more in their dues. Right, So them lobbying Raleigh for more money for the teachers, they're also lobbying for more money for them. Based on the estimated salary data for this year, Andya says, Arkansas, Montana, and South Dakota moved ahead of North Carolina. We are still ahead of Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Mississippi miracle, right, so they're they're having like huge improvements. They're like tops in the country now and they're ranked what forty ninth they got Missouri. In West Virginia last year, the average teacher pay was sixty three to twenty three. One positive note from the data is that the state moved up one slot last year. Beginning with beginning teacher pay, we are now thirty eighth in the nation, and the state made that a priority, and that then drew complaints from experienced teachers that they were getting overlooked North Carolina. So the average national teacher pay seventy six thousand and five point fifty two. One of the demands that the NCAE is making is a per pupil expenditure level of twenty thousand dollars okay, by the year twenty thirty, So within four years we got to get to twenty thousand dollars per pupil. Well, that is not a good measurement of outcomes. It actually doesn't prove that you're educating the kids to wit. New York. New York spends thirty thousand dollars per pupil, and half of their kids cannot read at grade level and cannot do math at grade level. Okay, and they spend thirty k per kid. Right, So this idea that if we just throw a certain amount of money at the education establishment, that that's somehow going to improve the outcomes is it is verifiably false. They want school employees pay raised by twenty five percent. They want to raise the corporate income tax rate to five percent so that more money goes to public schools and healthcare. And what the observer does not throw in the list of demands is the elimination of the vouchers. That's a big part of this movement is to fight the competition, the very competition that exposes the rot that exists in a lot of these districts and in a lot of these classrooms. And then there is this report from Defending Education Defending ed dot org. National teachers' unions have contributed over six hundred and sixty million dollars to far left organizations and left wing political groups since August of twenty fifteen. So for the last decade, the two largest teachers' unions, the AFT and the NEA, have given out a combined six hundred and sixty nine million dollars from member dues and fees and their political action committee funds. They've made these donations to left wing political entities, far left nonprofits, school board campaigns, and opponents to school choice legislation. They note that some packs and nonprofits can act as pass throughs to benefit can paigns or to advance ballot initiatives, to oppose school choice legislation, or even promote far left social justice ideologies. For example, the unions and their packs gave a combined eighty five million dollars to local Democratic Party entities and their packs. That does not include contributions to individual candidate campaigns and packs eighty five million. So this is where your dues go. In twenty twenty five, AFT contributed half a million dollars to Span Burger for governor. Gee, why do you think they did that? See? This is why public sector unions should never get collective bargaining rights, because they're funding the candidates that then will open up the per strings and dole out taxpayer dollars to the unions, and the people who actually pay it are never at the table. Midwest Academy has received one point seven in funding million in funding from the teachers' unions. This organization is part of a collective effort to provide training for May Day twenty twenty six mobilization activities. They're taking your dues and they're using it for these types of protests to organize and to train people in these protests. There is a reason why I say like this kind of indoctrination, radicalization and teaching people to be activists. This is now embedded in the K twelve model. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. 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 dpetecalanarshow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.