American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten claimed in an op-ed that children are better off under the provision of teachers unions.
Weingarten wrote an op-ed for The Daily Beast to make "a factual case for teachers’ unions."
She cited research that shows that "teachers unions are positively associated with student achievement." The research, conducted by Eunice Han and Jeffrey Keefe, found that the effect of teachers unions was particularly strong for Hispanic and Black students.
She also noted that economists Eric Brunner, Joshua Hyman, and Andrew Ju have found that districts with strong teachers unions increased spending on public education, which leads to larger increases in student achievement.
Furthermore, Weingarten pushed back against the notion that teachers unions seek to get politicians elected in order to get a pay-off at the bargaining table.
"The ‘pay-off’ my union bargains for is to improve teaching and learning conditions and to reduce the ‘teacher pay penalty’—the gap between teachers’ compensation and their non-teacher college-educated counterparts that hit a high of 23.5 percent in 2021," Weingarten said.
"Teaching has always been a complex and demanding job," she added. "After the onset of the pandemic, teachers worked harder than ever. They managed remote, hybrid, and in-person instruction. They covered classes for colleagues suffering from COVID, often for weeks. They helped students recover academically, socially, and emotionally."
The last national report card shows the impact that forced at-home learning may have had on schoolchildren, finding the largest decrease in reading scores in three decades.
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Math scores, meanwhile, saw their first decrease in the history of the testing regimen done by the National Center for Education Statistics.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said the statistics are a sign that schools need to redouble their efforts, using billions of dollars that Congress gave schools to help students recover.
"Let me be very clear: these results are not acceptable," Cardona said.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, school board meetings have oftentimes become battlegrounds between parents and school board officials.
Parents across the country have protested controversial curricula like critical race theory as well as the presence of certain books in public libraries.
