(Not The Bee) As the 2022-23 school year is set to begin, a local sports radio host in my state posed a question on social media last week that generated responses from across the United States and Canada.
His question:
I want to hear from EDUCATORS as to the reason(s) for a teachers shortage. Salaries? Parents? Curriculum? Safety?
Reply ONLY IF YOU ARE IN EDUCATION or are tagging someone who is. Please reply w/ your experience or reasoning, as to make people more aware of the issues.
Thanks!— Jake Query (@jakequery) July 29, 2022
I’ve been a teacher in a public high school for 20 years now, and I have my own take on each of those issues he proposed, but the responses he got were largely what I expected to see. The ideological balance of Twitter unquestionably tilts left, and many of the most active voices in these kinds of threads are associated with teachers’ unions and associations. That doesn’t make their opinions or experiences invalid or wrong, but it does offer at least one explanation why so many seem to be saying the same thing.
For instance, notice the response from a teacher named Shawn Crull who quote-tweets a post from left-wing activist Ron Filipkowski:
The current replies are telling the story Jake. For me, I’m blessed to be in a great school. But it’s this garbage, which people ACTUALLY believe, that infuriates me. They need to walk a mile in our shoes. https://t.co/UbTOAFVoKt
— Shawn Crull (@illini3sc) July 29, 2022
I can’t say that I have ever knowingly worked with any Marxists in my school, and frankly I can’t think of many colleagues past or present that I wouldn’t trust to babysit my children. President Trump is unquestionably painting with a broad brush, throwing red meat to his supporters for political purposes.
But rather than get worked into a lather over the fact that Trump’s brand of anti-public-school hyperbole sells, I think it’s far more productive to understand why it sells. Introspection does us all a lot of good, and though it may not be as attention-getting or headline-grabbing as publicly assailing “Marxist educators” or the “Republican War on Teachers,” it might help us appreciate the dynamics of the situation and comprehend how to fix it.
If Mr. Crull wants to know how people “ACTUALLY believe” Trump’s categorical demolition of public school teachers, he should start by looking at who media promotes as the face and voice of those teachers. Randi Weingarten who heads the American Federation of Teachers, when she isn’t retweeting critical information on where you can still kill your unborn child legally, is publicly lying about her own activism that unquestionably hurt children:
