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May 13, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
42:23
Parents Not Welcome
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey folks, here on the Doug Collins Podcast, we always delve into issues, and we're getting into one that is close and near and dear to my heart, and that is this education issue, the education, the problems that are developed during the pandemic, not only are we going to see those, we're going to have a chance to have some conversation about that today, but also the inextraordinary role or extraordinary role of the The teacher union, especially during the pandemic and the things that they have been going into.
And as we've been going around Teacher Appreciation Week and always talking about our teachers, You know that's close to my heart.
The podcast listeners here, my wife was a 30-year teacher in public schools, retired, unfortunately, during the pandemic year.
Her last class with her students was the day everything, quote, shut down for two weeks, and she never really got back to go back to the class to tell that class goodbye.
But there's a lot that goes on in that.
And so today, I'm pleased to have Aaron Wythe with us from the Freedom Foundation.
He's the CEO. We're going to talk about education.
We're going to get into this a little bit.
We're going to discuss it.
Aaron, thanks for being a part of the podcast.
Doug, thank you for having me on.
I appreciate you taking the time.
No problem.
Let's dive into this a little bit.
And first off, let's go back and lay this groundwork.
How much of a problem, and again, we sort of hit on this in other times that I've been talking about this, but I want your perspective.
The concern of the teachers union, Randy Wathgarden and the rest of these, in the aspect of opening schools, closing schools, their influence in this pandemic.
Is it just them looking after their interests, or did you see a bigger issue here?
The teachers unions in particular went further during COVID than, frankly, I ever anticipated.
I mean, you have to go back to the roots of all this.
Government unions inherently make their business It's a business of taking money from teachers and other public employees throughout the country.
There are four unions, they have about 7 million members between them, and they're the biggest political contributors in America.
And the scandal of this is that they make their money by taking $1,100 a year from hardworking teachers and other public employees, and they funnel it into the elections of people like Joe Biden and other radical liberals, I mean, you know this, Doug.
You look at the Senate runoff races in Georgia.
They pump tens of millions of dollars into those races to ensure that candidates wouldn't win there.
So what we do at the Freedom Foundation is make sure that everybody knows that this money is being taken from these public employees and being funneled into politics.
And then that's what gives these unions this control when they get Joe Biden and others elected into office.
Well, exactly.
And let's say this clearly, because we have listeners all over the country and the world.
It's interesting that it's not just the effect of the teachers' unions in non-collective bargaining states.
They have effect in the states like Georgia, which is not a collective bargaining state.
They have, of course, the Georgia Association of Educators down here, which is a union but has no collective bargaining.
PAGE in here in Georgia, which is another, I say union, although they claim to be, like you said, oh, we just help.
No, they don't.
They're a union, whether they like it or not.
But it affects.
So what they're doing in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, where it actually affects these other states, especially when they can get into this.
I mean, think about this.
We're not talking about influencing the Department of Education, where we knew that would be going on.
We're talking about getting the CDC here and into the executive branch and affecting these openings and closings.
Yeah, Randy Weingarten literally and the AFT, the American Federation of Teachers, literally wrote the reopening procedures for the CDC, for schools to get back open.
And now, Randy, she's the head of this union.
She's trying to claim that she's always been for reopening schools.
She has been the biggest detriment to getting kids back in schools, getting face masks off them, and getting them back into full-time education without remote learning.
She has single-handedly been the largest barrier to doing that.
And now even Harvard, one of the most liberal institutions in America, is saying that the science doesn't match up here.
The kids' education, the detriment to kids' education far outweighs anything that COVID could have done to these kids.
Exactly.
We're going to get into that study because I want to dive into it a little bit because I have some personal experience because I was still a member of Congress in dealing with some of that 2020 when we shut down.
Think about this.
Back in March of 2020, everybody said, oh, we're going to shut down for a couple weeks and everything goes back to normal.
I mean, we're in May of 2022 now, and nothing's back to normal in many ways because we're feeling the after effects of that.
But let's dive into something.
Before we get into the study on the kids, because I want to draw this balance, Aaron, and I think this is something important.
It's one thing for these teachers' unions to fight for conditions, pay, those kind of things.
It's another to use a pandemic In many ways to use it as a leverage point against school systems and at the end of the day kids to change policy for teachers, protect teachers, have them paid.
Was this more of an understanding in this pandemic, especially at the local level, a tightening or an overreach by these unions that it may have helped short term, but do you see it maybe hurting long term here?
I think you articulated it well.
I mean, everybody wants to see us make sure that teachers have good benefits.
We want to see them get paid.
We want to see them make sure that their families are being looked after with health care and all that type of stuff.
But government unions, in my opinion, are actually a hindrance to all of that because What government unions, teachers unions, inherently do is they don't allow the top-forming teachers, and my wife is a public school teacher, so I know this firsthand.
They do not allow public school teachers, the top-performing ones, to go and negotiate their own contracts.
They don't allow them to go and actually earn things like bonuses that we should be doing.
We should be incentivizing teachers to be at the top of their game.
What they do do is they make sure that the lowest performing teachers, teachers that we shouldn't have in our classroom, they make sure that those teachers can't get fired.
We cannot We cannot remove these teachers from the classrooms and deliver a quality education.
That's one of the biggest problems that these teachers unions are doing is protecting bad teachers in America that should be replaced, could be replaced by other teachers that can come in and do a better job.
Well, again, that's the protection of those teachers.
You think about this, if a school was able to do it more efficiently or do it other ways, that might not be an $1,100 or $1,500 contribution to the national cause, so to speak, as we go forward.
But Aaron, your wife being a teacher, mine being a teacher for 30 years, one of the things that has concerned me over time is...
And we're seeing this now.
There was a study just out recently that said that most new teachers, that there was beginning to be a, I think I want to say a large percentage, you know, 30-40% were not lasting three years in the classroom.
And it was an interesting study because then it went back to how we are preparing them for the classroom.
And if you go back, you see the teacher programs, even at the largest universities, more theory-based and not practicality-based.
A lot of this, I think we've seen coming in from the influences of the unions, the influences of others, that this is a...
I don't want to say a watering down, but how are you seeing that?
On a personal level with your own wife, I saw it with my wife as well over the years, that the outside influences of teaching were away from the basic classroom education, reading, writing, math, those things, and into these other areas.
And I believe the unions are pushing that.
Yeah, especially in state universities where they're training teachers to basically, they're training teachers to go and indoctrinate our kids.
With these liberal theologies, such as critical race theory and sexual orientation, all that other stuff.
But state schools, they're teaching teachers to teach this type of stuff.
Now, fortunately, my wife and I were lucky enough to be able to go and get a private school education where they were preparing teachers to be in the classroom.
They were sending them in for six months for the last two years.
So she would go into the classroom and actually experience what life is like, which is what an education class should be.
But government unions, teachers unions, they're not interested anymore in educating the next generation of workers.
They're not interested in making sure our kids are prepared to go out into the workforce.
What they are trying to do is raise the next generation of liberal voters.
And they see education as the mechanism to getting that done.
Well, but it shows to be true.
I mean, let's think about this, and I'm going to engage you here on this from the Freedom, and I know you've been helping teachers get out of these union issues and everything else, and that's what your organization does.
Let's take this out a step further.
In that ideological war, if you would, and I don't know a better way to call it, this prevailing view of what's being taught.
He who controls the teacher controls the classroom in this.
How are we going to use the power of those teachers who are the ones like your wife and mine when she was teaching and others, who simply want to go and teach kids, but they're being controlled now, and I'm bringing this nexus in because it's now so overt, with the teacher unions, the Federal Department of Education, your CDC that got brought into this because of the pandemic.
How is that going?
How are we going to break that nexus?
Maybe that's the question for you.
How do we break that nexus?
Well, first of all, I think that it is a small minority of teachers that are actually activists in the classroom that are going out and actively pursuing critical race fear and actively going out and trying to teach about transgenderism and all that type of stuff in the classroom.
Most teachers get into teaching today because they want to teach kids.
They enjoy teaching kids math, learning to read and write.
That's the reason they're getting into the classrooms.
We at the Freedom Foundation speak to thousands of teachers every week.
We host teacher roundtables.
We go and visit them at their homes.
We have several phone calls coming into our office every day from teachers.
And most of these teachers The teachers don't agree with the union's agenda, which involves this critical race theory and, again, teaching about transgenderism, that the teachers actually want to go in and teach what is right.
And that's why we're seeing a large amount of teachers leave their unions.
Both teachers' unions, there's two large ones, the AFT that I mentioned before and the NEA, the National Education Association, Both of those unions saw net 2% declines in membership in 2020. We expect to see even more once the numbers come out for 2021. And we're seeing more teachers opt out in 2022 than we ever have at the Freedom Foundation.
So I think what's happening is teachers are starting to understand that the unions don't represent my interests.
And I can actually get out of this radical leftist organization.
And when they learn that, they opt out in droves.
Exactly.
And I think that's the beginning because there's always been that concern.
Well, I need my malpractice insurance.
I need that.
I can't tell you how many teachers over the years I've heard, well, I keep it because I get my malpractice or I keep it.
Well, there's other ways to do that, frankly, at a far cheaper cost than to do that.
Before we get into this Harvard study, which I think is...
The crux and really the heart of what's going to come out of this pandemic.
We can talk about funding, we can talk about a lot of things, but this Harvard study we're going to get to in just a minute is very applicable.
But before we get there, I want to take it even a step further because we're not only dealing with the NEA, but AFT, but it's also what we saw in Virginia without the school boards as well.
The school board associations, again, their influence even in the Department of Justice.
Is it concerning?
I made a habit on this podcast of telling people, I know you're concerned about the President and the Senate and the House of Congress and think governors maybe, but you need to be concerned about who you're putting on school boards.
You need to be, you know, your local judges, your kind of commission, city councils.
What we saw, and you deal a lot with education, did it just amaze you over the last year and a half to see the reaction of a normally isolated, insulated board, if you would, of the Board of Education in many of these districts, who were finally, in many ways, confronted the first time over actually what they do and the reaction that those boards had?
Yes.
I mean, the teachers unions, you know, they elect a lot of these school board officials.
And when I say they elect them, I mean that they fund them and they make sure that they get elected.
They make sure they do get out the vote campaigns and all that type of stuff to ensure that their school district, their school board member gets elected to the school board.
But we've never seen an uprising before from your everyday parent to go into these school boards and actually hold them accountable.
It's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.
Probably the best thing that I saw come out of COVID was the parents awakening to what was happening in their kids' classrooms.
Because we've known it's been bad for a long time, but it's never been at the forefront Yeah, it was amazing to see them go in and rally at the school board meetings.
It was amazing to see them turn around and say, no, our kids should be in school.
We shouldn't be teaching them remote learning.
What I thought would be a simple concept And should be something that was understood by people completely wasn't.
Our kids shouldn't be wearing face masks in schools.
Again, we held these school boards accountable by going to the meetings and actually letting them hear us, and not just one person or two people, in the hundreds.
And Virginia, what happened in Virginia...
That should put the teachers' unions on notice, because even the left is starting to realize that, no, wait, we can't represent the interests of these teachers' unions here above parents, because it's going to cost us elections.
Well, and there you go.
It goes back to elections which equal power, and I think that's the dynamic here.
One of the things, before we let this one go, though, because I think it needs to be emphasized foot-stomped any time that we can, What amazed me was is the boards have a responsibility, in my mind, that a fiduciary responsibility to the children being taught and to the employees of that school system, okay?
When they, what got me, especially in Loudoun County and many others across the country, and by the way, since then, there's been multiple recalls, San Francisco and other places of these school board members all of a sudden.
And a lot of it, I think, came out of the fact of the real condescending attitudes of these board members.
I remember one in particular, and it probably was in Virginia, that a parent who was honestly asking a question had not gotten rhetorical or anything else.
The school board member looking at us like, why do you question us?
We're the experts.
And if I was correct, this person wasn't an educator.
This person was somebody...
It's like, when did they develop this attitude, Aaron, that just because you sit on a school board making a stipend every month, that all of a sudden you are the expert?
You're a special expert in education.
It just amazed me a little bit there.
Yeah, you saw it in multiple instances across the country where it was, the liberal elites in particular, liberal elite school board members, liberal elite governors even, it translated up and down political tickets where they believed that they were the ones That were above the rules they were setting.
They believed that they knew better than parents and that I, the government, am telling you that this is right and therefore you have to listen.
Fortunately, parents and your everyday citizens in America We're good to go.
It is coming on.
I don't think the lesson's been learned at the highest levels.
And because of that, something that Joe Biden said just a week or so ago, he said something to the effect of, you know, teachers, you know, you're the one to control your classroom, this kind of thing.
25 years ago, we would have not thought anything really about somebody saying that because, you know, there's the realization that that teacher is that parental figure, is that, you know, idle figure for some in that classroom because it's some of your first impressions of someone other than idle figure for some in that classroom because it's some of your first impressions of someone other than your home All of us have those.
I bet you do as well.
I have teachers that filled roles that were above and beyond my parents.
Wow, they're pretty cool.
They're mean, you know, and but when he said that the other day, you couldn't take it anymore is simply making a sort of a truest statement that, you know, the teacher has great power.
You almost had to wonder, okay, again, is this that liberal ideology that the teacher controls the thought, the mind, and everything else, and the parent has no role in it?
Yeah, and I think one of the unfortunate things is that the role in big tech and TikTok and Facebook and Twitter and all that type of stuff is that you have these radical teachers that are very loud today, and they're posting things on social media and actually showing the parents what they're doing in the classrooms.
Teachers have been given a platform to go and do that today, and they feel some type of power, I guess, come out of that.
So I think, again, it comes down to the parents being reawakened and watching what is happening in their kids' classrooms.
I think it's a good thing that these radical teachers unions and these teacher activists have been exposed for what they are, because one of the things that parents are looking at today is school choice.
They're looking at, okay, what are other options for my kids?
Homeschooling has taken off.
These learning pods have taken off in America.
And of course, charter schools and private school enrollments continue to skyrocket as well.
And that's the way that, in my opinion, that's the way education should work.
We should have, it should be similar to every other capitalist system that we have in America, where you go where the best product is being delivered.
Well, exactly.
You should not be trapped by your zip code into the education system that you're going to get.
And I know that's...
And actually, you know where that's growing, as you well know, is growing the most.
And for the podcast listener, the area where that thought is growing the most is in your poor inner city schools.
And actually, it is shown to work.
And for those of you who are out there who just believe, oh, we just need to throw more money at education, I just give you the city of Atlanta, which has the highest, one of the highest, if not the highest per student spend rate In the state of Georgia, some of the lowest test scores,
and before you tell me it's about demographics and other things, you have private charter schools that are running simultaneously within two miles of the same school, the same demographic of kids, the same issues, but yet are producing graduates that go on to You know, flagship universities, where it's just down the road.
The difference is, I think, the motivation of the teachers and how they interact with these students.
So it's not all just about the money, which is what the teachers' unions want to share with this is.
You brought up activists.
I'm going to bring this up before we get to this Harvard study, because I was going to the Harvard study, but you brought up activists.
We've got to talk about this.
I mean, you're seeing some of the most out there Teacher activists and sites like Libs of TikTok and all these others who are bringing these things out, again, where they didn't think they would be.
It concerns me that, and this is a tieback to the teachers union issue here, the teachers union is protecting these teachers who feel like in elementary school and others, and even up into high school, that their job is to, and again, I saw these back in the Stone Ages for me when I was back in high school, The teachers, they're saying that we want to influence your social life, your social pattern.
They want to be best friends and encourage them to be like them.
At what point is there going to be a held accountable situation?
Between the union's protection of teachers who obviously don't want to teach the issues, they want to teach social engineering to make themselves look or feel better, however it is.
And if you listen to what they're saying, that's what they're saying.
They said, my job is to talk about this.
What about your job to teach?
Could this also be a breaking point for others who may have been on the sidelines to see this in classrooms, beyond the curriculum, and to see that the unions are behind actually protecting them?
Yeah, it comes down to what you said earlier, Doug.
It comes down to voting for your school board officials.
It comes down to making sure that your local government is set up in a way that can hold people accountable.
Because we saw it down in a county in Northern California, I forget the name of it now.
Where the Project Veritas exposed a teacher who was in the classroom basically teaching socialism, frank communism, frankly.
And they got him on video and they exposed him.
But what happened afterwards was the parents went to the school board meeting.
And they exposed to the school board what was happening and that teacher ended up actually being fired.
That's what it takes in some instances is parents continuing to go down this path to hold their local teachers, these radical activists, hold them accountable by telling their school board, by showing up to meetings, by sending a note to the superintendent.
All of these methods of outreach They work.
So we should absolutely be encouraging that in order to hold some of these radical activists' teachers accountable.
And again, I go back to what I said earlier.
Most teachers are not that.
But we are seeing a small minority that are becoming stars on TikTok nowadays.
Exactly.
Let's turn to one of the more concerning aspects of the pandemic, more of the concerning aspects of what we've seen.
Really, tied back to what we've talked about earlier about the unions and remote learning, distance learning, the out-of-person.
And to give an analogy, when I was in Congress, I had a meeting of my two school systems in one of the counties that I represented, sent representatives.
We talked about how they were going to open school for the quote 2021 school year.
This would have been the fall after the 20th spring.
And one of the superintendents brought this issue up, and I thought it was so great that you've highlighted this as well.
He made this comment.
He said, look, he said, I'm not worried about the high achievers.
He said, they're going to do fine.
He said, they'll manage through whatever.
They might not get as much, but they'll do fine.
The average kids, they'll be set back a little bit, he said, but eventually we'll do fine.
He said what they were concerned about was the non-first uptick, the slower learners, the learners who had issues, the learners who needed that engagement.
And he made a comment.
He said, and I think the statistics that we're going to talk about here in the Harvard study back this up.
He said, if they miss a half a year of school, it takes them at least a year to get back.
If they miss a whole year or more, He was really sad about this.
He said, Doug, he said, these kids will never recover.
He said they just won't.
And he said, that's why we've got to get back to this interaction.
So let's take this off, dive into this Harvard study a little bit.
Let's talk about it and how this actually affects what I think will be the articles written five and ten years from now about the educational issues that came out of the pandemic.
Yeah, I mean, so to simplify it, what the Harvard study basically showed is what we at the Freedom Foundation and what many on the right were saying years ago is that it was not worth stopping our kids' education in the name of COVID. It was never worth that.
And what the study showed was that the gap between students that most schools missed at least one month of school and then they went to in-person education again, they did not go to remote learning.
But then it compared it to the schools that were out for over four months, and they had remote learning options during that time.
In Washington State, the state that I'm in, my wife didn't see her kids for over a year.
They were doing remote learning for over a year, and she was getting 50% show-out on the Zoom calls, on the remote learning calls.
So we knew this, actually.
But yeah, what it showed was that the difference between those that only missed a month and those that missed over four months was night and day.
And yeah, you recognize it, Doug.
In some instances, it's hard to think that these kids can't even catch up, especially those that are at the end of their educational careers.
One of the things that just...
It appalls me many times in looking at this when it gets into education and the protection and this idea that teachers get let...
I mean, there was a time when I could break it down with my own wife's day that she would have an hour, hour and a half of actual instruction time.
When she wasn't having to go to teach other things or to send them to, you know, and I'm not taking away from these classes like 4-H or they have to have a bullying class or they have to have something.
I mean, an hour and a half of fifth graders day when they were to combine everything they were supposed to be teaching.
It just wasn't happening.
What bothers me even worse than that is the liberal thought That is projected so many times that we're here to protect, you know, the liberals.
Oh, it's about the poverty.
It's about those underprivileged.
It's about those.
The reality is just that's not true, okay?
Because if you do, you look at these policies, these policies affected, and I think the study itself set it out, that in high poverty schools lost about a half year of school achievement growth, which is twice the learning loss of low poverty in the same districts if they had more than half a year of remote learning.
Yeah, I think what we saw is that most low-income communities in America are controlled by liberals.
That's local cities, school boards, that type of stuff.
And a lot of them are actually in liberal states, of course.
So they have liberal governors as well.
And then you compare that with those that are run by conservatives.
Those are the ones that got back to school early.
They were in higher earning communities, generally.
So we saw the difference between low income and higher earners, but we also saw the difference between liberal and conservative ran areas.
And what we overwhelmingly saw was, yeah, if you were out for longer than four months, then the difference between you and your peers that had gone back to school after a month was six months.
So you can't, and then these kids, the low-income communities, they have to go and catch up.
They're not just now at a level pace with their peers that were going back to school, but they actually had to catch up.
And we're going to see the ramifications of this for a long time from now.
Is it even possible, Aaron, do you think, to even measure the ramifications for cities like Chicago, L.A., Philadelphia, which not only did they finally go back, but they did have the ins and outs.
You had Chicago's whose teachers went on strike.
I mean, it just even further degraded this process.
And also the fact that many in the lower demographics, poverty levels, and others, white, black, Asian, it doesn't matter the nationality or ethnicity there.
It mattered about where they were able to access My wife taught at a fairly middle to upper middle class school for most of the demographic, but they had kids who had trouble because they had something that didn't think about.
If you had multiple kids in the same house, which a lot of families have two or three kids, and they had one computer.
I mean, this is such a devastating thing.
I'm glad this Harvard study is out there, but One of the things that the federal government tried to do is, and they try again is the operative term, in the American Rescue Plan, was they only were going to spend 20% on academic recovery.
It was almost like, let's just forget this happened and then move forward.
Isn't that just a backward step in your mind?
Yeah, absolutely.
I think that most of these funds that were allocated by the federal government need to be spent on academic recovery.
That's where we need to be spending it.
Not hiring some bureaucrats to be in the front office of some school.
We need to be hiring it to get kids that want tutoring.
We need to get them tutoring.
Those that want to actually catch up, we need to make sure that our public schools are able to deliver that service.
And 20% earmark for academic recovery is frankly a slap in the face.
And yeah, that number should be 80%.
Why not more?
That's what we should be incentivizing here is actually Getting kids that need it back up to scratch and unfortunately I don't think that is going to be what we see if the teachers unions continue to have anything to do with it.
Well, and I think that's the going to match.
Look, I have a lot of problems going back as far as the no child left behind.
I believe that in many ways it left every child behind.
And it taught us to teach, to test.
It lowered our science and math levels tremendously.
But now we're getting the concern here is math and science.
And I think that's one of the issues that was brought out.
This achievement levels in math and science technology, we're all talking about a new technological economy.
But yet here in the United States, Because of some of these policies pushed by the unions and the out-of-school policies in an age grouping that did not show any real, you know, of the dynamic effects of COVID or the problems that we're associated with, how do you think that we can overcome that?
And we're already behind.
I mean, this could be writing a history that puts us behind the curve 15 to 20 years in math and science.
Yeah, I think unfortunately, in some cases, the answer is to get our kids out of these public schools.
I mean, if you're a parent that cares about your kids' education and the public school is not delivering a service, then we have to find options that allow you to go and take your kids to a charter school.
Unfortunately, if you're not wealthy enough to send your kids to a private school and you haven't got the time to do homeschooling, then that's pretty much your only option.
We need to make sure that in cities like Chicago, the school choice is actually an option that parents can pursue because in a lot of liberal states, Where the teachers unions are in power, they would not allow policy reform like that to see the light of day.
And that's frankly what parents need.
And that is a way that we hold public education accountable to the parents again, is allow these parents to essentially vote with their feet, to take their kids to places that are delivering that top quality performance that our kids deserve.
Aaron, I'm going to take you a little bit further, maybe, and just from your opinion standpoint, and if you have more, definitely stop into this.
There's this thought out there, when you keep mentioning, you mentioned charter schools, school choice, the course, the public education folks will scream, you're taking money out of public education.
We have down here scholarship programs in which are tax write-off scholarship programs, which the argument made every year is if you increase that limit, you're removing money from education.
Irregardless of the fact that that money was not being taxed or used for education to start with, you're assuming that it could have been used in a different way.
How big of a, if you would, I mean, the charter schools can be put into place.
You can have modified charter schools.
There's ways to look at it.
Even private school vouchers and scholarships, if you want to look at it.
If used properly, all of these could be very viable, very financially stable positions for school systems, for communities, if you're getting the kids educated.
Is that what's missing sometimes when we talk about it?
Because there's always the door, oh, you're killing us in the public schools by going to these charter schools, which is not, quote, for everyone.
But yet, at the same point, that viable economic argument is not there, is it?
Well, we need to make it open for everybody.
We need to make it so all these parents can send these kids to the schools that they want to be able to send them to.
And the argument about defunding public education, listen, if so many kids Disenrolling from public education?
Yes, we need to defund that school and we need to fund the schools that are performing so that we can get kids the quality education that they deserve.
Now, that's obviously an unpopular opinion amongst teachers unions, but we need to pay teachers that are teaching in charter schools and private schools.
at the highest level so that we can encourage the top quality performers to be able to go out and teach our kids.
That's the way that it works in every other industry in America.
Why are we settling for less in our kids' education?
We should be settling for more, frankly.
There's a lot of horror stories that we hear at the Freedom Foundation That these teachers unions have been able to do in terms of protecting bad teachers.
I think of one instance in Oregon, they protected a sexual predator for decades.
He went around from school to school, and because of a policy that the unions had, he was able to seal his record from the next school that he was going to.
It happened for over 10 years.
It's a policy of the unions to protect bad teachers.
We need to allow it so parents can send their kids to schools that are going to get them a quality education.
School choice is absolutely the mechanism to do that.
Well, I think one of the things you just mentioned is not only in education, you see protecting a bad teacher is moving.
We saw this in other areas that I work in and that's criminal justice.
You saw it in, you know, the police unions and police forces blocking the firing of bad officers and putting them on desk duty and basically being a liability to the department instead of actually just getting rid of them and moving forward.
I think this is, you know, there's always different ways that you can look at education, how we fund teachers, how we bring them in.
You know, one of the ways I think that's going to have to be addressed as we go in the future is how we bring in, you know, this quote, teacher training we spoke of earlier in the podcast.
You know, I've had stories here in Georgia and other places where you have engineers, people who are very, you know, very adept at math and higher math, who are wanting to get out of corporate life.
They're a little bit older in their careers.
They're ready to go do something else, but yet cannot come into a classroom and teach unless they go get, you know, five classes of certification and how to do a bulletin board, how to write a lesson plan, everything else.
Like, we've got to rethink education in our country.
Yeah, I think we absolutely do.
I mean, what we need to do is we need to make sure that obviously teachers are taught how to teach, not to do all this other stuff, bureaucratic stuff that is happening, especially in government universities today.
And that shouldn't be a foreign concept either.
Teachers should be taught how to teach.
They should not be taught how to deliver critical race theory lessons.
They should not be taught how to teach kids about sexual orientation.
That should be off the table.
We should teach teachers how to teach math, how to teach writing, how to teach reading, that type of stuff.
That isn't happening, unfortunately, in a lot of institutions in America.
I agree.
Aaron, for the folks who are listening today, this is a good in-depth education issue and we're going to continue this talk because it's a passion project of mine as well.
Before we get gone though, Freedom Foundation, I want to always give you a chance to tell you what you do, how people can find out more about your work.
Sure.
So the Freedom Foundation, freedomfoundation.com, we exist to educate public employees all throughout America of their rights when it comes to union membership.
As I mentioned earlier, government unions are the number one contributors to liberal politicians in America.
The scandal of this is that this money is being taken from teachers and other public employees all throughout America.
So we run a campaign to tell every single one of those public employees in the country that they can opt out of their union and stop paying union dues.
And if anybody is a public employee today, I'd encourage you to go to optouttoday.com.
That's our website that we've set up for public employees to help them get out of their unions, take about $1,100 a year out of the union's radical political agenda and put that back into their pockets where it belongs.
Outstanding.
Well, Aaron, it's always great to have you on.
I appreciate you being a part.
This is a discussion for education.
It's only going to grow.
I'm planning on probably later this year doing some more, a little more in-depth, several series on this education system in crisis, what I call it here in America, and probably would love to have you back on to talk about that.
Doug, yeah, I'd love to.
Thank you for your time.
Thanks for exposing this.
Appreciate it.
Folks, this is something that's very valuable.
You see it in every community we have.
We're going to keep talking about it here on the Doug Collins Podcast.
Education is critical.
It is the thing that unlocks the potential of our kids and also unlocks the potential of adults who continue to grow.
So we're going to keep talking about education here on the podcast.
We'll see you next time.
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