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Aug. 23, 2023 - Doug Collins Podcast
35:22
Fighting For Freedoms In Our Schools
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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 everybody, glad to have you back on the podcast today.
Today we're going to touch on one of my favorite topics, and that is education.
And education around the country is, I mean, really what we're seeing in the unions, what we're seeing in the lack of integrity, I think that has come down.
So much in our teaching profession.
It's very close to my heart.
I have my wife who taught and retired from teaching.
I have a brother, a sister-in-law.
I had a sister-in-law who taught.
Again, it's very personal because I believe that education is that silver bullet.
Education is the thing for me that took a kid in North Georgia and was able to gain knowledge to go out into the world and literally be able to travel the world and sit in different places.
Countries and learn and grow, but also influence policy.
It took me all the way to Congress and sitting in the Oval Office, a place that I would never have thought about if it hadn't been for teachers in my life who drove me to learn, who drove me to be curious and to have an inquisitive spirit.
This is what we're going to talk about.
Aaron Weiss with us today, Freedom Foundation.
He talks about a lot of the issues with the public unions and even teachers and public sector employees can get out of their unions.
So again, Aaron's been on with us before.
Another opportunity though for us to talk about this.
You don't want to miss what is going on in our public sectors because they affect your tax dollars, folks.
These unions are living off of you.
They're living off of you.
If you don't realize that, you need to.
And so that's what we're on today here on the Doug Collins Podcast.
Right after the break, we'll be with Aaron.
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Aaron, I'm glad to have you back.
Freedom Foundation.
A lot of good stuff going on that we want to get to today.
And some of the biggest is, and this is a generic question for you, Aaron.
Is it just me and maybe this podcast?
I mean, we list this all the time.
Is freedom really slipping away from us?
It seems that way more and more as we look at how the unions are attacking some of our freedoms.
You look at CRT and sex ed and what they're pushing in public schools today, it certainly seems that some of those freedoms are slipping away.
But as someone that was born and raised in the UK, I can tell you that America is not lost.
Right.
You know, I go back home and look at the policies that they have over there, and it's basically a socialist country today.
America is not lost.
It's still the most free society.
It still has the capitalist economy that we have over here.
So certainly not lost, but not going in the right direction.
Well, I think that's what we see, and it's not just in education, but before we get into some of the topics with the new bill, I know that, you know, Is hitting, talking about the charter and other things that Rep Fitzgerald has come out with.
But I want to continue on this thought.
Because a lot of times, I mean, think about this.
How many times we hear what I'll call, you know, a lot of hyperbolic statements.
You hear a lot of, you know, statements.
Oh, the end is near.
So, you know, educate.
But the reality is education, especially from a...
From a directional standpoint, from a capturing of the mind standpoint, education is that one area that if you can control, you don't just control the moment, you actually can control 5, 10, 15, 20, even 50 years down the road.
Is that a fair statement?
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, what we've seen, what we have in America, basically in a lot of states, is where public education, where the government and government unions, the teachers unions, have a monopoly on educating our kids.
You know, if you're a parent and you live in Chicago, Illinois right now, you've got one choice, and that's basically to send your kid to the local public school, no matter how bad it may be for the kid.
So in a lot of states we have it where you don't have any choice but to go to the local public school.
So that does put a monopoly on public education.
And the teachers unions have figured out that if they're able to influence elected officials, they're able to influence Curriculum.
And that's when you see CRT and sex ed and all the rest of it start to get into our public schools.
And the big problem, like I mentioned, is that these parents don't have an option.
They have to send their kids that.
And the teachers union's goal is now to indoctrinate our kids and turn out the next generation of liberal voters.
It's not to get them prepared for the workforce or for college or whatever's next in their lives.
Well, you know, and this is an interesting thought here because if you talk to educators, and I'm sort of inoculated, I don't say inoculated from this here in Georgia, but we have a different setup because there is no public sector unions in Georgia, period.
And so our police, our fire, you know, they have groups that they can be a part, but they have no collective bargaining.
Let me rephrase how I want to make sure I frame that right.
And here in Georgia, we have the GAE, which is the Georgia Association of Educators, which is the offshoot of the National Association of Educators.
And at least the good part about them, Aaron, is they don't pretend not to be a union.
They don't have collective bargaining, but at least they don't pretend.
We've got one down here called PAGE, Professional Association of Georgia Educators, that swear they're not a union, but their tactics are worse than GAE. And it all revolves around teacher-centric actions And yet cloaked in the disguise of students.
And I think that's the part where you talk about parents being out of it, choice being out of it.
This is a big deal.
And parents, I think, are beginning to wake up, especially the pandemic.
And I think you and I have talked about this before.
The pandemic did a lot for awakening parental involvement in education.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I see three populations really light up during the pandemic, and that's students left public schools in droves.
They went to charter schools, they went to home schools, they went to private schools where they could afford them.
They left public schools in droves.
Parents started voting, especially at the school board level, in ways that we'd never seen before.
In San Francisco, one of the most liberal places in America, they actually recalled two of the school board members there.
And then teachers have reacted, too, by leaving the unions in droves.
We've seen more teachers leave the unions the past...
A few years than ever before.
And it's partially to do with the Freedom Foundation and our campaign to tell them to leave, but it's also partially to do with the fact that the unions have overplayed their hand.
The teachers unions, when they started shutting down schools, when they started masking our kids and putting in this CRT and sex ed, while these kids were being homeschooled, people started to wake up to their agenda.
And it was a good thing.
Well, and you see this is going into it.
And so let's take this back a second.
And as we go forward, because you provide a great perspective here.
And I think it's good for our podcast audience to hear.
Let's go back now.
And let's put the foundations on this a little bit.
Because this is something, you know, again, and you and I have talked about this before.
My wife taught for 31 years in the public schools.
You know, fortunately, in an area that...
You know, has not been, you know, as indoctrinated.
I mean, just put as indoctrinated.
But the problem comes in two levels.
Going back all the way to the 60s, 70s, 80s, you began to have this, the affirmation of the teacher college, okay?
Teacher programs.
And, you know, you would get a major in early elementary ed, a major in high school ed, you know, whatever it may be, post-secondary.
And that began to train the trainers, if you would.
And the classes being taught, the indoctrination being taught, that it is, was moving into that next generation.
So we saw this moving forward.
Unions capitalized on that.
They locked in these jobs.
And now it has become more commonplace.
And I think, would you be very, I mean, you have to warn parents today that In some of these school districts, the liberal areas and others, and even non-liberal areas, the school board members and the teachers have been so indoctrinated that this is the only way to do it, that parents are not just running up against the current people, they're running up against 40 to 50 years of history.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And you look at the school boards and, as you mentioned, the colleges that are teaching the teachers to go into the workforce.
Yeah, the unions have recognized that if they can grab a hold of those areas, then they're going to be able to continue to indoctrinate kids.
And those are two areas that they've been successful at doing that.
My wife went to one of these education programs, but she went to it at a small private Christian school called Corbin University.
And at that school, you know, they didn't do all this indoctrination stuff.
They basically taught teachers how to teach reading, writing and math and how to basically run a classroom the way that it should be done.
So she goes into the classroom and she taught for four years in challenged public schools.
And she was shocked at what the teachers were doing in those schools.
Not just the competency level, but some of the teachers, you know, they were not there to care for kids.
They were there for a paycheck or they were there to push a political gender upon kids.
But that isn't most teachers.
Most teachers, as you know, Doug, are there to teach reading, writing, math, and other core subjects.
And they're there to basically prepare kids for the workforce.
So teachers are heroes, but the union's agenda completely goes against what teachers are trying to do in the classrooms.
Well, I think that is.
And one of the issues, and we're going to continue this conversation, but I want to get into something just recently that happened with your organizations, and that is the Student Act, Stop Teachers Unions from Damaging Education Needs Today.
Representative Fitzgerald introduced this.
Y'all talked about this.
Tell our listeners a little bit about what this actually does.
Yeah, so the National Education Association is the largest teachers union in America.
They represent just over 3 million teachers.
And they were given a federal charter by Congress decades ago.
And I didn't know what a federal charter was until I got this explained to me.
But it's basically where Congress gives them A blessing and gives them some benefits in return.
One of the big benefits at the time was that they didn't have to pay property taxes in the District of Columbia.
But what we realized is that over the course of years, this teachers union went from a professional association to this radical political organization.
And most of these federal charters are given to organizations like the U.S. Olympic Committee, Little League Baseball, the American Legion, the Society of American Florists, organizations like that.
And one of the provisions with most of these organizations is that they can't operate in politics and they can't lobby.
So the Student Act, what it does is it has 11 what we call accountability items.
Which reforms the National Education Association's charter to make it so they can't operate in politics.
They can't lobby.
They have to submit annual reports to Congress.
They're not allowed to strike.
Their officers have to be U.S. citizens.
And they can't do CRT or sex ed.
Sorry, they can't do CRT as part of their operations or their advocacy.
So a lot of common sense reform here that is in the Student Act.
Well, I'm sure that Redfish, Gerald, anybody who signed on to this has, you know, made the list for the NEA and others here as going forward.
They just really do not want anybody to question them is the way it comes across.
Yeah, that's right.
They don't want accountability.
And the problem here with the National Education Association and other government unions is their revenue comes from public employees, which is taxpayer dollars.
So what their goal is to grow government so they can take more union dues from more public employees.
And what we see in education is that we've seen spending Per pupil go up.
In some areas, it's as high as $25,000.
You look at Philadelphia and New York, that's how much they're spending per pupil.
Most of those dollars are not actually going to helping the kids.
They're going towards hiring bureaucrats so the unions can get more union dues.
And that's a massive problem in our education system.
Well, I recently saw a chart on this, Aaron, and it was really interesting to me, and it talked about the rise in per-pupil income.
And again, being on the state legislature side, we saw this a lot more.
And this is something I think is going to have to be addressed in Congress.
A lot of congressional leaders have never been in state or local politics.
Okay, they came straight into the federal side of it.
And so, as you well know, a lot of the state policies, a lot of education policies, the vast majority, and where it should be, comes from the states with the carrot and stick approach of the Department of Ed, which again is another issue that needs to go.
But they don't see like the, and I'll use an example here, and you can use probably other examples across the country.
You know, it's just a three to four to six time difference, the amount of spending on students in a city of Atlanta school system, as opposed to counties just 50 miles away.
And yet the results are far worse But this chart was actually interesting that showed the increase in per-student spending, but yet it showed actually the sort of a flat line of teacher salaries.
And it's really interesting there, and the comment was, because when they talk about teacher, you know, everybody wants to pay the teacher, it's where did the money go?
That's right.
That's right.
And one of the examples that I saw just a couple days ago was someone was referencing the amount of COVID money that we allocated to public schools, and Biden's out there now calling for an increase in teacher salaries.
Well, if you took the money that was actually given in COVID funds that really wasn't spent where it was meant to be spent and gave it to every teacher in America, it would be a $40,000 or $50,000 pay increase for every single teacher in America.
So, it's not that the money isn't there.
It's not that we're not taxing people enough.
It's that it's not being spent in the right places.
I mean, you know, if you were running a state, then you and I, Doug, would probably agree on this, where we'd make it so that the best performing teachers would be paid more than the least performing teachers, so that we'd encourage high performance.
I spoke with Superintendent Ryan Walters in Oklahoma about this, and he's doing exactly that by incentivizing teachers to come into the state of Oklahoma so that they can get the best teachers in his state teaching in public education.
And that's what we would advocate for.
Of course, the unions hate that idea, and they want everybody to be paid at the baseline level, and they do not want to advocate for high performance.
And again, this is the part, and look, the part that comes off so much, and again, we have to address this, and I think the choice issue is probably, to me, I don't understand why every conservative politician in the country does not, especially at a state, local level, and even a federal level, run on a school choice platform.
I just don't understand why they don't.
It's not just a political asset for, quote, conservatives, but it's I mean, go to inner city schools.
And the one thing that just infuriates me is, you know, all this inclusiveness, everything else.
But yet you're willingly keeping students in poor neighborhoods in many of these cities and many places trapped in public schools that are decaying, dying and not giving them the education.
And yet at the same point in time, you know, you're you're you're trying to keep out possibilities for other students.
And we've talked about this before.
I mean, there's true charter schools, private charter schools, or even a public mix, that are sitting literally within sight of other elementary schools in the area, taking the same kids, the same, and getting phenomenally different results.
And that's amazing.
No, it is.
It is amazing.
I think Chicago is one of the best examples of this, where you just have public schools year after year failing, failing, failing, and education results continuing to go down.
So the answer, of course, is to throw more money at the problem.
We were, I was, we host a teacher conference at the Freedom Foundation a couple of weeks ago.
We had 200 something plus teachers from across the country.
And I spoke with the vast majority of them.
And a lot of them, these were friends, Doug.
These were people that are like-minded to us, but they were scared of school choice because Because the teachers unions have basically said, well, if these students go to these charter schools, then, you know, we're going to have to start cutting jobs.
We're going to have to start, you know, we're going to have to start cutting wages, all that type of stuff.
But the reality is, in a free market system, the teachers, the free market system being school choice, when you have that system in place, these teachers are going to be able to go to higher performing schools.
They're going to go to charter schools that can pay them Wages above the public schools because students are going to be flocking to get into those schools because they want out of this failing education system.
Exactly.
I just have to think, except for the most egregious examples and negligence, most parents want the best for their kids.
Okay?
And I'm not going to say every single one, but most do.
All right?
They want the best of their kids.
They don't want to see their kids hurt.
But yet they themselves, many of the younger parents, have been brought up in this same system to think, well, this is all there is.
And the reality is, is there's much more there.
But the unions...
And even in Georgia, and I brought this up again, and, you know, Paige and GA are very high players at the state level.
I mean, and if anything comes up that remotely resembles, and also basically, here's another group, and I'd love to get your comments on this.
You, excuse me, you mentioned a super, you know, you're, School superintendents, Ryan Walters out in Oklahoma.
But, you know, in Georgia, the school superintendents are actually another very powerful lobby in this state.
And if you touch anything remotely to funding or requirements, many of the superintendents are some of your absolute shrillest voices for no change.
Yeah, I believe that.
Fortunately, Ryan Walters in Oklahoma is one of us and definitely thinks in the same way that we do.
But you're right.
When it talks about funding, I mean, these guys are trying to protect their own school districts and they want to have a blank check basically to spend on whatever they like, despite not realizing that this is taxpayer dollars that they would be spending.
And bottom line is this, Doug, you referenced it earlier, is that increased spending does not equal What equals increased outcomes?
Well, you need to find good teachers.
You need a curriculum that gives flexibility for every student to have a chance and not, you know, throwing in stuff like CRT and sex ed and all that type of stuff.
You need to be teaching these core subjects that prepare kids for the workforce.
Increased funding to hire some bureaucrat in the back office, it doesn't equal any better results.
That's been proven over and over again.
What we need to be spending money on is quality teachers that can go out and basically inspire...
Everybody probably watching this remembers one of their favorite teachers in high school, elementary school, or whatever it is.
The teacher that made an impact on their lives.
And if you're a parent watching out there, that's what you need to be investigated, is those kind of teachers that make a positive difference in the lives of our kids.
And I think that we should be rewarding those teachers more and more than teachers that aren't performing.
And yeah, that includes increased salaries.
That includes increased wages.
Teachers unions, they absolutely don't want that.
Their goal is to get the worst performing teachers paid at the 50th percentile level.
It's just wrong.
Yeah, and I think that we move along in this, and I think this is the becoming...
Again, when you move the pay scales, and again, one of the areas you top out teachers after...
This is a concern because one of the things is you're losing too many teachers in that one to five year range.
They just get in there.
They're not being helped.
They're not liking it.
They don't get the encouragement.
They don't have the proper background because, you know, frankly, they...
They're being taught this little analogy of thought theory, and they've never been in a classroom with kids.
And they're being forced.
Another issue is the paperwork issue, and I think this is a Department of Ed issue that I would love to see more be done on the federal level.
You know, to take bureaucrats, and I don't know how to put them, former educational professionals, many of them who've never taught in a classroom, who sit in a cubicle in Washington, and, you know, put requirements on teachers.
I mean, my wife, that was one of the biggest things she got out when she was not, she was ready to retire.
She loved the kids, but it was the paperwork.
It was just the ridiculousness of requirements being put on by non-educators from state levels and local levels where the kids can't get their help.
The teacher understands what a kid may need, and they may be able to work with the parent.
The parent may be in denial.
The parent may understand.
But it took so long to get some of these kids help.
We're raising a generation that frankly doesn't have the benefit of the basics anymore.
Yeah, we need to empower those teachers to be able to allow them to do that and not stick them with red tape and forms and all the rest of it.
You're absolutely right, Doug.
My wife went through basically the exact same thing.
It's scandalous because, you know, we train these teachers to go and basically help these kids, to educate them.
But The government does everything that they can to prevent that from happening, which is why private schools and charter schools are becoming so popular.
And I've also seen an increase in these learning pods crop up as well.
One of the reforms that we've been advocating for at the Freedom Foundation is getting rid of the government's ability to take union dues from teachers' paychecks.
We successfully got this done in Arkansas.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the state legislature there, they got that passed quickly, followed by Rhonda Sanders in Florida and then Kentucky and Tennessee followed suit very quickly.
What that does is allows for teachers and other public employees to realize that these union dues that are automatically being deducted from their paychecks, when you change that status quo, so they have to write a check to the unions or they have to give them their credit card information, they start leaving the unions in droves.
Well, this is something, and I have a personal story on this.
About 15 years ago, we were in, I was in the state legislature, we're going through the budget, and it came up on a, the teachers were, again, we were, it was, if you remember after 2007, 2008, most states were hit with the recession, I mean, and everything that's going on.
And so we were cutting billions, literally, out of the budget.
And there came a choice on a couple of educational issues here in Georgia, and the GAE page reps, Showed their true colors.
And that was, is they were given a choice between, you know, we'll not make this, you know, policy change here, or we'll make this policy change, but we'll take away your ability to deduct straight from teacher salary.
And they said, here, what's your choice?
And Without hesitation, their choice was, we'll just deal with the policy later, but we do not touch the fact that we can take direct deposit out of their checks.
Just plain and simple, I mean, that just shows self-preservation to them was far more important than, you know, anything else for either more pay or anything else for teachers.
They were self-preserving themselves.
And look, and I am harsh on them because I have watched them up close.
I have seen what is going on, you know, in protection of teachers.
And again, many of them, and it's something to maybe address.
There's a teacher listening to this and they said, well, I have to get...
I have to join in their local association of educators, Georgia, Pennsylvania, whatever it may be, or especially in a state that they don't have collective bargaining, or PAGE, like here in Georgia or other places, because they need the benefit of malpractice insurance.
Address that, and we've done this before, but I want to hit it every time we talk.
What can they do?
Because, I mean, I was an attorney.
I mean, later in my wife's career, I was an attorney.
So, I mean, it was like, I still, I gave her a hard time.
Like, really, Lise?
You don't think we could find an attorney if you had an issue?
But that is a big incentive to keep these folks.
Yeah, it is.
And it's a common misconception, actually, because most of that coverage mostly comes from school districts.
The unions actually can pick and choose who they represent.
But for those teachers that do have that question mark about, well, the unions are providing this liability coverage for me, shouldn't I stay with them?
The answer is you should go to a group like the Association of American Educators They're a great group.
They provide liability coverage.
My wife was a member of them while she was a teacher, and I think she paid $17 or $18 a month, and she got double the liability insurance that the National Education Association provided.
And they had to represent 100% of their members.
They didn't get to pick and choose who they represented.
So it's a lot better policy for a fraction of the cost.
And the reason that they can do that is because the National Education Association, they're of course significantly larger, But they spend most of the union members' money on politics.
We did an analysis of this a couple of years ago.
The National Education Association, they spend just 7.5% of their $300-something million budget on representational activities.
They spend over 50% on lobbying, gifts to nonprofits, and political gifts to candidates and initiatives.
And then the rest of it gets spent on their own salaries and benefits.
So just 7.5% of it is actually being spent on representing members.
So their goal is to be entirely a political agency, a political entity.
Well, and I think that's come out now with Randy Weingartner.
You've got the others.
You've got Becky Pringle.
You've got the others that are out there.
That really, that lobbying, especially with the Biden administration now, has become so blatant that they were putting teachers and their members...
Again, it's amazing to me that they put their teacher membership ahead of what the teachers are actually supposed to do.
I mean, it's almost like...
We're going to represent waiters and waitresses, but we don't care if they ever wait on a table.
We want their money, and we're going to be this advocate, and we're going to do this kind of stuff for them, but they don't care.
And the reality is what this union's actual goal is actually hurts the generations to come.
And I think that is where people's eyes are being opened here to really what is it.
And if you don't believe, look, folks, you're listening out there on the podcast, and Aaron and I, you think we're just, you know, You have this opinion on education.
You leave it alone.
It was good enough for you kind of thing.
Look, if you don't believe their political power is real, just look at what happened in the pandemic.
Look at what happened in the States.
But if you want to go back, even if you don't think this is new, go back to the 1976 presidential election in the Democratic primary.
Who elected Jimmy Carter at the convention?
Teachers unions.
Plain and simple.
If you look at the Democratic Party's Membership in the delegates of their convention, there's a strong, not only teacher unions, but other unions.
That is the dominant delegate count there, Aaron, and I don't think people realize that.
No, I don't think they do.
They're the number one political contributors in America.
And up until 2018, they really had no incentive to represent their members or provide them benefits because membership was not compulsory.
But in most states, they had to pay at least some form of union dues.
They're called agency fees.
That was until 2018 when the U.S. Supreme Court said, basically, listen, you cannot compel a public employee to pay any amount of union dues because everything you do as a union is political and therefore you're compelling political speech.
So in 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court gave every public employee in America the right to leave their unions and stop paying union dues.
Now, what I hoped would happen at the time was that these unions would start providing benefits to members.
They'd start spending their money the way that the members would want them to and not on politics.
As you've seen the past couple of years, the teachers unions in particular have gone the complete opposite direction.
They don't care about spending money on their members.
They care about their political agenda first and foremost.
And that's why we've seen over the past five years, over 700,000 public employees leave the big four unions in America.
These are state workers, these are county workers, city workers and teachers, all leaving their unions in droves.
And it's because, one, they're learning their rights.
We run a campaign to tell every public employee their rights to their unions and to leave their unions, and we send them to optouttoday.com.
But two, it's because when given a choice, they realize that there's no benefit to being part of the unions and that their money would be far better spent on gas, on groceries, on whatever it is that they want, not Joe Biden's political campaign.
Yeah.
And I think that's it.
Aaron, if folks want to get involved, teachers out there listening, others, maybe you've got family members.
It seems like everybody has a family member associated with education in some way.
How would they get in touch with you?
How do they find out more about this?
So we've set up a website exclusively for every public employee.
It's called optouttoday.com.
For anybody else that's interested in learning about the Freedom Foundation, it's freedomfoundation.com.
I have a new book that just came out.
It's called Freedom is the Foundation.
I'd encourage listeners to go to Amazon and buy Freedom is the Foundation.
Outstanding.
Folks, again, we're going to hit this a lot.
It's always great to have Aaron on.
We talk about education.
This has got to change because, folks, you can't, I mean, Small business employers, everybody else is seeing the results of our education system.
We're seeing the downplay in our education system.
We're seeing kids come out without education, actually, as you look at it.
And that is going to be more and more of a problem as we go if we don't get a handle on this.
And it's going to affect us and already is affecting us in much of our economic standing in the world.
So as we go forward, Aaron, thanks for being a part of the Doug Collins podcast today.
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