High-profile union bosses like National Education Association President Becky Pringle have such an inflated sense of self-importance they make all sorts of absurd remarks.
This time, Pringle had something to say over the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor. On June 27, the court decided 6-3 that, “(P)arents (can) opt their children out of a Maryland public school system’s lessons that contain themes about homosexuality and transgenderism.”
While the impact of this ruling lies somewhere between religious values and parental choice, the union leader seems to be entirely confused on the boundaries this decision has put in place and what they mean as a precedent going forward.
To be sure, Pringle is as morally bankrupt as they come, but her response raises fair questions about her reasoning skills. Pringle wrote in a June 27 tweet on BlueSky, “Students pay the price when books are censored and educators are silenced.”
Somehow Pringle seems to have jumped to the conclusion that when parents choose to opt their kids out of certain lessons, it equates a mass silencing of educators. The only conclusion one should be jumping here is that the protection of choice in the education system serves to empower parents and students, it hardly “silences” anyone.
Later in the same tweet, Pringle had the gall to suggest the justices have “discounted and ignored the expertise of trained educational professionals, and harmed students in the process.”
She called the ruling, “Shameful.”
Given that the material parents would be opting their children out of participating in was centered heavily around homosexuality and transgenderism, including books that promoted Pride parades and same-sex playground romances, what “experts” is the NEA president referring to in her protest?
Should anyone be listening to a woman who is OK with backing so-called “experts” who promote this sort of literary material to preschoolers?
More to the point, is isn’t the job of the court to consider the views of presumed “experts,” or even the impacts of a given ruling. In this country, we have a separation of powers: The legislative branch makes laws and the court determines whether they violate the U.S. Constitution.
Maryland’s audacious scheme to inculcate students against the wishes of their parents clearly was, and it was rightly struck down.
As entertaining as it is to watch union leaders spew their harebrained takes on issues having nothing to do with teacher pay, benefits or working conditions, the laughter quickly fades when we then discover that, as Chicago Teachers’ Union President Stacy Davis Gates asserted last week, they sincerely believe students belong to them, not their parents and, under this arrangement, they have an obligation to indoctrinate their minds rather than educate them.
