Anyone else ever get tired of hearing about “public servants” and the “selflessness” of teachers, nearly all of whose salaries are paid by hardworking taxpayers, many of whom reside in “flyover country?”

The Chicago Teachers’ Union, via Union President Stacy Davis Gates, recently demanded a new contract granting them an extra $50 billion and 9% raises through at least 2028. And that’s only the beginning. Incredibly, CTU is also demanding free abortions for all teachers, an expanded slate of LGBTQ-related requirements and training in the classroom, housing for and $2,000 per undocumented migrant, mandatory gender-neutral bathrooms, full coverage for storage of embryos, implementation of policies that would prohibit any member from being compelled to tell parents when a student rejects his or her sex … and more. WTH?

The $50 billion the Chicago Teachers’ Union is demanding is virtually equal to the total base tax receipts for the entire state of Illinois last year ($50.7 billion) and would push average yearly teacher salaries to over $144,000, more than double the median household income in Chicago. (Davis, who has called school choice racist, sends her own son to a private school. Of course.)

Chicagoland teachers already receive up to 45 days off, have 15 forms of leave … and an annual maximum of 244 sick days. And they have the nerve to make these demands while only about one in five eighth graders in the city are proficient in reading, though the district spends $21,000 a year per student, almost half-again as much as the national average.

And teachers are not just in bed with their students, they share a bed with the Democrat party-- or at least their unions do. And have for many decades now.

Teachers’ unions are nothing more than the propaganda arm of today’s highly undemocratic Democrat party. And getting ever more radical.

Chicago schools, already among the most politicized in the country, now seek to go beyond ideological indoctrination and perform voter outreach. The CTU’s 142-page list of demands includes this one: “[Schools] shall designate a day of civic action to assist students who are of age to register to vote and cast votes.” (Illinois allows 17-year-olds to vote in primaries and 16-year-olds to pre-register to vote.)

CTU, like most teachers’ unions, is already a massive taxpayer-subsidized voter turnout and electoral machine for Democrats, yet it now wants to exploit the students that it is supposed to serve in order to essentially rig elections.

The union has deep ties to Mayor Brandon Johnson -- whose campaign it lavishly funded -- and, during his push for a tax hike referendum, teachers took students out of class and marched them off to vote. In fact, CTU’s vice president proudly announced a “Parade to the Polls, where students will march to an early voting site” and urged teachers to “organize a group of voting age students.” Guess who these kids will vote for?

We’ve come a long way from one-room schoolhouses with dedicated and chaste schoolmarms deeply concerned with teaching their charges how to think, not what to think. Though there are still many excellent individual teachers around, teachers’ unions are almost uniformly greedy, self-centered, and bent on pushing a radical, far-left agenda no matter the cost.

The unions themselves have dispensed with any notion of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Now they push unfettered abortion, transgenderism, and Marxism. Community organizing, DEI, and left-wing activism have replaced instruction in the Western Canon, American government, and civic duty. Clearly, they are hell-bent  ... on achieving a one-party, authoritarian state where voting is rendered moot.

These are sad times, indeed, when teachers and higher (and lower) education are the gravest threat to the healthy development of students’ minds and bodies.

And the continued existence of the republic.

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License