NJ Unions Defend Teachers Who Struggle To Read Or Write

Let’s say your child, like the majority of schoolchildren in America, is having trouble reading and doing math. Your state offers a corrective. See if you can guess which: 

Option No. 1: The state will hire teachers who excel in language arts and math.

Option No. 2: The state will hire teachers who underachieve in language arts and math.

If you’re in New Jersey, your political leaders just chose Option No. 2. Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, with huge support from the New Jersey Education Association, signed Act 1669, which removed the requirement for those seeking to become teachers to pass basic tests in reading, writing, and mathematics. The so-called teachers union said that requiring teachers to be proficient in the three R’s is a “barrier” to teacher certification. This travesty of a law took effect on Jan. 1, 2025.

Those populating New Jersey’s political class, like those in several other blue states, are disconnected from reality and parental interests regarding their children. Teacher unions are just plain dangerous. American voters recently made clear they are tired of failed leftist experiments in our schools. Americans want change.

New Jersey’s politicians could care less. Not only have they ensured citizens won’t see change, but they have virtually guaranteed that students’ reading and math abilities will continue to plummet.

Teachers unions in New Jersey (and throughout the country) have spent years fighting for these disastrous results. They have dumbed down students and have opened the classroom door to incompetent “teachers” who impair children in America’s schools. In 2022, during the Covid shutdowns, the union even persuaded politicians to do away with edTPA, a basic performance test would-be teachers had to pass to be certified.

The edTPA has been long opposed by the union because it attaches one more accountability requirement to those seeking to teach your children. You see, the unions are not interested in representing excellent teachers or providing children with superior educational experiences. Instead, their goal is to dumb down American citizens and make us dependent on the giant government they’ve been building over the last 100 years.

So, deceptively citing a “teacher shortage,” the union persuaded their captured politicians to scrap the edTPA, and now has succeeded in persuading a majority of lawmakers to approve hiring teachers who perform poorly in basic academic skills.

What could possibly go wrong?

The underlying context to this is even more ominous. All over the United States, voters have started choosing feisty school board candidates who refuse to rubber-stamp union demands. Voters are seeking to unseat city council and county board members, and legislators who have allowed radical ideologies to reign. Even the presidential vote proved decisively that Americans have had it with the left’s agenda.

But Democrats in New Jersey just proved again that they don’t care how you voted or what you desire from the public education system. They will decide what your kids will learn and who will teach it to them. Your views are not welcome.

In Chicago, a teacher shortage is requiring “imaginative” solutions. One is to group high school students into auditoriums with class sizes of around 100 because that would require fewer teachers.

New York state is likewise dealing with a teacher shortage. However, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and leaders of the New York State Union of Teachers have come up with “certification options” so that they can hire more unqualified individuals.

And the list goes on.

One obvious answer to this grim landscape is to offer parents alternatives to the failing government schools. But that, says American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, “undermines democracy.”

Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children and a target of Weingarten’s ad-hominem attacks, said Weingarten undermined democracy “when she fought to keep schools closed as long as she possibly could.”

Now that Americans have caught on to the immense harm her union did to children, Weingarten says she never argued for continued closures. Even PolitiFact, attempting to help her, acknowledges she campaigned loudly that anyone who wanted to open schools during Covid lockdowns was being “reckless.”

The new reality in American education is that a dug-in establishment of unions, politicians, and sympathetic activists are fighting against a new and burgeoning movement to get kids away from the toxic atmosphere and poor performance of America’s government schools.

Gradually, the public and some non-establishment politicians are realizing that the schools have failed and their intentional demise is an existential threat to our republic. We must confront and dismantle the establishment before America and her schools collapse from within.

Rebecca Friedrichs is the founder of For Kids and Country, the author of Standing Up to Goliath, and a 28-year public school teacher who was lead plaintiff in Friedrichs v. CTA. Roger Ruvolo is a longtime newspaper editor and a contributor to For Kids and Country.