Immigrant mom says teachers union 'profiled' her for urging school reopening
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The head of the Los Angeles teachers union claimed that there is "no such thing as learning loss" for students who were forced into remote learning during the pandemic, saying the children learned "survival" and "the difference between a riot and a protest."
"There is no such thing as learning loss," United Teachers Los Angeles President Cecily Myart-Cruz told "Los Angeles Magazine" in a rare sit-down interview when she was questioned about how her insistence to keep the school district locked down during the pandemic impacted students.
"Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup," she continued.
The Los Angeles Unified School District is the second largest district in the country, with more than 600,000 students.
Myart-Cruz was at the forefront of rejecting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s push to get teachers back into the classroom in March, saying $2 billion in incentives for teachers to return to in-person teaching was "a recipe for propagating structural racism."
"If you condition funding on the reopening of schools, that money will only go to white and wealthier and healthier school communities that do not have the transmission rates that low-income Black and brown communities do," Myart-Cruz said at the time.
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Amid talk of the district implementing hybrid learning this year, she said in her interview with "Los Angeles Magazine" that her objective "is getting back into schools as safe as possible."
But added: "Are there broader issues at play? Yes, there are."
"Education is political," she said. "People don’t want to say that, but it is."
She has been protested by parents and others for her handling of education during the pandemic, including in May, when protesters held signs at UTLA’s headquarters with slogans such as, "Cecily Myart-Cruz Doesn’t Care about Our Kids."
She looked at one protest flyer during the interview that riffed on the movie Total Recall, with her head superimposed over actor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body and showed other California officials, such as Newsom, surrounding her.
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"I love that my picture is the biggest one," she said of the flyer. "But here’s the trouble: You can recall the Governor. You can recall the school board. But how are you going to recall me?"
The interview and article went on to detail that Myart-Cruz saw criticisms of her handling of remote learning as racial attacks on her.
Last winter, she posted an article to Facebook reporting that a Chicago superintendent believed parents who pushed for students to return to in-class learning were part of "white-supremacist thinking." She captioned the Facebook post with, "Right on!" and claimed that UTLA staffers were being "stalked by wealthy, white, Middle Eastern parents."
The UTLA president was accused of anti-Semitism for the comment and was also slammed for allegedly ordering a study to be conducted on the racial backgrounds of parents protesting her remote stance to ostensibly prove her point that racism was behind the push to get kids back into the classroom.
"I felt very targeted," said one mother in March, Maryam Qudrat, who claimed she was the subject of racial opposition research because she wanted kids to return to school. Qudrat’s parents are originally from Afghanistan.
"I felt almost violated, like they were bullying me. It was clear to me that Cecily Myart-Cruz made this whole thing into some sort of racial war," she said.
Now, Myart-Cruz is facing pushback for her comments that there is " is no such thing as learning loss," with Building Education for Students Together’s executive director Laura Zorc saying it’s a deflection from "the mess they've created."
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"The teachers union will deny learning loss and deflect because they do not want to be blamed for the mess they've created. Forcing students to stay out of school has shown the union's true motivation and parents are now awake to it. Cecily Myart-Cruz’s comments demonstrate how out of touch the teachers union's priorities are with working class Americans. This is nothing more than a cheap trick to disguise the lasting damage teachers unions have done to families across the country," Zorc said in a statement.
Myart-Cruz did not immediately respond to Fox News’s request for comment on the pushback.
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