The #RedforEd teachers’ movement confirmed it is a purely political movement designed to help elect Democrats and stop the re-election of President Donald Trump in 2020. The teachers union in the key battleground state of Minnesota announced it will hold a three-day summit beginning on January 31 to train teachers how to harness their “collective power to defeat Trumpism in 2020 and win a public education system in 2021 that can prevent Trumpism for the next generation.”
The announcement made no mention of the need to improve test scores of Minnesota’s K-12 public school students, which have been declining for several years, as Minnesota Public Radio reported in August:
The number of Minnesota students considered proficient in math fell for the fourth year in a row during the most recent school year.
According to newly released data from the Minnesota Department of Education, only 53.9 percent of students met or exceeded state standards for math proficiency in 2019. In 2016, close to 60 percent of Minnesota students met or exceeded those standards.
Reading scores in Minnesota have remained more steady. Just over 58 percent of Minnesota students met state standards for reading proficiency this year – that’s down from approximately 59 percent last year.
As Breitbart News reported last February:
A well-funded and subversive leftist movement of teachers in the United States threatens to tilt the political balance nationwide in the direction of Democrats across the country as Republicans barely hang on in key states that they need to hold for President Donald Trump to win re-election and for Republicans to have a shot at retaking the House and holding onto their Senate majority.
This teachers union effort, called #RedforEd, has its roots in the very same socialism that President Trump vowed in his 2019 State of the Union address to stop, and it began in its current form in early 2018 in a far-flung corner of the country before spreading nationally. Its stated goals–higher teacher pay and better education conditions–are overshadowed by a more malevolent political agenda: a leftist Democrat uprising designed to flip purple or red states to blue, using the might of a significant part of the education system as its lever.
The website for the 2020-2021 Education Minnesota Unity Summit outlines the event’s objectives:
Education Minnesota reshaped its election work in 2018, focusing on getting out the vote at the worksite level. While the union still supported pro-public education candidates, the focus on activism and building power at the worksite was the core of our electoral success.
As we look to 2020, voting is still a high priority. And through our democracy, and especially our union, we have the collective power to defeat Trumpism in 2020 and win a public education system in 2021 that can prevent Trumpism for the next generation.
That will only happen when Minnesota’s public school system is fully funded and educators can wholly and completely meet the needs of students without an ongoing struggle for necessities like a well-rounded curriculum, student supports and small class sizes.
Uniting in a movement around the public schools, which are a public good for everyone no matter where you come from or what you look like, will be at the crux of our 2020 electoral work and the next two legislative sessions.
The power of the educator vote only translates into real changes for students and for our democracy with a visionary movement in our workplaces and within our communities. Only this way will we reverse decades of underfunding and inequality, and build a truly inclusive, multi-racial democracy for future generations. Across the country, #RedForEd organizing is showing time and again that the public is with educators. [Emphasis added]
The event’s website highlights Education Minnesota’s “plan for democracy and public education for 2020-21”:
(1) Get out 100 percent of the educator vote for public education on Nov. 3, 2020.
(2) Collectively organize at least 33,000 parents and community voters in the election and beyond.
(3) Unite our co-workers and communities in a statewide movement for full funding of public education in the spring of 2021.
Education Minnesota President Denise Specht welcomed in the New Year by highlighting the union’s political objectives for 2020 in this tweet:
Education Minnesota describes itself as “the leading advocate for public education in Minnesota” and “was formed in 1998 as a result of the merger between the Minnesota Education Association and the Minnesota Federation of Teachers.”
Minnesota is considered a key battleground state in the 2020 presidential election. Hillary Clinton narrowly defeated Donald Trump by about 44,000 votes in the state in the 2016 presidential election.
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