A new Los Angeles Magazine profile of "controversial" United Teachers Los Angeles head Cecily Myart-Cruz reveals the wild thoughts of the woke social justice warrior representing LA's 33,000 public school teachers.
Myart-Cruz was one of the teacher's union bosses who insisted schools remain shuttered for months during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, and she was clear that she doesn't regret subjecting children to subpar instruction nor the outcomes of learning through a computer for more than a year.
UTLA's Cecily Myart-Cruz is on a controversial crusade to remake education as we know it. https://t.co/cZ24I5z0Yy pic.twitter.com/33QfwZ19gb
— Los Angeles Magazine (@LAmag) August 25, 2021
"There is no such thing as learning loss," she maintains in an interview for the profile. "Our kids didn't lose anything," she said despite numerous studies and anecdotes of students falling behind without in-person instruction. Her rationale for such a claim, however, is even more absurd.
"It's OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables," she explained before suggesting what they did learn over the months of isolation wrought by forced distance learning:
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.
This insane rationale also implies that the education provided by the teachers Myart-Cruz represents is unimportant and inconsequential. The same teachers for whom Myart-Cruz demands more money can apparently be replaced — following her logic — by a student just sitting at home and watching TV.
One of the strangest developments of the last two years has been teachers unions repeatedly explaining that the education they provide isn’t actually that important. https://t.co/rB2VVWNiEk
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) August 30, 2021
The comments from Myart-Cruz aren't all that surprising given her activism that has frequently strayed beyond school issues. She's advocated for Medicare for all, tax increases, taxpayer-funded services for illegal immigrants, eviction moratoriums, and a boycott of Israel.
Absolutely, completely infuriating that people like this have any control over the fates of childrenhttps://t.co/pcUDnLbM3z pic.twitter.com/quEElGMt6Y
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) August 30, 2021
She's even to the left of embattled California Governor Gavin Newsom whose attempt at reopening schools she slammed as "a receipt for propagating structural racism." And when parents pleaded for Los Angeles teachers to return to the classroom, Myart-Cruz attacked their concerns for their children as a "product of their unexamined privilege."
Even as the 2021 back-to-school season hits full swing across the country, Myart-Cruz remained cagey at the time of her interview about the prospect of LA schools being in-person. "We will be going back to the table for that conversation" because "education is political," she told Los Angeles Magazine.
And while she claims to be an advocate for underprivileged students and families, Myart-Cruz's tenure has disproportionately harmed those same students. "School closings have arguably done the most damage to those in poorer communities," explains the LA Mag profile. "An astonishing 64 percent of L.A. Unified's middle- and high-schoolers—some 129,000 kids—were not actively engaging in the district's online learning program" last spring. "Hardly any of the district's 229,000 elementary school students were logging on at all... A significant portion were doubtless from disadvantaged neighborhoods with working parents and less access to technology."
Nevertheless, Myart-Cruz persists in her woke campaign apparently unconcerned with the welfare of Los Angeles students. As she herself said, it's all about politics — student wellbeing be damned.