The Taxpayer-Funded Child Abuse System

The National Education Association was caught spending 9% of its budget on member assistance and 50% on various political programs. Teachers’ unions have become enormously powerful by turning their membership and their resources into assets for the Democrats.

Democrats have generously returned the favor by negotiating favorable contracts and allowing teachers’ unions to dismantle the educational system, including shutting down schools for an extended period during the pandemic, eliminating standards in favor of promotion and turning a blind eye to sex abuse. While the shutdown of schools traumatized a generation, leading to increased suicide rates, loss of learning skills, social decline and even higher crime rates, school sex abuse is an ongoing crisis that targets a narrower population of abused students.

That doesn’t mean that the damage is any less.

A recent report reveals that nearly one school employee has been arrested a day on child-sex related charges.

In just the last week, a Utah elementary school teacher was arrested for inappropriate behavior with two female students, a middle school teacher in Pennsylvania was caught sexually abusing a 13-year-old, an Oregon high school basketball coach was arrested for sexually absuing a 17-year-old, a California elementary school employee was arrested on 19 counts of abusing minors going back a decade, and a Washington middle school employee was charged with 137 counts of taking videos in female bathrooms: an incredible school crime log for one week.

Behind the individual arrests there is often a larger culture of institutional complicity. The ongoing case of James Eschert, a fourth-grade teacher in Connecticut accused of grooming and abusing little girls for years, is unique in its promise of institutional accountability.

Four school principals have been charged for not reporting the abuse, and for “neglect or injury of a child or imminent risk of serious harm to a child.” But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The Department of Education did not have a single document “in his employment file that indicated he was under scrutiny by state officials and there was no documentation of the repeated complaints by parents and students about his behavior.”

Institutional corruption like this is routine.

New York City’s rubber rooms, despite supposedly being abolished, have only gotten worse with a recent case of a high school teacher getting routed back after a year in the rubber room while earning $135,000. Despite “numerous inappropriate acts” he can’t be fired, because he has tenure.

Tenure for even the worst teachers is a gift granted by Democrat politicians to the United Federation of Teachers in exchange for their political support. Mayor Bloomberg had promised to end “tenure as we know it”. He never did, but his reforms cut tenure from nearly all teachers to around half. Under Bill de Blasio, a majority of public school teachers were tenured again.

And, once tenured, they’re nearly impossible to fire.

To understand the hundreds of school employees arrested in less than a year on child sex charges, 226 of them teachers, you have to begin with the millions of dollars that unions contribute to politicians to enable these taxpayer-funded crimes against children to continue.

The UFT is an affiliate of the American Federal Teachers. In the last election cycle, the AFT and the National Education Association spent $35 million on their political agendas. The AFT is deploying millions more in this election cycle. That money goes to score favorable terms at taxpayer expense, but it also buys complicity. The Democrats and their media who have come after Catholic schools and are now coming after Jewish schools over “educational standards” remain silent when it comes to the culture of sexual abuse in public schools. Why? Money.

The teachers’ unions are a vital campaign asset. And the abuse of children is a small price to pay for winning elections. Teachers’ unions were allowed to shut down schools on a massive scale, driving women out of the workforce and effectively ending education, as a demonstration of the sheer raw political power commanded by their organizations. A few hundred or even a few thousand sexually abused children a year are a small price to pay for millions in cash.

Every few years, teachers’ unions call strikes and demand even higher school spending. Union members claim that they’re shutting down schools to demand more money for the sake of the children. Teachers, the media argues, should be paid like NBA players. But while unionized public school teachers do molest almost as many people as professional athletes, they also perform far worse than NBA, NFL or the athletes of even the worst teams around.

In Baltimore, a high school student who passed only three classes in four years but kept getting promoted no matter how often he failed, scored near the top of his class with a 0.13 GPA. That’s after per pupil spending of $21,606. There’s no team on the planet that performs this badly.

But the real financial number is how much money teachers’ unions give to politicians so that they’ll ignore the systemic sexual abuse of students. What do the millions in campaign spending by teachers’ unions factor out to when divided by the number of sexually abused children?

What is the price of one child’s innocence?

Democrats and teachers’ unions have calculated that price. But we’re the ones paying it.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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