The Massachusetts Teachers Association Wants to Drop Standardized Tests and Jews

Is it time to drop them?

We here at the Flickering Beacon have a love-hate relationship with unions. The idea is not bad: We often need protection from the arbitrariness of our Supreme Leaders. The execution, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired. Our local Faculty Staff Union (FSU) and Professional Staff Union (PSU) have been sticking their nose in political affairs for years, thanks to our Comrades who would rather promote their woke politics and Twitter accounts than help us, their constituents. There are union members who, surprisingly, actually do their job and stay out of politics, but they are few and far between.

The local unions’ sinking mother ship, the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA), is even worse. They pocket our union membership dues and use it for noble causes such as advocating to remove the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) as a high school graduation requirement because scores plummeted due to the pandemic and standardized tests are, you know, racist and all that. They do not offer a reasonable alternative because it requires actual effort.

Most importantly, the MTA is very anti-racist. So much so that they have their own anti-racism task force, whose suspiciously sparse webpage states that its main role is to “develop anti-racism strategies for our locals, schools and communities”, or in other words - fill kids’ heads with conspiracy theories about dangerous things such as book censorship, systems of oppression and the Jewish people.

For example, on November 9, the MTA executive committee voted to call for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. A month later, on December 9, the MTA approved a motion that calls Israel’s campaign in Gaza “genocidal”. Whether you agree with the definition or not, you MUST wonder whether the best use of the time and resources of a Massachusetts professional organization, funded by our membership dues, is to vote on an international conflict. The resolution passed with a whooping majority of 34-11 (out of 117,000) members. Did we mention that December 9, 2023 was a Saturday, and that members of a certain faith don’t roll on Shabbos?

Hmmm… What a strange coincidence.

But it doesn’t stop there. On March 21 the MTA’s anti-racism task force hosted a webinar led, among others, by two of our distinguished colleagues, including our very own Hamas cheerleader extraordinaire, Prof. Khayke Scottish. The seminar was about anti-Palestinian racism, but Jewish teachers who attended the event said that the event was steeped in “crude anti-Israel propaganda” and “trafficking in antisemitic tropes”.

It is hard verify any of the above, since any mention of the webinar has mysteriously disappeared from the MTA website and the recording is not available to the public. One would think we invented the whole thing if it weren’t for the media attention and a flier announcing the event.

According to one source, some of the more inflammatory propaganda items include:

• Panelists villainized mainstream Jewish communal organizations and religious institutions, including synagogues, as arms of an Israeli propaganda machine and proponents of Jewish supremacy bent on using the charge of antisemitism to conceal Israeli crimes and suppress pro-Palestinian voices. Any similar charges against Palestinian organizations was characterized as “Anti-Palestinian racism”.

• Panelists erased Jewish peoplehood and redefined Zionist belief as unacceptable, but at the same time characterized the erasure of Palestinian peoplehood and national aspiration as racist.

• Falsely claiming the land of Israel was always called “Palestine”.

• Mischaracterizing Zionism as a European settler colonial movement premised on Jewish supremacy and bent on ethnically cleansing, expelling, and eliminating Palestinians.

• Idealizing Arab-Jewish relations in the Middle East before the establishment of the State of Israel.

• Whitewashing unlawful campus activities and student protests as innocent “pro Palestinian” activities.

• Claiming that mainstream Jewish communal organizations believe that mere criticism of Israel constitutes antisemitism (which is false), but then seriously characterizing similar criticism of Palestinian national movements, as well as pushback against the webinar itself, as “Islamophobia” and “racism”. Hypocrisy much?

…these are just a few examples. All that’s missing is a bunch of big-nosed Jews meeting in a secret place and plotting to control the world, or maybe something like this slide:

that was shown at the UMass Boston Antisemitism vs. anti-Zionism webinar that was co-organized by the same Hamas cheerleader extraordinaire on March 5. The slide described Zionism as a secretive, state directed, all-encompassing well oiled, well-funded propaganda machine that controls the world. If this is not a full blown Antisemitic trope, we don’t know what is.

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In response to the criticism, the MTA president, Max Page, gave a typical non-answer:

There are also issues about which our members have starkly diverging views. We do not run from those disagreements; we seek to engage with them. [...] The particular viewpoints expressed in these individual workshops do not represent the official views of the MTA." 

Which would be fine and dandy, except that, as mentioned above, the anti-racism task force is coming to your kids’ school.

The fallout was so bad that even two Democratic state senators wrote a scathing letter to the MTA and a group of teachers is planning to sue to MTA.

As a reminder, we are no longer obliged to pay union dues. Is there any hope to change them from within, or is it time to drop them once and for all?