SAINT PAUL, Minn. – Are teacher unions the guardians of America’s white supremacist culture?

According to the logic presented in a new op-ed from terrorist-turned-educator Bill Ayers, the answer is “Yes.”

In a June 29 news analysis for Truth-Out.org, Ayers lashes out at the recent California v. Vergara ruling in which Judge Rolf Treu determined that teacher tenure and other work protections violated poor and minority students’ constitutional right to a quality education.

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(Treu agreed with plaintiffs that teacher job protections keep inept and ineffective teachers in classrooms that disproportionately serve low-income and minority kids.)

Treu’s ruling caused Ayers to flip his lid, partly because the judge cited the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling  — which ended school segregation — as evidence that students have a constitutional right to an equal education.

Ayers uses the Brown reference to offer a meandering, revisionist history lesson that concludes the 1954 ruling conveniently coincided with white interests to prevent a “revolution led and defined by subjugated African-Americans” and to transform the South from a feudal society into a modern one, so it could help fuel America’s “capitalist juggernaut.”

Ayers’ biggest gripe is that Brown did nothing to address America’s “immoral and destructive system of white supremacy.”

The terrorist-turned-academic writes:

“Now comes Judge Treu using the lofty language of Brown to attack teachers, but without a word about the reality of districts continuing to herd black children into unnatural, chronically underfunded and inferior schools, and build ever higher walls, nor any mention of the policy interventions championed by Duncan and the corporate ‘reformers’ – things like the overuse and misuse of standardized testing, massive school closures and school ‘turnarounds,’ the stripping of needed resources, and inadequate scripted and ‘teacher-proof’ curriculum – that have disrupted and hurt urban districts for years. As usual, white supremacy is hiding in plain sight.” (emphasis added)

Back to question posed at the beginning of this blog: Are teachers unions the guardians of America’s white supremacist culture, as articulated by Ayers?

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Well, consider this little news nugget from Minnesota’s Saint Paul school district: A group of African-American parents met with school leaders last month to discuss ways of closing the achievement (or learning) gap that exists between the district’s white and black students.

The African-American parents urged Saint Paul school leaders to consider “longer school days, longer school years, and moving the best teachers to the schools that were struggling,” in order to boost learning opportunities, InsightNews.com reports.

Chief Academic Officer Michelle Walker told the parents that district officials are prohibited from making those changes unilaterally because of the language in Saint Paul teachers’ union contract, the news site adds.

Did you catch that? The teachers union – which is comprised mostly of white educators – is standing in the way of commonsense policies that would increase the academic performance of the district’s African-American students.

Consider this, too: If the Saint Paul school district is like most other districts, it spends 70 to 80 percent of its budget to pay employees’ salaries, health insurance, pensions, retirement bonuses and other benefits. Such spending practices don’t result in much left over for the students. (Ayers laughably describes this condition as “underfunded.”)

Let’s put this all in language Ayers can understand: The white adults in charge of educating Saint Paul’s African-American students care more about their “rights” – regarding control of the school calendar, work assignments and layoff policies – and their pay packages than they care about helping minority students succeed.

This problem isn’t unique to Saint Paul; school leaders in districts all across the country experience similar limitations over how they can manage their education system.

To be clear, we don’t believe teacher unions are motivated racism. We believe they’re driven by the selfishness and greed that characterizes the entire Big Labor movement.

However, if one buys Ayers’ argument that America is an inherently racist society, it’s only fair to ask if the nation’s teacher unions aren’t some of the worst offenders around.

By Ayers’ logic, they are.