High school teachers vs parents (and America)

Over the past year it has often felt as if teacher’s unions were working against the interest of both parents and students, i.e. demanding that classrooms remain closed even after most teachers had been vaccinated and while many private schools were open. But over the past day or so, there have been reports about a couple of individual teachers who are quite openly doing things in the classroom to which most parents would probably object.

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Let’s start with teacher Kristin Pitzen who works a high school in Orange County, CA. Pitzen recently posted a Tik Tok video in which she describes how and why her classroom doesn’t have an American flag. It turns out she took it down because it made her uncomfortable and then “lost” it. Pitzen has now been removed from the classroom while the school investigates.

The Newport-Mesa Unified School District has removed a teacher from the classroom while it investigates a posting of a video on social media in which she is heard saying she told students they could pledge allegiance to an LGBTQ pride flag, since she’d removed the American flag from her room…

Newport-Mesa school board President Karen Yelsey said Monday that she was “very disappointed, and I was outraged when I saw this, because it bothers me personally,” particularly while the nation is still mourning 13 military service members killed last week in Afghanistan.

Here’s a local news report about the video and the reaction from parents.

Also today, Project Veritas has posted a new video about a high school teacher in Sacramento named Gabriel Gipe. Gipe has an Antifa flag in his AP government classroom. He explains, in what is obviously an undercover video, that his goal during the school year is to turn his students into “revolutionaries.” He actually offers extra credit to students who attend left-wing rallies.

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Individual teachers are free to fly the Pride flag or the Antifa flag and show it respect if they wish to do so. However, asking students to treat either of those flags as a progressive substitute for the American flag is out of line. Also out of line is using your position as a teacher to push uninformed students toward a particular political viewpoint rather than educating them about their government. Gipe doesn’t seem capable of a neutral stance toward his subject matter.

All you have to do is imagine how parents in San Francisco or Boston would react if a teacher did the same thing with the Gadsden flag or a Thin Blue Line flag or even a Confederate Rebel flag, i.e. asking students to acknowledge it each morning or suggesting it’s equivalent to the country’s flag. Suddenly, you’d have a lot of parents on the left saying that was wildly inappropriate. And if the same teacher was doing his best to get students to participate exclusively in right-wing causes (or religious gatherings) for extra credit that would definitely be seen as a problem. The same is obviously true here even if some progressives would prefer to wink and pretend it’s fine when they do it.

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I suspect there is a lot more of this going on than we hear about in the national or even the local media. Videos of teachers behaving like this seem to pop up pretty regularly and almost always the teachers are on the left. Now that teacher’s unions are embracing Critical Race Theory you can probably expect even more of this sort of thing in the near future.

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | November 21, 2024
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David Strom 11:20 AM | November 21, 2024
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