‘Give Us a Voice,’ Says Education Freedom Advocate and Former Teacher Rebecca Friedrichs

Remote learning exposed agendas in the education community previously hidden from parents. Teachers are starting to share their stories now that parents and community members have gained an awareness of what is happening in tax-payer funded schools. “We have stories to tell,” says education freedom advocate and former teacher Rebecca Friedrichs. Heartland Daily News interviewed Mrs. Friedrichs for this exclusive, five-part feature.

Friedrichs taught in elementary schools for 28 years in southern California. After years of frustration with the California Teachers Union (CTA), she filed a lawsuit known as Friedrichs v. California Teachers’ Association, aimed at eliminating the forced unionization of teachers. The case was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016, which affirmed a lower-court decision against Friedrichs, because the court was deadlocked after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. The goal of Friedrichs’ suit was accomplished two years later in the landmark case of Janus v. AFSCME.

Friedrichs’ book, Standing up to Goliath: Battling State and National Teachers’ Unions for the Heart and Soul of our Kids and Country, documents her battles with the unions and the details of the lawsuit. Friedrichs is a Prager U host, was a panel participant for the Fox Nation series The Miseducation of America, and is the producer for the upcoming documentary Whose Children Are They?, available in select theaters on March 14. Friedrichs is the founder of For Kids and Country, an organization working to “Unite, Educate, Engage and Empower Parents, Teachers, Students and Citizens in the fight to restore America’s schools and culture.”

Heartland Daily News: What should state and local governments do to improve K-12 education?

Friedrichs: I have so many ideas here. The first thing I would ask policymakers at every level—county, state, national—I would ask you, will you please start calling on people like me—and there’s a whole bunch, hundreds—call on us to testify, because advocates are not as powerful as people who have actually lived it. We have been brutalized by these unions. We have stories to tell, and they cannot undermine our stories because they’re the truth and there are hundreds of us to stand behind it and say yes, that happened.

Please start calling on us so that we can help to end this tyranny in our schools and in our government agencies. We have people in other government agencies who are willing to speak out against very corrupt and brutal unions that are truly destroying our professions and our country.

I’m not saying every union is bad, but I am saying many of them are corrupt and they are a stronghold in a very negative way. We would love to speak out. Give us a voice.

The second thing I would say is, please make government unions illegal. They never should have been allowed to form in the first place, because government unions are collecting billions annually in “dues money,” tax-free, and they are spending much of it putting people into office. Maybe you can find out how much money they gave to some political campaigns, but you cannot count all the free boots on the ground that these unions provide by bullying teachers and other government workers into helping with these campaigns.

Many of these government employees do not want to help with these political things. They just want to do their jobs, and they’re being bullied and being told that they have to do phone-banking and all kinds of things. I had a teacher who was a friend who was told if you don’t do the phone banking, then we’re going to take money out of your paycheck to pay someone to do it.

These unions are brutal. If any of the rest of us did what they did, we’d be in trouble. Where these unions are controlling the political process, it’s completely out of balance. The way we fix that, in my opinion, is to make government unions illegal.

Heartland Daily News: What can policymakers do to help fix the schools?

Friedrichs: We need to make collective bargaining illegal in the public sector. We never should have had collective bargaining in the public sector. It removed parents from the conversation. Things happen behind their backs because they don’t have a seat at the table.

We need to get the government out of our classrooms. Specifically, we need to remove the national, state, and county departments of education. Schools should be run by parents, caring and effective teachers, and the community. Not these special interest groups.

I don’t know how many organizations now have their hands in our school system, but they are impacting policy decisions. They’re impacting laws. They are destroying the teaching profession. They’re making the classroom a dangerous place. They are removing outstanding and proven ways of educating children, such as phonics for reading; they’re removing that and replacing it with things that don’t work.

Heartland Daily News: In your book you address the bullying of teachers and provide numerous examples. Is there any policy initiative that could address that?

Friedrichs: I don’t think policy will fix the bullying. The so-called teacher unions—they do not deserve the right to be called teacher or union because they are not representing good teachers—have raised up activists who come into the teaching profession. They have bullied teachers into just accepting their way, but the good teachers, true teachers called to this profession who love the kids, who are excellent, can’t stand the unions once they find out what the unions are really about.

Teachers have been under the iron fist of these brutal unions. Teachers have always been forced to accept the representation, forced to fund them. Tno longer forced to fund, but now they’re still forced to accept the representation, so policy won’t fix this if they’re just going to put a band-aid on it and say, “Oh, unions don’t bully the teachers.” They will bully us—they will bully us worse when you opt out of the union. They basically mock you: now you’re a freeloader.

Heartland Daily News: So, a policy change would not help teachers with the bullying?

Friedrichs: The policy that needs to happen is making unions illegal so teachers can be liberated and can return to their true profession and our kids can start learning again. I’m happy to talk to any legislators at any level and give them a deep dive into what’s really going on from a firsthand position so that they can understand it better.

It’s unconscionable what we’ve done to our education system, and I pray that all people, including policymakers, will awaken to the fact that our schools are failing because of unions and their special-interest groups, period. And if we can get back to what we’re supposed to be doing, we not only will save trillions of dollars but we’ll actually educate our kids again and we will save our republic. We’ve ignored education way too long, and we let our domestic enemies destroy it.

In part two of our exclusive interview, Friedrichs responds to questions about the change in educational standards.

Look for the upcoming documentary Whose Children Are They?, in which Friedrichs and many other education experts share their insights and concerns about the current state of America’s public schools.