The liberal media and their allies in the teachers’ unions are spiraling after Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary delivered a brutal truth bomb on CNN: unions protect mediocre teachers while America’s education system crumbles. As the Department of Education—a bloated bureaucracy long overdue for dismantling—begins its downsizing under President Donald Trump’s leadership, left-wing panelists like Bakari Sellers and former Biden aide Ashley Allison floundered, desperately defending the very system that has failed American students for decades.
O’Leary didn’t hold back, exposing how teachers’ unions prioritize job security over student success. “Unions that keep mediocre teachers in place in every high school in America when we should be firing them,” he declared. “We have broken the system long ago through unions.”
The facts back him up—despite pouring billions into education, U.S. math and reading scores lag embarrassingly behind other developed nations. Yet instead of acknowledging the crisis, Allison tried to deflect, weakly invoking her teaching background before O’Leary shut her down: “The lowest-paid person in America that deserves a lot more money is a great teacher.”
Sellers, meanwhile, embarrassingly argued that weak unions in Southern states prove they aren’t the problem—ignoring how union-backed policies like tenure and rigid pay scales stifle competition and excellence nationwide. O’Leary fired back: “They have weak teacher unions, but they have unions.” The reality? Unions resist merit-based pay, protect underperforming educators, and push radical ideologies—like critical race theory and gender activism—instead of focusing on core academics.
The COVID-19 school closures, championed by these very unions, accelerated the disaster. Locking kids out of classrooms caused catastrophic learning loss, with 2024’s Nation’s Report Card confirming test scores still haven’t recovered. Yet rather than take accountability, unions like the NEA and AFT spent years pushing divisive political agendas—from gun control to transgender policies—while students fell further behind.
President Trump’s bold plan to dismantle the Department of Education is the first step in breaking the unions’ stranglehold.
By decentralizing power and returning control to states and parents, we can finally reward excellence, fire failures, and put students first—something the left’s union puppets will never allow.