Attorney Bakari Sellers and former Biden campaign aide Ashley Allison flailed Tuesday night when “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary reminded them that teachers’ unions “keep mediocre teachers” in place.
The Department of Education announced that it cut roughly half of its staff Tuesday between voluntary buyouts, the termination of probationary employees and layoffs, which is seen as the first step in implementing Trump’s campaign promise to close the department entirely. Sellars complained about Trump’s plan to shut down the department, claiming it would harm children.
“As an individual who worked in the education system for 14 years, there’s a 100,010 high schools in America. Majority of them are New York, Florida, Texas and California. Our reading and math scores are the worst in the G7 and the G20 in terms of how many dollars we spend to advance our children,” O’Leary said. “Why? Unions. Unions that keep mediocre teachers in place in every high school in America when we should be firing them. You want to talk about whack as our theme of tonight’s show? I would like to fire teachers — wait, wait, wait. And I’d like to pay a lot more to the teachers that advance math and reading scores, that push our system forward against every G7-to-20 country. We have broken the system long ago through unions.”
School closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, largely backed by teachers unions, lead to significant learning loss for students. According to the Nation’s Report Card’s 2024 data, student test scores still remain below pre-pandemic levels nationwide. As student scores continued to plunge, national teachers unions frequently promoted left-wing causes such as critical race theory, gun control and gender ideology.