“The Chicago Teachers Union posted a social media memorial tribute to Assata Shakur, a convicted cop killer who fled to Cuba and was wanted as a terrorist,” notes the Illinois Policy Institute. Shakur was
a former Black Liberation Army member convicted in the 1973 killing of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster….
CTU’s post read in part: “Rest in Power, Rest in Peace, Assata Shakur… Today we honor the life and legacy of a revolutionary fighter, a fierce writer, a revered elder of Black liberation, and a leader of freedom whose spirit continues to live in our struggle.”
In 2013, the FBI placed her on the Most Wanted Terrorists list, offering a $2 million reward.
In 2023, another teachers union, the Colorado Education Association, passed a Marxist resolution declaring that capitalism inherently exploits children and harms education. The resolution declared that “CEA believes that capitalism requires exploitation of children, public schools, land, labor, and/or resources. Capitalism is in opposition to fully addressing systemic racism (the school to prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy, (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality, and income inequality.”
The teachers union claim that capitalism harms schools is contradicted by the fact that capitalist countries tend to be better at teaching students useful skills than Marxist countries. Communist regimes may be able to teach basic literacy, but they are very bad at teaching students to think creatively or do complex or mentally demanding tasks. Eastern European countries had lower IQs than Western European countries, directly proportional to the stultifying nature of their school systems. Albania, which suffered under the worst communist regime in Europe (which outlawed religion and killed most of its clergy), had the lowest average IQ in Europe, while Romania, which had the second most oppressive regime in Europe, had the second-lowest average IQ in Europe. By contrast, Albanian-Americans and Romanian-Americans exhibit perfectly normal intelligence and include many innovative people like John Belushi and John DeLorean.
The union is also wrong to depict capitalism as bad for children. Communist regimes have much higher child death rates than capitalist countries. Millions of children died in Communist China’s Great Leap Forward, an artificial, man-made famine. One example was when a starving “teenage orphan kills and eats her four-year-old brother” to survive during the famine. Communist North Korea suffered a famine in the 1990s that killed millions of people, while capitalist South Koreans right across the border had plenty to eat.
Teachers unions sometimes point to Cuba as an allegedly shining example of how Communism can improve an educational system. But this is both untrue, and ignores the fact that Cuba is very atypical: Communist Cuba received billions of dollars in aid annually from the Soviet Union, artificially propping up Cuban government services. Cuba’s communist regime did not give Cubans literacy. Cuba already had one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America by 1950, nearly a decade before Communist Fidel Castro seized power, according to United Nations data (statistics from UNESCO).
In 2016, the Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler debunked a politician’s claim that Castro’s rule significantly improved Cuban healthcare and education. In today’s Cuba, children are taught by poorly paid teachers in dilapidated schools. Cuba has made less educational progress than most Latin American countries over the last 60 years. For a time, literacy increased under Castro, just as it had increased under his non-communist predecessor, but that was due to the Soviet Union giving Cuba $4 billion a year, in a country with just 10 million people.
Cuba had about the same literacy rate as Costa Rica and Chile in 1950 (close to 80 percent). And it has almost the same literacy rate as they do today (close to 100 percent). Meanwhile, Latin American countries that were largely illiterate in 1950—such as Peru, Brazil, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic—have literacy rates of 90 percent or more today.
