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 110,000 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.”
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Allison took issue with O’Leary’s comments, trying to use her past as a teacher to oppose the layoffs at the Department of Education.
“But what do those cuts actually say — impact —” Allison said before O’Leary said, “What it means is — the lowest paid person in in America that deserves a lot more money is a great teacher.”
“I agree, as a former teacher,” Allison responded, with O’Leary saying, “And we can’t — in the system of unions in America, we keep mediocrity festering. We’re destroying the education system —”
Sellers cut in, claiming that some of the states struggling, the teachers’ unions were “weak.”
“I want to tell you why you’re wrong,” Sellers said. “Because the bottom 10 states that are underperforming, those states that I’m talking about in the south, let’s take South Carolina, for example, or Mississippi. You want to tell me one thing they don’t have? One thing they don’t have: strong teacher unions. So, there is no direct correlation —”
“They have weak teacher unions, but they have unions,” O’Leary responded.
After a further back-and-forth, O’Leary explained why the unions needed to be shown the door.
“Well, you got to fix the unions first because we do both agree, bad teachers destroy advancement of children,” O’Leary told Sellers.
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.
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