Education Enemy #1
Why America hates Weingarten
RANDI Weingarten is wrong. Americans still love our teachers. We just don’t love our teachers-union leaders. Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, claimed in USA Today that “MAGA Republicans” are destroying public schools and it’s up to parents and teachers to save them.
She gets one thing right: Parents and teachers should join forces to fight for our nation’s public schools. The Republicans, however, are the least of her worries. When it comes to destroying public education, Enemy No. 1 is Randi.
For the past 15 years, Weingarten, a former lawyer and briefly a teacher, has presided over the union’s 1.7 million members, including more than 200,000 health-care workers in 18 states and over 250,000 retirees.
Under her leadership, the AFT, the 107-year-old, second-largest teachers union in the country, has strayed from its founding principles. Past AFT presidents, like Albert Shanker, were staunch believers in quality public education, evidenced by his support of charters, national competency testing, merit pay for teachers and rigorous highschool graduation requirements.
AFT boss Sandra Feldman backed George W. Bush’s bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act, which strived for increased accountability of schools.
Randi just wants to teach our kids how to be progressive activists, while they fall further behind in subjects like reading and math.
There’s an important role for activism in education. AFT’s rich history boasts being the first union to admit black teachers as members (in 1919), demand their equal pay and compulsory school attendance for black children.
During this era, union advocacy and the interests of students and families converged.
But, under Weingarten’s leadership, the politicization of teachers’ unions has grown more extreme; unions are increasingly concerned with policy outside of education and drag them into classrooms.
Randi conflates teachers with teachers unions, but union leadership today is a poor proxy for members. Though the AFT is a top Democratic donor, actual members are more diverse. A 2017 national Education Week Research Center survey showed that while 41% of members were Dems, 30% were independent and 27% Republicans.
About half said they avoided political activity to “some extent” or “a lot” because of their work. Many teachers are also parents and may not want their union leader’s politics to infiltrate their own children’s classrooms.
During the pandemic, Randi colluded with the Biden administration to keep schools closed.
She claimed it was to keep teachers and minority students safe, but in fact she was gaslighting us.
While schools had reopened safely across Europe, union messaging reinforced the notion that schools were unsafe and teachers would die in classrooms.
Minority families were told inperson school was a danger and remote was the safer, more equitable option. Some families and teachers then demanded remote school only; school-reopening advocates were smeared as “white supremacists.”
But remote failed to prove safer for teachers or students. A recent study reveals that teachers who worked remotely were more likely to experience depression and isolation than those teaching in-person.
Minority children suffered disproportionate learning loss and mental-health issues as a result of the disruption to their academics, sports and social activities — policies pushed by Randi as “equitable.”
And Randi continues to gaslight by pretending to be a savior to students damaged by the very policies she pushed. She also talks about parents and teachers as her partners, yet Randi is a multimillionaire, who earns over $500,000 a year.
She can hardly claim to be a woman of the people. She may have started out as a teacher, but today she is an out-of-touch extremist, yelling at, not talking (or listening!) to, her constituents.
In Democratic NYC’s failing schools, a minority-centric student population gets at $38,000 per child, teachers are well-educated and financing is equitably distributed across schools, not allocated by wealth of the constituent base. Republicans can’t take blame or credit for Randi’s policies.
The AFT’s mission includes a commitment to democracy. But as Philip K. Howard, author of “Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions,” says, “Democracy is a process of accountability,” and at every juncture, Randi has resisted accountability.
Today, as the nation struggles to heal the widening partisan divide, Randi fans the flames of the culture-war fires she helped start. On social media and in print she lobs missiles at “MAGA Republicans” and politicizes classrooms.
Shanker famously said, “I don’t represent children. I represent teachers . . . . But, generally, what’s in the interest of teachers is also in the interest of students.”
This is demonstrably true. Randi has said schools aren’t merely physical structures. Indeed, they’re breathing, living ecosystems, where teachers and students intertwine. There’s certainly opportunity for teachers unions to be restored to their founding principles representing teachers and improving student outcomes. But a change in leadership must come first.
Natalya Murakhver is co-founder of Restore Childhood, a nonprofit advocating for children. She is producing “15 Days . . . ,” a documentary on school shutdowns.