Teachers’ Union Boss Randi Weingarten Says Conservatives Are Working to ‘Undermine’ Teachers

Susan Berry, PhD

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten said Wednesday at a union conference that conservatives are “working consistently” to undermine teachers.

“Conservatives are working consistently to undermine educators in this country,” Weingarten said at the New York State United Teachers conference this week. “They’re in the same race as we are between fear and hope, aspiration and despair, democracy and autocracy. And they’re doing this because our members worked so hard during COVID.”

A Twitter thread from AFT presented some of the other highlights of Weingarten’s address.

“I know how exhausted you all are,” Weingarten told NYSUT members. “But you continue this work because that’s who you are. That’s what this administration is trying to do: Help working families. This new #InflationReductionAct will help keep costs down, invest in the environment, lower drug prices.”

Referring to teachers’ unions as “trusted messengers” in a “post-truth society,” Weingarten said it is up to union members to “strengthen democracy.”

“What right wing extremists understand is what Americans understand: That public schools are foundational,” she said, adding, “These extremists are fighting these culture wars, and the attacks are only going to get worse. It’s a strategy to divide educators from parents, to create apathy and fear. These are the biggest tools they have to win.”

Stressing that teachers and other staff need certain “conditions” to be able to “help kids,” Weingarten said, “But we believe in public ed as an anchor in this country. Another anchor in this country? Unions.”

However, Moms For America Senior Director Quisha King told Fox News Digital Weingarten was promoting a “failing system.”

“Randi Weingarten says ‘kids won’t become critical thinkers’?” King said, adding:

What she fails to realize, is the way public school is going, kids are not learning critical thinking skills now. She wants to continue to push kids into a failing system because she is only concerned about her own outcomes, not the children’s. Kids are struggling academically now more than ever because of her collusion with the CDC to lock kids out of learning. That is on top of a system that was already failing to educate kids. Randi can say whatever she wants, the proof is right in front of us and parents will not let these bureaucrats determine the future of our children. School choice is on the move and not going away anytime soon.”

At the end of March, House Republican leaders exposed the unprecedented level to which the Biden Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collaborated with Weingarten’s AFT to create the national health agency’s guidance on the issue of keeping the nation’s government schools locked down during the pandemic.

The Republicans’ report noted emails between the AFT, the White House, and CDC showed the union’s “cozy relationship with the Biden Administration’s political leadership at the CDC positioned the union to impose line-by-line edits to the Operational Strategy on at least two separate occasions, despite the CDC’s past practice to keep draft guidance confidential.”

Weingarten warned NYSUT members that “elections matter,” and that “[W]e have lawmakers running in states across the country, who are denying the results of the 2020 election, spouting the Big Lie.”

The union leader also targeted the 2nd Amendment during her address to union members, stating “weapons of war have no place in our communities.”

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Susan Berry, PhD, is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Randi Weingarten” by Florida Education Association. 

 

 

 

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