The school choice movement has seen more success in the past three months than over the past three decades. Why? Some point to the general aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Others point to a shift in choice proponents’ political strategy—emphasizing cultural concerns over testing data. Others point to the influence of the novel social media strategy executed by the American Federation for Children’s Corey DeAngelis. But DeAngelis himself frequently places the crown of the credit elsewhere: on the head of Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
The truth of that puckish assertion was in evidence earlier this week, when Weingarten gave a speech at the National Press Club titled, “In Defense of Public Education,” which dripped with a special species of hatred for half of America.
During the Trump administration, an ironic slogan became vogue in some quarters of the Left: “Love Trumps Hate.” It was ironic because its mouthers seemed entirely unaware of the hatred implicit in attributing the political preferences of their opponents to hatred. Most politically sane people understand that most everyone is motivated by a vision of—and desire to do—good. Most also understand that Americans of good faith can profoundly disagree about what is good, and how to promote it.
But not Randi Weingarten.
As cultural concerns over the character of public education have bubbled to the fore, Weingarten did not react at the National Press Club as though those concerns were rooted in conflicting visions of what is best for our nation’s children. Rather, Weingarten asserted her political opponents were “putting LGBTQ youth at risk” and “aiming to ban books about Black people and by Black authors.” Her political opponents “don’t give a damn about kids’ safety and well-being”—not even about whether kids kill themselves. She framed the debate as a “matter of life and death.” Naturally, Weingarten is on the side of life; her political foes are on the side of death.
How about policies attempting to rein in sexually inappropriate indoctrination? “The intent and effect,” she says, “is to create a climate of fear and intimidation.” Parents who are alarmed by pornographic books in school libraries aren’t reacting defensively to protect their children’s innocence; they are trying to frighten and intimidate. They are, actually, “banning books and bullying vulnerable children.” (I’ve personally spoken at length to many parents concerned about sexually explicit books in school libraries. I’ve detected no hint of a desire to bully vulnerable children. On the contrary, I’ve noticed an overriding concern with their own children’s vulnerability.)
Most Americans still trust their local public schools in particular, but more are beginning to distrust public education in general. This is not the result of a right-wing con job. Distrust is, rather, a reasonable reaction when an institution operates under the outsize influence of an organization whose leader believes that you and your concerns are motivated by hatred.
If Weingarten had evinced more compassion, wisdom, and political grace, she could have perhaps headed off the school choice movement’s recent advances. Imagine if instead of characterizing conservative parents as “bullies” who “don’t give a damn” about whether children kill themselves, she had instead dealt with concerns over critical race theory by saying something like: “Our schools are doing their best to promote racial harmony. I understand the objections of some parents who see some efforts as counterproductive, and I’ve seen some examples of practices that alarm me. Let’s have teachers and parents work closely together to find the best approach.” Or if she had reacted to concerns about gender identity and sexual orientation by saying this: “It’s important to make all students feel safe and welcome. But it’s obviously inappropriate for teachers to take a proactive interest in their students’ sexuality, or to cut parents out of the equation when it comes to gender identity. Our schools are strong enough to strike the right balance.” Or if she had reacted to concerns about sexually explicit library books by saying: “I’ve seen some explicit library books that are obviously not age-appropriate. But it’s important to not blame educators or overreact to what is really a limited problem.”
Weingarten was in the perfect position to police her far-left flank, stand up for traditional teacher professionalism, and rebuild trust in public education in the wake of the pandemic. She chose not to do so.
She chose, instead, to ascribe to sheer malice the parental reaction against what many earnestly saw as the intrusion of a novel and divisive social agenda. Republican politicians paid attention to her rhetoric as she defended public education by attacking half the country as bigots. And they decided, quite reasonably, that parents have a right to send their children to schools outside of the influence of someone who hates them.
like a good little alinskiite, weingarten espouses her true views as those of her enemies. and make no mistake, she and her ilk view a free people as the enemies of their satanistic goals.
“Weingarten was in the perfect position to police her far-left flank”
she is the far left flank, which is a psychotic condition, she has no intention of policing herself, ANYMORE THAN LENIN, STALIN, AND HITLER DID!!!!!
It is about time that the elected officials who work for US started to crack down on the indoctrination of our youth! Please take the next step and dismantle the Federal Department of Education. The DOE should be a local entity with NO interference from the Federal Government. It is a LOCAL issue! We need LESS government interference with local issues. That includes State Governors who try to overrule local zoning ordinances!
no government/public k-8 school.
Seems to me that a really good share of the distrust toward public/government education from a large segment of the general public comes from observations of a combination of considerable amount of obviously displayed secrecy on the part of public school governance, administration and teachers, much of which only came to light with virtual education where parents personally got to see public education in action.
Both the institutions and the parents suddenly and unexpectedly were greatly surprised by those experiences and the resultant reactions on both sides, parents v. institutions and left v. everyone else.
Then in the aftermath, the oft repeated failed institutional attempts to cover up what was revealed, what was being discussed and enacted at the governance level, then the failed attempts to exclude interested parties in said governance meetings and actions. Finally, the rather obvious dislike, disrespect and even hatred on the parts of the unions, many of the governance bodies and many of the teachers themselves.
To a lesser degree, all the vocal, oft idiotic and oft hate-filled social media and other public output on the part of far too many teachers and others involved with the institutions.
This has been a long time coming. While arrogance and ignorance on the part of the education community regarding a number of topics* has been observed by some, especially those with a business background and/or good memories for comparative teaching methods, as well as from some strained interactions of individual institutional folks with parents, now most of the public is seeing these issues as well as and more stridently in conjunction with the new abilities for the outside’s ability to see inside the institutional cloisters of public education.
* Among those topics, including:
1) That a student and the institutional income and expenses therefore supporting said student going to programs such as vouchers or Running Start “take money away from public education”. Anybody reasonably well versed in business administration knows this is an abject misconception even a falsehood as along with the income/student goes all the expenses associated with the student. Given that public education is not a for-profit endeavor, that should zero-out with no loss to the institution. The ONLY argument on their side can be a loss of economy of scale. Countering economy of scale with public education is the existing and increasing top-heavy nature of most such public institutions, wherein the more students, the more and greater percentage of overhead and waste at every level beyond the classroom.
2) Some may recall the fad of the 1990s of “whole word learning” (WWL) combined with the more zealous adherents tossing out all “sounding it out” method (SIOM) of teaching early reading. Many or most of the younger such teachers having learned WWL from post-secondary instruction had never heard of SIOM or could initially understand what that may entail.
Of those (including some parents of that time) versed in the earlier SIOM, some quickly realized that while WWL was very effective for shorter and most frequently used words (“the”…) but useless for any new words that budding even advanced readers would encounter. Teachers most zealous about WWL, as noted, often excluded SIOM, removing a “tool” from the tool set that their students would later be able to bring to task. Older parents may have also noticed that an earlier generation of either zealous or lazy teachers had removed the “tool” of using word roots to figure out new words (both for readers and speakers) which is really handy when initially encountering a new word.
Personally, it was, among other insights, rather enlightening and disconcerting to engage such zealots and to experience the palpable disrespect and disregard of some of the noted zealots toward parents whom such teachers considered ignorant and backward.
3) Differing math methods were also introduced to exclusion of previous methods. Sometimes that was not too bad. However, some, as with the WWL v. SIOM issue resulted with young adults entering the workforce minus what had previously been needed tools to use when tasks encountered did not fit nicely into the neatly paradigms to which their smaller tool set were designed and taught. Too many such new members of the workforce also brought a diminished toolbox that included the same disrespect for alternative methods and were loath to allow experienced colleagues to provide them with the needed tools for the encountered situations.
One of the main complaints I heard from fellow teachers, back in the stone age, when I was doing my 30 year stint in the classroom, was–“We need for our students’ parents to be more involved in their child’s education.” Now, that public education has moved away from actually “educating” children and more toward “indoctrinating” them, the educational professionals have changed their tune. They now wish to keep all parents in the dark as to what is actually going on in the classroom, because what’s going on is an atrocity. When I started teaching, before Pres.Carter instituted the Department of Education, public education in the USA was always rated in the top 5-10 countries internationally as far as quality of education was concerned. Now, our rating has dropped so low a caterpillar would have to squat to see them. We have students graduating from high school and college who don’t have even a basic understanding of the fundamentals necessary to be considered “well-educated”. One might ask why and the answer would be that the progressive socialist teachers of today no longer actually teach the basic fundamentals. They indoctrinate using leftist Marxist theory. The demise or our public education system started with the meddling of the newly formed DOE, the educational unions (NEA, AFT,etc.) and the progressive socialists. When these progressive socialist Democrats took over, it became clear that what they wanted wasn’t well-educated students with the skills to think for themselves, but little automatons who would march to the leftist drum without ever questioning its goals. Now, they are grooming our most precious commodity, our children, to believe in and accept, as normal/natural, every perverse type of behavior known to man–all in the name of increasing their voter base and attempting to insure that every tradition upon which this great country was built is designated as “racist, homophobic, transphobic, hateful, and nothing more than “white supremacy”. Their end goal is governmental take-over of our children. It wouldn’t surprise me if, eventually, they decided that removing children from their homes at a certain age and turning them over to the state, is the next best and very necessary step to insure their agenda comes to complete fruition. My question is: Are we going to continue to sit quietly by and let this happen, as so many of us are doing now? Or are we going to let the government, the leftist teacher’s unions and the progressively left teachers know, with certainty, that our children don’t belong to the state. Speak now, before it’s too late!
More division perpetrated by the democrats. It’s all part of a plan. Every day we get more and more changes to our freedom. Little by little everything is taken away from us. The constitution has been eliminated by de democrats in favor of a dictatorship.
Home school. We did, worked great.
We still would have the problem of federal control of schools rather than local. Thanks to Pres. Carter.
Unions (Randy Weingarten) and College Departments of Education are the worst thing to happen to public education. Public education has run it’s course. Let education funds follow the students and let’s see if public education can survive.
Unions are concerned for their power, period! creating false claims about parents is about the extent of what you need to know about this “leader”. Public education is about the students and the students are from a family with parents at the head. Who does this union serve? Dictate the teachers to drive agenda that in turn chases good teachers away. No thought given to school customers, the students and by extension the parents. Time for union to go away.
Folks like Weingarten should have no place in governmental authority. America is not a place where a few priviliged people get to dictate policy for everyone else. Everyone in America has a voice and has a vote. Her opinion is of no greater value than someone elses.
Weingartens rigid control over this nation and our govt is beginning to crack as now 6 states have voted for school choice and vouchers. There will be many court cases but the days of students and parents being abused by politics is about to end. We have wasted almost as much funding
fake public education in this country as we have spent on the war on poverty and the war on drugs.
I am 100% in favor of school choice. Give the parents very single cent of the money that is to go to the schools The schools should have zero dollars other then those provided by the parents. If the school wants more money the school will have to figure out how to attract more parents/students to their school. More more school levies. no more special programs funding. All the money goes to the parents and them to the schools.
Further if the parent is home schooling that he parent gets to bank the voucher.
absolutely correct. that is why the fascist leftist need to take him down.