A frequent jab at the AFT is that it puts teachers before students, a framework perfectly summed up in a quote attributed to former union president Al Shanker: “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, then I will start representing the interests of the students. Shanker’s biographer, Richard Kahlenberg, found no record of Shanker saying this and doesn’t believe he ever did, but that hasn’t stopped union critics from citing him. Weingarten has a rebuttal: good working conditions for teachers create good learning conditions for students. But Weingarten, in fact, represents the teachers, not the students. Often, such as when it comes to issues like classroom size or school budgets, their interests overlap. Sometimes they don’t.
For a period during the pandemic, the apparent interests of the two groups diverged, and a series of fault lines began to open up across the country, separating not only Republicans from Democrats, but also parents from teachers, centrist Democrats from progressives and urban black parents from suburban whites. parents, and even dividing the teachers’ union itself. These dividing lines widened as reopening debates merged with fights over how schools should approach teaching the country’s racial history, as well as sexuality and gender identity.
What has become increasingly clear to me in recent months, as I have spoken to dozens of politicians, political advisers, union leaders, parent activists, and education scholars about the upheavals in American education, is that it is no longer possible to separate education about politic. and that public schools are more vulnerable than ever. How did Randi Weingarten end up at the center of the 2024 Republican primary? The only way to answer that question is to reexamine America’s education wars and the competing political agendas that drive them. “Oh my gosh no! You’re welcome!” Pompeo responded when I asked if he was perhaps being hyperbolic in his comments about Weingarten. “It’s not just about Ms. Weingarten, but she has been the most visible face of the destruction of American education.”
in the chaotic In the early months of the pandemic, teachers were celebrated as essential workers, heroically continuing to serve America’s children from their homes, often with limited resources and inadequate technology. But during the summer of 2020, things started to change. There was already preliminary research showing that students suffered academically due to remote learning. Schools across Europe had begun to reopen without major outbreaks, and many of the United States’ private and parochial schools were making plans to resume in-person learning at the start of the new school year. Many public school parents also wanted their children back in the classroom. But many teachers seemed resistant to the idea.
Due to the decentralized structure of the US public education system, which has some 14,000 different school districts, the federal government was unable to order schools to reopen for in-person learning, but in July 2020, the President Trump threatened to withhold federal funds of those who did not. His education secretary, Betsy DeVos, echoed her sentiments, demanding that the nation’s schools be “fully operational” by the fall without providing a specific plan for doing so.
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