Randi Weingarten’s woke union will focus on anything but education
Jack Elbaum
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Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers will do just about anything to avoid discussing, or putting effort toward improving, educational outcomes. This sad fact was on display yet again last week when the AFT announced it will be participating in a 15-city rolling bus protest in Florida over the next few days.
Weingarten tweeted, “Ron DeSantis wants to make Florida the state where ‘woke goes to die’ but we’re supporting a bus tour to ‘awake’ the state to the Governor’s failures economically and his attacks on working people and their families.”
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https://twitter.com/rweingarten/status/1670578111845367810?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The questions are just as numerous as they are obvious: Why is a teachers union allocating resources for a political protest? What does a protest like this aim to accomplish? Does it help provide a “high-quality public education” as the AFT says in its mission statement? Why is the union promoting overtly partisan messaging? If the AFT promotes wokeness in protests, does it also want wokeness to be infused into K-12 curriculum? I could go on.
None of these questions are likely to be answered honestly any time soon. The answers would almost certainly be damning. However, they become even more important in light of the failing state of too many of our nation’s schools. According to the Nation’s Report Card released by the Department of Education, students’ scores in reading, math, and history all dropped to lows this year not seen since the 1990s.
The story is even worse in many cities, where there are huge districts in which almost 60% of students are chronically absent. In Baltimore, for example, just 8% of students are proficient in math and 16% are proficient in reading. In Chicago, 20% read at grade level, and 15% are proficient in math.
The school closures that Randi Weingarten herself was instrumental in prolonging exacerbated these problems further. Studies show that students lost months of learning in math and reading and that it has not been easy to make up the lost progress.
It seems that the AFT’s priority, then, should be focusing on promoting policies that result in positive educational outcomes — not spending time and resources on political campaigns opposing Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in an effort to make Florida more woke.
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Unfortunately, this seems to be a theme with the AFT and its leader, though. Weingarten consistently spends her time sounding off about random political issues such as inflation, Ukraine, and guns rather than, you know, education.
People and organizations make their priorities clear with actions. In the case of Randi Weingarten and the AFT, their priorities have been made clear time and time again: wokeness over education.
Jack Elbaum is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.