Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, took to the podium at the National Press Club earlier today to deliver a stern lecture on the current state of public education and to issue dire warnings about threats to our nation, our values, and our civic ideals. The address was billed as a defense of public education, but Weingarten failed to acknowledge in any meaningful way why trust is in decline or to acknowledge her own role in damaging an essential American institution.
“In good times and bad, public schools are cornerstones of community, of our democracy, our economy, and our nation,” she began. But malefactors of great wealth including (but not limited to) Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Betsy DeVos, and the Walton and Koch families are actively seeking to destroy it. “The Betsy DeVos wing of the school privatization movement is methodically working its plan,” she insisted: “starve public schools of the funds they need to succeed. Criticize them for their shortcomings. Erode trust in public schools by stoking fear and division, including attempts to pit parents against teachers.”
I’m sympathetic to the argument that diminished trust in public education is bad for the country. In the new issue of National Affairs, I argued that conservatives “should think long and hard before retreating from engagement with traditional public education,” simply because the vast majority of America’s children are educated inside their walls and likely will be for generations. We have a vested interest in the outcomes of all children, regardless of the roof under which they learn and have their character formed.
But it is disingenuous for the head of the nation’s second largest teachers union to blame only others for the crisis of trust in public education. Weingarten correctly cited “the urgent work of helping kids recover from learning loss, from sadness, from depression, and from the other effects of the pandemic” while conveniently neglecting to mention how her union fought to keep schools closed. Likewise she lamented “culture war fearmongering” over critical race theory, “disgusting unfounded claims that teachers are grooming and indoctrinating students, and pronouncements that public schools push a ‘woke’ agenda” including book bans and “bullying vulnerable children” as if these concerns were made from whole cloth or a figment of parents’ imagination. Two years ago, Parents Defending Education, a national advocacy group, began inviting parents to submit incident reports to its website documenting instances of schools and teachers imposing an “activist agenda” on children. In a little over 18 months, PDE received more than 2,000 such reports from all 50 states and independently corroborated one-fourth of them.
Yesterday, Florida became the sixth and largest state to enact universal education savings accounts, which allow families to opt out of public schools and use state dollars to pay for private school tuition, tutors, textbooks, curriculum and other educational resources. As Jay Greene and Jason Bedrick of the Heritage Foundation have documented, the sudden surge in legislative action is being driven by values-based issues that Weingarten waives away as culture war fearmongering. “Whether it’s placing biological males in the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, calling children by pronouns that differ from their sex behind parents’ backs, or teaching a radical and ahistorical ideology that condemns America as irredeemably racist,” Greene and Bedrick wrote recently in National Review, “public schools are breaking faith with the families they are supposed to serve.”
Even more absurd, is Weingarten’s sudden interest in testing and accountability. “Voucher programs are proliferating even though research shows that, on average, vouchers negatively affect achievement,” she claimed, an assertion of questionable accuracy. But it was just few short years ago that Weingarten was making precisely the opposite argument, that test scores “don’t help children build trusting relationships and instill confidence and persistence. And they ignore the countless other ways educators nurture and develop our children.” Apparently, it is only in public schools where these unmeasurable value-adds are to be found.
In her tub-thumper, Weingarten invoked a litany of great Americans extolling the virtues of education for guaranteeing freedom and safeguarding democracy. “Thomas Jefferson argued general education was necessary ‘to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.’” What Weingarten seems not to comprehend is that the “privatization” movement that clearly is commanding her full and overdue attention is precisely that: Americans judging for themselves that public education is not serving their needs.
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