Radical far-left American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten is once again attacking parents and limiting opportunities for our nation’s children.
In a recent discussion, Weingarten said words like “school choice” or “parental rights,” are the “same kinds of words” used by segregationists. If you use those words, you are “one of them” ie. you are a racist for wanting better educational opportunities for your children.
And although Weingarten is trying to walk back the disgusting comments, pretending she was just making an innocent comment about “language” rather than calling millions of parents racist, Randi has a long history of outrageous accusations and choices.
In 2017, she suggested that school-choice programs are “only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.”
Weingarten was deeply involved in the damaging decisions made during COVID that children out of the classrooms and forced them to mask up for an outrageous length of time once they returned.
In April 2021, Weingarten argued that teachers cannot return to the classroom because the Jews have too much power. The union also complained that the teachers were too afraid to come to work.
But Weingarten is not alone in her vitriolic rhetoric.
Stacy Davis-Gates, President of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU, ) is a prominent opponent of school choice. Davis-Gates has suggested that “school choice was actually the choice of racists” and said this about parents who support school choice running for local school boards:
“Yes, we are concerned about the encroachment of fascists in Chicago. We are concerned about the marginalization of public education through the eyes of those who’ve never intended for Black people to be educated. So we’re going to fight tooth and nail to make sure that type of fascism and racism does not exist on our Board of Education.”
Racists AND fascists no less!
SubX News reports that Davis-Gates does, however, support public education alternatives for some children: her own. One of her children attends a private Catholic high school in Chicago.
Go to a school that Weingarten likes: a school run by the government or, if you’re absolutely determined to go the charter school route, one whose teachers are a member of her union.
But the problem is that those schools often aren’t a good option, particularly for minority students.
In 2005, the Weingarten started a unionized charter school, promising that “real, quantifiable student achievement” would disprove the “misguided and simplistic notion that the union contract is an impediment to success.”
But by 2014, only 2% of its eighth-graders were proficient in math and 11% were proficient in English.
At that point, the union threw in the towel and closed its elementary and middle school.
But if you prefer not to choose a school at which your child has a 2% chance of learning math or, God forbid, you think you have “parental rights” to choose a better school, well then, you’re a racist.