There is a reason why you know who Randi Weingarten, the leader of the second-largest teachers union in the country, is.
She’s the one who threatened to strike if schools did not close in 2020. She is the one who said that school closures were not that big of a deal because “kids are resilient." She is the one who influenced the CDC to change its COVID-19 guidelines using almost her exact language. She is the one who introduced a campaign to bring Ibram X. Kendi’s simplistic ideas on race into “every classroom.” In other words, you know who Randi Weingarten is because she is a left-wing culture warrior — and she is proud of it.
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But now, Weingarten wants you to believe that she is completely opposed to “culture wars,” particularly in education. On Sunday, Weingarten published a piece on the American Federation of Teachers website titled “Culture wars harm education.”
The issue is not so much the basic statement, which seems to be self-evident. Of course, it is preferable for schools to be places of learning for the benefit of children instead of the centers of culture wars that win political points for adults. Rather, the issue is her premise that the culture war somehow just appeared in a vacuum. This assumption is reflected in her decision to focus the entire piece on Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) education policy. But to believe that the culture war over education only emerged because conservatives needed a new boogeyman would suggest a total lack of self-awareness on Weingarten’s part.
Simply looking at the past few years is instructive here.
First, when COVID-19 came to America in March 2020, there was understandably a lot of uncertainty and fear. But one of the first things that was known about the virus was that children were the least vulnerable to severe infection and that schools were not a hot spot of COVID transmission. Nonetheless, there were prolonged school closures across the country, closures that can be directly linked to cyclical activism by teachers unions such as Weingarten’s. From “die-ins” to strike threats to claims that opening schools was “rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny,” their goals were made quite clear, and their consequences were quite dire.
Then, in recent years, some schools have also begun to incorporate radical lessons on race and gender into their curriculum. Deep reporting on this issue has exposed shocking anecdotes of teachings on race that can only be described as regressive and teachings on gender that are downright bizarre. And those anecdotes are also backed up with numbers. The Manhattan Institute recently found that "ninety-three percent of American 18- to 20-year-olds said that they had heard about at least one of eight [critical social justice] concepts from a teacher or other adult at school, including 'white privilege,' 'systemic racism,' 'patriarchy,' or the idea that gender is a choice unrelated to biological sex.'" Sixty-eight percent said that the concepts were taught as truth, not as one perspective among others.
In response to these developments, there was a natural backlash. The culture war started because one side decided that it was no longer going to allow politically driven actors to make decisions unilaterally like these about what was “best” for children. After all, teachers unions have incentives only to do what's best for their members. This is not to say that the pushback was and is not thoroughly imperfect. Of course it is. Rather, it is just to point out that it is a natural outgrowth of an education leadership more concerned with its own goals and politics than with children. It did not emerge out of nowhere.
And most people intuitively know this. That is why a recent poll taken by the American Federation of Teachers (which is Weingarten’s union) found that a significant plurality of likely voters in battleground states believe traditional public schools are spending too much time on topics related to gender identity, and 60% are dissatisfied with the way they are teaching about race. Moreover, when it comes to trust, more voters now say they trust Republicans than Democrats with education, an unprecedented fact. CNN suggests that it has a clear cause: school closures.
The purpose of education is, in the words of Russell Kirk, “to develop the mental and moral faculties of the individual person.” If a society wishes to sustain itself, then it has no more foundational responsibility than to achieve this purpose. But, unfortunately, much of the public education system today fails to do either. If we wish to return American education to its proper state, then a real debate over what direction education should go may just be necessary.