Randi Weingarten Bites The Bullet

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK

A few weeks back we pointed out in this space that you don’t hear liberals accusing parents who send their children to private schools of racism as much as in the past. We speculated that liberal politicians and leaders of teachers unions have intuited they would lack credibility if they made that charge, considering the large number of politicians and teachers who send their children to private schools to avoid dangerous and dysfunctional local public schools.
It looks as if we spoke too soon. Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, seems to have decided that she had to bite the bullet and take a position in public for which she knows she will be charged with hypocrisy.
She knows that members of her union do not keep their children in dangerous inner-city schools. They use private schools if they are determined to live in downtown areas of New York City, or move to Long Island or Westchester County to find safe and stable public schools for their children. Even so, she leveled the charge of racism at those who push for school choice.
She made the accusation in a speech in late July to 1,400 AFT members in Washington, D.C., stating flatly, “Make no mistake: This use of privatization, coupled with disinvestment are only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” She said the word “choice” was “used to cloak overt racism by segregationist politicians like Harry Byrd, who launched the massive opposition to the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.” She followed up on Twitter a few days later: “Make no mistake: The ‘real pioneers’ of school choice were white politicians who resisted school integration.”
One can only wonder how many of the assembled teachers who cheered her remarks have children in private schools. Perhaps their salaries are sufficient to handle private school tuition and make vouchers and tax credits not all that necessary for them.
In any event, it seems clear: Weingarten fears that the push for school choice being championed by Betsy DeVos, the Trump administration’s secretary of education, is gaining momentum. DeVos contends these programs “most benefit families from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.” She described the term “privatization” as a “scare tactic from those who are invested in defending the status quo at all costs.” DeVos argued that teachers unions are “defenders of the system” over students.
Weingarten shot back at DeVos on Twitter. She said DeVos wants “the country to invest in individual students. NO we should invest in a system of great public schools for all kids.”
To which DeVos replied, “I couldn’t believe it when I read it, but you have to admire her candor. She has made clear that she cares more about a system — one that was created in the 1800s — than about individual students.”
Weingarten is no dummy. Why then does she act as if there is no difference between middle-class and poor Americans looking for a way to escape failing public schools and George Wallace?
In his syndicated column, Rich Lowry explored that question, pondering whether Weingarten has ever seriously considered the arguments for school choice “first planted in 1955 by Milton Friedman, the late Nobel Prize–winning libertarian economist never mistaken for a bigot. Friedman believed widely available vouchers would create a new dynamism in a state-dominated sector characterized by stasis.”
Lowry asked if Weingarten understands the extent to which “the real-world political impetus for choice has been developing alternatives to rotten public schools for poor minority kids without other options. The first notable law came in the late 1980s in Minnesota, championed by its Democratic governor, Rudy Perpich, and passed by its impeccably progressive legislature. It permitted parents to send their kids to school districts where they didn’t live with public money. The liberal American Prospect reported at the time that supporters of the reform included ‘1960s-era open school progressives’.”
Lowry also called our attention to the “experiment in Milwaukee to provide poor parents assistance to send their kids to private schools. Polly Williams, an African-American state assemblywoman from Milwaukee, became a high-profile advocate of choice. A Black Panther and the state chairman of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign, Williams was open about her ‘pro-black’ views and even said in private that she didn’t much like white people. Harry Byrd, the Virginia champion of massive resistance, she was emphatically not.”
Lowry notes that “half of the states in the union now have private school-choice programs, and more than 40 have charter-school laws. They don’t aim to take white kids out of integrated schools, but to take minority kids out of underperforming de facto segregated schools.”
He also observes that Weingarten’s “nemesis” when she was head of the New York City teachers union was “Eva Moskowitz, the founder of the Success Academy Charter Schools. Moskowitz is a Democrat who happens to believe poor kids deserve better than what they get in the traditional public school system. According to the New York Post, her 41 schools enroll about 14,000 kids, almost all of them minorities. The demand is vast, with annual waiting lists exceeding 10,000 families.”
What is the cause of Weingarten’s blind spot? Lowry says it is self-interest, and that the analogue for “for today’s choice programs” is not the segregationist academies of the South, “but the efforts by black leaders to bypass a system long designed to deny their children a proper education. Today, black kids aren’t legally excluded from the best schools but are legally bound to failing ones. In her speech, Weingarten bizarrely compared defenders of the status quo — amply funded by union dues, and embedded in entrenched bureaucracies — to David, and the reformers fighting for every inch to Goliath.
“These are the words of a woman who knows the other side has the moral high ground, and the only way she can try to regain it is through obfuscation and tortured rationalizations. Hers, in short, is the voice of someone who is losing — and deserves to.”
By the way, Weingarten’s salary as head of the AFT is around $500,000 per year. That is part of this scenario.
A reminder: I will step down from writing my weekly columns in The Wanderer at the end of August. I will be 75 this September and would like to spend more time traveling and pursuing leisure-time activities than a two-column-per-week deadline permits. It has been my great pleasure and honor to write each week for The Wanderer and to correspond with readers over these many years. My plan is to continue to submit an occasional article to the editors at The Wanderer; it is just the weekly columns that will stop.
Starting in September all correspondence to First Teachers should be sent to the new P.O. Box that will be posted by the editors very soon.

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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.