American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten is known primarily for two things: screaming into microphones at political rallies and making the teacher’s union an extension of the Democratic Party. However, Weingarten had an unintended substantive moment when she changed her earlier position on the elimination of the Education Department. Weingarten previously shrugged off the elimination of the department as not a big deal for education. Recently, she returned to her irate default in denouncing the elimination. The reason, however, was telling.
After Trump was reelected in November, Weingarten said that the elimination was not a big deal and that teachers had originally opposed the creation of the department: “I mean, my members don’t really care about whether they have a bureaucracy of the Department of Education or not. In fact, Al Shanker and the [American Federation of Teachers] in the 1970s were opposed to its creation.”
Now, however, Weingarten has resumed her natural state of being “really angry.” In an interview with MSNBC, Weingarten explained:
“That is why so many people are so mad about it. Because they’re just taking opportunity away from kids that don’t have it. So billionaires – kids of billionaires, they have it, they go to private schools. Everyone else, 90% go to public schools. Don’t take away their opportunity.Sorry, I’m really angry about this … I’m really angry,”
However, it is the reason that is most interesting.
In a podcast, Weingarten explained that they have to avoid such “block grants” going to families. Host Molly Jong-Fast readily agreed, raising the danger that it might even support Catholic and religious schools. Weingarten stressed that “We know, for example, what Texas would do. They’ll use it for vouchers. So they won’t give [federal funding] to the kids who have it now, they’ll just give it for vouchers.”
There is reason for Weingarten and the teacher’s union being so concerned. Florida allows for school choice and has demanded greater performance from public schools. Despite attacks by Weingarten and other Democrats, Florida has been ranked as the number one state for both education and the economy.
We have previously discussed how schools have been dropping the use of standardized tests to achieve diversity goals in admissions. That trend continued this month with Cal State dropping standardized testing “to level the playing field” for minority students. I have long been a critic of this movement given the overwhelming evidence that these tests allow an objective measure of academic merit and have great predictive value on the performance of students.
Many colleges and universities are returning to standardized testing after the much-acclaimed abandonment of the tests for a more “holistic approach” to selection.
However, public educators have continued to lower proficiency requirements and cancel gifted programs to “even the playing field.” The result has been to further hide the dismal scores and educational standards of many public school districts.
I previously wrote about how public educators and teacher unions are killing public education in America. Many of us have advocated for public education for decades. I sent my children to public schools, and I still hope we can turn this around without wholesale voucher systems.
Teachers and boards are killing the institution of public education by treating children and parents more like captives than consumers. They are force-feeding social and political priorities, including passes for engaging in approved protests.
As public schools continue to produce abysmal scores, particularly for minority students, board and union officials have called for lowering or suspending proficiency standards or declared meritocracy to be a form of “white supremacy.” Gifted and talented programs are being eliminated in the name of “equity.”
Once parents have a choice, these teachers lose a virtual monopoly over many families. They are no longer a captive audience. If public unions want to maintain funding, they will have to actually improve educational results for these families.
You see, Weingarten knows that, like her, they are “really angry,” but not about the future of a union that increasingly sounds like an educational cartel.
She’s like Chuckie Shroomer with a mop on her head.
The U.S. News Education score for Florida (and other states) is for HIGHER EDUCATION, not K-12. It’s based on the state’s system of universities and community colleges. Not sure what that has to do with Randi Weingarten, AFT and our nation’s K-12 public schools.
See the documentary “Waiting for Superman”. It explains so much of today’s public education predicament.
Twenty years ago as a behavioral management special education teacher I was written up for not letting my students walk out to protest when they couldn’t tell me what they were protesting. 🤦🏻 I left education after that.
“Everyone else, 90% go to public schools. Don’t take away their opportunity.”
That statement suggests that Ms Weingarten’s reasoning abilities are poor–killing off the federal DoE won’t “take away” anyone’s “opportunity.” The states ran their own education systems for, what?, a century and a half?, before the feds started interfering. All killing the federal DoE does is put the states in charge again.
“We have previously discussed how schools have been dropping the use of standardized tests to achieve diversity goals in admissions.”
Yeah, dumbing-down in action.
“…an objective measure of academic merit…”
Leftist schools don’t want “an objective measure of academic merit,” they want to pursue their ideologies. Maybe they should start admitting students based exclusively on the melanin content of their skins.
What Weingarten is “really angry” about is the growing possibility of losing her power–and losing her $560 thousand annual salary.
Actually state school systems and state highway departments were only created about 1915. They both are little more than a century old and obviously it was constitutional to not have a public school system until 1915 since no state had one.
Florida’s education ranking is for higher education. It’s not for K-12, as you (intentionally???) wrongly imply.
The original source (not the one you link to but the one THEY link to) is the annual higher education ranking by US News and World Report.
I’m a busy man and investigated your first claim. I am certain your other claims are equally false, but I don’t have the time.
Do your job and stop lying to us.
You mean like California’s
Interesting – when I went right to the source (US News and World Report – Best States 2024: How They Were Ranked), for education it considered both higher education and pre-K-12 in their rankings. I presume you’re too busy to actually investigate properly before making unfounded accusations against the author.
Someone needs to re-read Animal Farm. Tracks perfectly.
The puppies raised up to attack the other animals is the model for the AFT.
We need to abolish public schools. They are harmful by design.
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Everyone is missing the problem with education. In concurrence to education you must teach discipline and self discipline. Without that, children’s minds will wander and their studies are always secondary. Spare the rod spoil the child. The second thing would be the childs IQ. If the child doesn’t have the capacity for higher learning, they should be pointed in the direction of trade schools or whatever their mental abilities are best suited. Those that excel should be groomed for success at their respective levels. There’s the way it should be and then there is the way it is.
I agree–as a now retired community college instructor–but I would argue that even high IQ students should be exposed to and consider trades. Many of these NEED smart people–and the best tradesmen and women I have met are very smart indeed. And always employed when they want to be.
Of course my comment was not meant to imply that trades people were not smart. Cut in a conventionally framed roof or layout a footer foundation and see what it takes. There is a coming market for tradesmen as we expel the interlopers. Trades pay good and if you’re more than a do boy you can make millions. What I am saying is not everyone is a doctor, an engineer, a lawyer, a business executive or accountant. Not everyone is capable of abstract thinking and critical path analyses. This can be determined early on and head kids in a more favorable direction that is productive and successful for them.
I understand what a doctor, an engineer, a business executive or accountant does. What is special about a lawyer?
You can understand what they do, because it is rules based. Try researching how to answer a question based on what 50 different judges have ruled on similar questions. Then prepare a summary of same, and a line of questions to pose adverse witnesses in order to prove you are right, to another judge. The throw in settlement negotiations, and the ability to understand at least basics in accounting, business, and/or medicine in order to put expert witnesses on. And that’s just litigators. I know you’re joking, but really, anybody can be a bad lawyer. The good ones are worth $1-2,000/hr. in the free market.
our legal system is a joke. they don’t even use the words ‘and’ and ‘or’ in a Boolean sense. I was sitting in voir dire one time for a murder case and BOTH the prosecuting and defending attorney had a posterboard of the charge and essential said the following: the charge had the phrase ‘did willfully and knowingly’. Both sides agreed that they only needed to demonstrate willfully or knowingly, not both. One of the attorneys even said ‘For some reason, teachers have problems with that.’ No shit. I asked my brother’s father-in-law, a retired state judge, about this non-sense. His reply: there’s a lot of case law on the meaning the word ‘and’. This is a game people. You should know this given Clinton and ‘is’. You want a better society: start with 50% of politicians being engineers, scientists, or economists. What our legal system is good at is attracting people with a great attraction for $$$ and power.
My plumber was here today to fix the sink. He’s an older guy. I asked him what he did before becoming a plumber. He said he was a doctor. 🙂
Money is in those trades especially if they have the desire and ability to expand. My generator tech is a smart young guy who is excellent at what he does. He doesn’t want the hassle of ownership. Instead he spends his spare time investing, especially in bitcoin. This is true: he already has more than two million saved.
If the government stays out of people’s ways there are plenty of routes to the millions.
MAGATS: NO EGGS? EAT 💩
^ crybaby loser idiot ^
Hey dikhaid eggs dropped $2 carton, does that mean President Trump is bringing down inflation?
MAGA-DOGE and ELON Rule!
Egg prices are dropping.
Commie
Developing news
I went back to see what the public schools that I went to were offering today. I was surprised to see that they don’t teach Industrial Arts anymore. That would partially explain what has happen to young men today. Taking shop classes give a young man confidence because he knows how to build and fix things. It makes you use what learned in math and science for practical uses. Knowing how to build and fix things prepares you for life experiences and gives you confidence.
Because kids today don’t know to build things, all they want to do is tear things down.
Public schools also do not teach civics anymore. And I’m wondering what % of these kids can effectively read, write and do basic math.
This is why kids have such poor reading skills today:
https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read
https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
#74. Isn’t that part of the taking down of America? Illiterate children grow into Illiterate adults? Takes out competition, Karen. Add poverty, drugs and gangs is a winner, Karen.
Homeshoolers in elementary do 2-4 hours per day and do ok. The schools baby sit. High school homeschooling is 6 hours. Go for it.
#74. I forgot to add immorality. 7-8 year old little girl wants dinner? Go to the taco truck and behind the shed do the ? Whatever ,5 dollars buys a taco, mam. Seen it. The men’s like em waist high at top of head.
Junkyard
My kids went to public schools–but it was my wife who taught them competent use of English and I taught them chemistry, physics, and math past algebra: trig, analytic geometry, calculus, linear algebra… Their among-the-best-in-the-state high school taught none of that. (One of my sons is a medical physicist now and the other a data analytics developer for the Army. You don’t get to either without a lot of math.)
#9. That is certainly a truism, they didn’t teach anything of use for becoming a working adult in the 1960’s. Once you mastered how to read and write, that was about it. The major difference was that the schools didn’t indoctrinate the students with Marxist woke ideologies. There are many reasons the youth of today do not have any moral compass. Declining Church attendance as one example. It matters not if one is a believer in the context of the ultimate outcome, because no one else is teaching moral codes, certainly not the schools, and the kids are not likely to pick it up from Tic Tok. And everyone’s surprised when one of them goes off like a roman candle because they perceive that someone somewhere hurt their feelings for some reason. Then there’s the “failure to launch”, syndrome.
November 2022 Census data showed the following:
(Parents teaching moral codes to their children, what parents?)
* Less than one quarter (24%) of children under age 15 living in opposite-sex married-couple families had a stay-at-home mother, compared to only 1% with a stay-at-home father in 2022.
(Perhaps Papa will teach them…, what Papa?)
* Mothers Maintain 80% of Single-Parent Family Groups.
(Children learning to become adults, learn a trade, work for a living, and provide for their own means.)
* More than half (56%) of adults ages 18 to 24 lived in their parental home, compared to 16% of adults ages 25 to 34 in 2022.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/americas-families-and-living-arrangements.html
Yeah, my fairly new son-in-law can barely use a screwdriver, had not a clue how to diagnose why his car wouldn’t start, and even less of a clue how to change the battery.
I’m surprised how seldom our public education system’s “poor” performance is link to immigration. Both my wife and one of our daughter’s are elementary school teachers. Even though we live in a relatively rural conservative area, over 30% of the students now are the children of first generation immigrants who don’t speak English. That alone presents insurmountable challenges, including the fact that 1/3 of the students don’t understand what is being taught and their parents can’t help them at home. The time the teacher has to spend trying to help the non-English speakers is diverted from the native born children’s instruction. But come proficiency testing time, all the scores are lumped together, so it looks like our public educators and the public school system is failing. If we were allowed to separate the test scores for the native born, English speaking students from the others, the scores in our area would be amazing and rival any student population in the world comparisons. In our area, teachers and administrators aren’t indoctrinating the students with progressive ideology. They are talented professionals who work their hearts out, but they are relentlessly subjected to declarations that “public schools and public school teachers are failing” when it is the federal governments immigration enforcement that is failing. That should not be hung around the public school teachers’ necks. Not in areas like ours.
Hello, my Mom came to this country from Ukraine at age 9 not knowing a word of English, and my grandparents barely spoke English their entire lives. My Mom said there was no bilingual education as her school had kids from every country. It was sink or swim, yet she learned the three R’s. She probably didn’t read at the college level, but she could read the newspaper, fill out a job application, and balance her checkbook, and she taught me to read when I was four. I am a volunteer tutor in the NYC public school system, and usually the third grade kids are reading at the second grade level. Is that cumulative by the time they finish high school? Thank you for your concern.
Not buying your argument. Both if my parents started school in 1930s rural South Louisiana speaking only French. Both were forced to learn English (not defending the methods), and both graduated from High School with an education equivalent to at least a few years of college today. My dad went on to be a successful businessman. My parents were not unique – most of the people in South Louisiana at the time had the same background, and the same education.
Agreed that children of illegal aliens drag scores down. But what was the excuse for failing grades (with an illegal alien population a FRACTION of today’s invasion) in Chicago 17 years ago and a 39%minimum priciciency in math and English was touted as progress?
I live in California, and my son goes to public school. The school employs many different methods to artificially boost grades. Most of his classes either allow test corrections, or give open book tests. Teachers assign group projects to homework, class work, and sometimes even tests. My son usually ends up doing it all, to protect his grades, and then the other kids in the “group” get credit. The teacher makes sure to assign a kid who cares about grades, with kids who don’t. There are kids in his AP English class who have difficulty reading. I’m certain they’ve just relied on group projects and test corrections to get placed in advanced classes for which they are not prepared. Teachers regularly extend deadlines. He’s in AP English, and has yet to write an essay this year.
I have always done extra work with him after school, because I don’t trust the quality of education, at all. I would dearly love to send him to a higher performing Catholic school, but we’re focusing on saving for college, and don’t have the money to also pay for private education.
If he went to a public school in the next town, he’d go to a school with a metal detector, where there are mob fights that involve the parents of students.
There are no debate classes offered, or any other curriculum that trains the mind how to reason.
There is no clearer sign that the Teachers Union does not believe in its own product, a public school education, than their war on school choice. When you need captive customers, you know your product is a failure.
The Democrat hegemony has had complete control over all levels of education in America, from public school to grad school, the bureaucracy of the Department of Education, and the professors who teach the teachers in college. The Democrat party owns the state of education in America.
https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read
https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
Karen, Another trick schools use is Standards-Based Grading which decrees that no grade can be less than 50%. Spend your year staring out the window and picking your nose you still get 50%. I have asked teachers what that 50% stands for in such a case but never get an answer.
Young, public education in the US is a scandal.
#74 not everywhere.
The Mob Fights are starting even in Kindergarten!
Here’s a sad story. Dude gets transitioned, and then offs himself a month later. He was a vet. Apparently he was having mental issues for years.
https://revolver.news/2025/03/trans-vet-gets-government-paid-vaginoplasty-then-hangs-himself-a-month-later/
Floyd:
I don’t know if you are area of the details of a vaginoplasty, but it inverts penile and scrotal tissue, after castration, to create what is essentially a body cavity, an open wound. The skin grafts used to line the cavity were never intended to be internal, so there is a risk of infection and foul smells. The patient must use a dilator, daily, forever, because the body will try to close that wound. If it does close, then it would become an abscess, and possibly septic, due to the skin grafts on the inside. Repeat sessions of electrolysis remove as much hair as possible from this inverted scrotal skin.
Although schools, activists, and the media have drilled into kids’ heads that they can actually become a woman, producing adults who claim “trans women are women”, the reality is that most straight men do not view a vaginoplasty body cavity as the same as a biological woman’s. Trans people come to the grim conclusion that in the dating world, they are not viewed as “real women” by most people.
That poor vet may have felt like he just couldn’t do this for the rest of his life.
I don’t see a difference between the dysphoria. Those with body integrity disorder believe they are supposed to be amputees. Therians believe they are another species, like a wolf, trapped in a human body. Otherkin believe they are a species that doesn’t exist on Earth, like an elf, vampire, or alien. All of these people exhibit mental distress at the reality of their own bodies. It is illogical to select one of the dysphoria and claim the person’s belief is real, demanding everyone concur that the patient actually did change gender.
English has been declared the official language of the United States.
The communists (liberals, progressives, socialists, democrats, RINOs, AINOs) can stop forcing captive American students to learn Mexican now.
The problem is not Americans learning a little Spanish, the problem is that the ESL students require extra resources and drag the level downwards. Also, class size is a problem. Deport: first the worst, next the rest. Who cares what Fink says?
OT
WATCH:
https://x.com/OversightPR/status/1899520975156216146
Whoever controlled the Autopen controlled the Presidency.
There now appears to be a plausible legal argument that all of those pardons are invalid.
Probably much else as well..perhaps the entire Occupancy.
Prof. Turley
You fixate on the wrong end of things.
All the things that the left wants and does not want are not the core issue.
The objective should be a system where different ideas compete in a free market and those producing the best results prevali.
A true free market does not even assure a single best answer.
A personally beleive Standardized tests have value and DEI is harmful.
But my beleifs are only relevant to MY CHOICES with MY CHILD.
A free market will sort things out – If DEI has broad value – it will prevail broadly.
If it is valuable even in the narrow sense – it will succeed narrowly.
The same with standardized tests, and myriads of other factors in educating children. ‘
Further it is unlikely that one size fits all. Prior to 2020 Cyber Charters had a very high success rate.
But when public schools tried to educate 100% of students online they failed horribly.
I can argue that one size does not fit all and that public schools ignored the decades of experience that cyber charters had and tried to reinvent the wheel from scratch.
But the fundimental problem was this was not done in and by a free market.
We are specifically dealing with education here.
But all of my remarks are true EVERYWHERE Govenrment has taken over what is NOT a govenrment function.
Our healthcare system is ridiculously expensive and getting worse constantly.
WHY ? Because we do NOT have a free market in healthcare. Because government is in control.
On this blog we constantly fight over things like DEI and drug costs and one side or another of some choice that government should make in some domain.
But the answer ALWAYS – is government should get out of that domain – and PEOPLE should make those decisions on their own.
They will not always make the same decisions – sometimes some people will make mistakes.
But top down decisions forced by govenrment are always wrong for some people and frequently wrong for ALL people.
if a state doesn’t allow VOUCHERS…END ALL Federal Aid to that State