WASHINGTON—The nation’s public schools, and their teachers and staffers, are defending democracy in America against an autocratic president, Donald Trump, said Teachers/AFT President Randi Weingarten in a keynote address to her union’s 1,000 delegates at its semi-annual TEACH conference here.
She said in her speech and told People’s World afterward that Trump’s program (massive cuts in school aid and an even more massive tax cut for the 1%), “is making Americans sicker, hungrier and poorer, while adding trillions of dollars to the federal deficit. For what? For a tax cut for the wealthiest? How about a tax cut for the middle class?”
Weingarten, herself a long-time civics teacher, told People’s World that the union is working on the idea of a tax cut for the middle class with a variety of people, including the Patriotic Millionaires. They’re a group of wealthy and progressive people with a conscience—similar to some of the wealthy progressives of the early 20th century.
The continuation of the tax cut for the rich and its impact was one of Weingarten’s milder criticisms of Trump. Her top attack was his threat to U.S. democracy. She urged teachers to take both the tax cuts’ inequality and the threat to democracy back home and educate the large numbers of people who still haven’t gotten the message.
“The [Trump] government is attacking our foundations,” Weingarten declared. “Masked agents”—Trump’s ICE agents—“are ‘disappearing’ people,” she said, using that word in a context normally reserved for military dictatorships.
“And we’re not talking about hardened criminals,” she added, referring to Trump’s characterization of people his ICE agents tackle, beat, tear gas, pepper spray, knock unconscious and dragoon off the streets, out of schools, churches, worksites and courthouses and even haul out of cars—after breaking even unresisting victims’ car windows.
“We’re talking about a teenager heading to soccer practice…He (Trump) is pursuing an agenda of chaos, corruption and cruelty,” she said of Trump. “This is what autocrats do, and they do it today. We are seeing authoritarian tactics right here in America.
Elephant in the room
“Whether it’s hate, Islamophobia, racism, or anti-Semitism, it’s the elephant in the room,” she added.
Given all that, the teachers are fighting back, and Weingarten urged her union members to do so even more, using their teaching skills not just in the classrooms, but in the streets and door-to-door, educating those U.S. people who are still ignoring what’s going on about both Trump’s actions and his dictates affecting them.
“We are pushing freedom of thought, and freedom to learn, and to do so free from fear” of ICE agents, gun violence at schools, and kids seeing their parents snatched off the streets. That produces “loneliness, depression, and fear of violence,” she added.
In some large cities where ICE has raided schools—notably Chicago and Los Angeles—parents now either keep kids home from school or don’t dare go outside to drive them to school, for fear they’ll be snatched before their scared and upset children’s eyes.
Despite all that, “we are giving the students opportunities to prepare for life, opportunities to prepare for careers and opportunities for citizenship. As the Founders” of the U.S. “advocated, educated citizens are necessary to keep a democracy,” Weingarten assured the crowd.
“And we’re teaching critical thinking and pluralism.” Autocrats, Weingarten said, “can’t survive that.”
“But we can’t just close the classroom doors and hope these attacks never make their way inside,” she warned.
Yet there’s ample evidence the ideological attacks on schools and teachers have been “making their way inside,” including book burnings in Tennessee and library censorship in Florida. And several years ago, almost a century after the Scopes “monkey trial,” a Kansas school board commanded teaching of creationism, not evolution.
They also include McMahon’s threat to yank all K-12 funding for schools with high shares of poor kids unless those school districts “whitewash” their textbooks and lesson plans to eliminate discussion of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
McMahon and Trump ignore the latest federal data. It shows 44.7% of all public school students are white, but they’re outnumbered by the combined figures for Hispanic students (28.7%), Black students (14.4%), and Asian students (5.5%), along with students of other races.
Weingarten briefly described one other threat to kids and their learning: Social media and cell phones. Her home union, in New York, just convinced the legislature to ban them from the classroom.
Extensive cell phone use and attention, at the expense of learning, makes kids “sedentary, solitary, anxious and depressed,” Weingarten said.
Schools key to U.S. future
Weingarten did not devote her entire speech to trashing Trump. She also pointed out that public schools, “as imperfect as they are” are keys to the U.S. future. Left unsaid: They teach 90% of the nation’s K-12 kids.
Which means millions of those kids can benefit from wrap-around programs AFT advocates and from the brighter future teachers try to paint for them, Weingarten said. Schools “should be safe, welcoming, relevant and engaging.”
That means such initiatives as putting more money into career and technical education, a new center teaching teachers how to use artificial intelligence positively in the classroom and teaching by doing, rather than teaching to the test—the mandate of the George W. Bush-era No Child Left Behind law.
While Weingarten’s speech came against a background of relentless attacks by the GOP Trump regime, McMahon and the GOP congressional majority, it also included one big win.
Just 20 minutes before Weingarten took the podium, McMahon threw in the towel and released the rest of the $7 billion in local school grants for the year that began July 1 for such programs as English as a second language, reading and math tutoring, after-school activities, teacher training, and special education for students with disabilities.
McMahon and Trump’s Office of Management and Budget had yanked the money on June 30 via a three-sentence e-mail. AFT, the National Education Association, 22 state attorneys general and two governors, and local school board, literally from Anchorage, Alaska southwards, filed two lawsuits against their decision. Congress had already appropriated the money.
And the day before the conference, 110 of its teachers walked the Capitol halls, lobbying lawmakers to turn the funds loose. It worked, and Weingarten gave credit where credit was due. Their insistence convinced ten GOP senators to write the White House, objecting. Trump and McMahon caved.
Nevertheless, pushed by Trump, the lawmakers approved what he called the “big beautiful” bill and its $4.5 trillion 10-year tax cut for the rich and cuts in programs and personnel for everyone else. Weingarten called the bill “anything but beautiful.”
She singled out its zeroing-out of funds for community wraparound schools, and its allocation, via taxpayer-paid vouchers and tax credits, of $50 billion over a decade for parents of private school kids.
Left unsaid: Most of those parents are well-off and don’t need the help, while the private schools can turn away kids, especially kids of color, they don’t like.
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