MICHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: The Trump administration has made no secret of its desire to upend the Department of Education as it currently functions. It plans to lay off at least half of the department's workforce, more than 1,000 people, and the Supreme Court has agreed that it can. And in response to troubling data from the latest Nation's Report Card, which is out this month, the president reiterated his plans to, quote, "return education back to the individual states," unquote.
Longtime teachers' union leader Randi Weingarten says whatever the problems with the nation's schools, this administration is not trying to solve them. Instead, she says, these efforts are really part of a plan to destroy public education, which itself is part of a plan to weaken democracy. Weingarten makes this argument in a fiery new book called "Why Fascists Fear Teachers." And she's with us now to tell us more about it. Good morning. Thanks so much for joining us.
RANDI WEINGARTEN: Good morning.
MARTIN: So let me start with, why this book now? You've been president of the American Federation of Teachers, AFT, since 2008. What motivated this book now? This is your first book, so clearly you felt strongly enough about something to take the time away from your day job to write this.
WEINGARTEN: So I started thinking about this particular book in the weeks and months after we got back to school from COVID and thought about why all of these smears and why this level? There started to be a different kind of political attack on teachers. And it was coming from extreme forces, some on the left, but mostly on the right, that seemed different. The smears seemed different.
MARTIN: You don't pull any punches with the title, which accurately represents the tone of the book. But despite that, you say that you're not interested in the labels as much as the actions. What is it about public schools per se that you think is particularly challenging to people who you believe try to weaken democracy?
WEINGARTEN: I think we teach kids how to really think, not what to think, but how to think. We teach kids how to live with each other in a diverse environment. That's why welcoming...
MARTIN: Because they have no choice, basically. Public schools have to welcome all comers, I guess, right?
WEINGARTEN: Exactly. But in that realm, that is critically important, particularly if you think about what's going on in America and the attack on immigrants and the attack on diversity. We actually believe in opportunity for all, not opportunity for some. And that is different than a competitive model. If you think about education as the public square or education as imperative to democracy, which is what the founders thought. Then you think about, what are the three things, Michel, that give regular people power? It's voting, it's education and it's some economic power. And so what teachers and their unions do is basically two of the three.
MARTIN: Teachers are one of the last remaining heavily unionized workforces in the country. You're arguing that their efforts to unionize pose a challenge to autocrats. But you also make the case that the interests of kids and families and the interests of teachers are aligned. But what if they aren't? Isn't the role of the union to protect the interests of teachers, even if that conflicts with the interests of kids and parents as they perceive them?
WEINGARTEN: I think our role is to do everything in our power to align those interests. And in 2010, parents and teacher unions really were divergent. I saw that as a clarion call. So 2024, several years after COVID, we asked that question again. In that polling, it was 74% approved of teachers and 9% disapproved. But even the union in 2024, what we saw is 53% of people approved of teacher unions and 22% disapproved of them. We have to align them.
MARTIN: You begin the book by talking about how some conservative activists have used critical race theory, which is a complex legal analysis of racism, to attack public education, implying that it's being taught, you know, in third grade, at levels which is not appropriate. Why do you think that people are receptive to these arguments?
WEINGARTEN: I think there's a lot of fear. There's a lot of anxiety. I think social media has been a pretty prime reason. I think that the politics have gotten corrosive. And when you have this kind of fear and anxiety in a country, it creates distrust. Frankly, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Tim Snyder, all of these historians talk about what autocrats or what oligarchs or others end up doing to exploit it.
MARTIN: What do you have to say about the Nation's Report Card data that the president cited in saying that this is exactly why the Department of Education needs to be rethought? What do you have to say about those test scores?
WEINGARTEN: They were terrible. And the NAEP scores are important. They're different than state test scores each and every year. There seems to be a big problem in terms of impact, in terms of attention. What I've seen in the last few years is that project-based instruction and career tech ed, which used to be very stigmatized, these things actually help create the habits not only of democracy, but the habits of knowledge that we want kids to have. And what we're seeing is a 95% graduation rate for kids from these career tech ed schools, and 70% of these kids go to college. So it creates more choice. Now, why do I raise this?
MARTIN: Yeah, because, I mean, isn't this one of the things that some of the people on the more conservative side of the aisle have been saying as well? They are some of the people who've been saying that career education, technical education has been demonized and so it needs to be brought back. So, I mean, is there alignment there?
WEINGARTEN: Yes, there is. But this is my point. There's huge alignment there. What the federal government's role in education should be is how to support this.
MARTIN: So given everything you're saying, I mean, you paint a fairly dire picture of some of the conditions that you say that teachers are operating under right now. Given all that, would you advise somebody to go into teaching right now?
WEINGARTEN: Yes, I would.
MARTIN: And what would you say to them? Why?
WEINGARTEN: If you want to make a difference in the lives of children or of young people, teaching is the way to do it. We are in a race always between hope and fear, and teachers are the nation builders, and teachers are the hope agents.
MARTIN: Randi Weingarten has been the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the AFT, since 2008. Her new book is "Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education And The Future Of Democracy." Randi Weingarten, thanks so much for talking with us.
WEINGARTEN: Thank you so much.
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