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Randi Weingarten in 2019.
Rightwing operatives anticipated that attacking public schools would be a key strategy for vaulting Republican candidates into victories. But during the recent midterms, pro-public-education candidates often fared better than expected. The Progressive spoke with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on the impact of the midterm elections on public schools. This is an edited transcript.
Glenn Daigon: The political momentum seemed to be on the right after Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race in 2021. Do you think the midterms saw any shift in the political winds? If so, how do you think the results of the midterm elections will impact education policy both at the local and national level?
Randi Weingarten: Based on data analytics from TargetPoint, Youngkin used the culture wars to win people in rural areas who were very fearful. The culture wars didn’t persuade parents to vote for Youngkin, but they persuaded the elderly to vote for Youngkin. He used it effectively as a divisive tactic. But part of the reason he was successful was that Terry [McAuliffe], made an election-deciding mistake [by] saying, wrongly, that parents don’t have a role in their kids’ education.
Parents of course have a role in their kids’ education, and I think what you saw in 2022 was that public education did quite well. Not in all places, but by and large parents want [teachers] to help their kids recover [from the disruption of the pandemic] and thrive by focusing on things that both Republicans and Democrats talk about: reading and literacy; pathways to career and college; and helping kids have confidence again and feel better about themselves.
“There is an agenda—a true education agenda—that is bipartisan.”
There is an agenda—a true education agenda—that is bipartisan, with perhaps Florida being an exception. But even in Florida, pro-education budgets were passed even though Republican Governor Ron DeSantis won comfortably. In virtually every other state where these issues were hotly contested, the pro-public education governors and legislators won.
If you look at Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine, and Arizona, where Republican candidates ran on denigrating, defamatory, and demeaning planks; the undermining of teachers and vulnerable students; defunding public education; and all of the culture wars, pro-public education governors won. Those wins were just in states where races were really hotly contested. In less contentious races—in Illinois, New York, Connecticut, and Minnesota—pro-public education governors also won.
Q: When you say “pro-public education” does that include advocating for smaller class size, higher teacher salaries, and more funding for public schools?
Weingarten: I would say that it included more funding for public schools. Some [candidates] ran on smaller class sizes, some ran on the mental health needs of kids, some ran on addressing teacher shortages with higher salaries. There are a lot of different ways that you make every public school a place where parents want to send their children and educators want to work. Pro-public education governors also talk about the importance of respecting, recruiting, and retaining teachers..
Q: Yet in Florida and Texas, where right-wing candidates had success in school board elections, conservative candidates DeSantis and Gregg Abbot both won their respective races for governor. If either one of them ran for President in 2024, would their stances on education appeal to voters nationwide?
Weingarten: I don’t think that they are conservatives. I think that they are divisive. Will they attempt to exploit fear and division, and does that have potency in some places? Yes, of course. But what we saw here is that it didn’t have potency with swing voters. There was not a crossover appeal with swing voters that Youngkin claimed he had in 2021 . . . . What happened in 2021 was that there was a lot of anxiety about school closures and about whether the kids were going to be okay. And that anxiety can trigger fear.
DeSantis’s anti-woke laws have now been overruled in a case involving employers and a case brought by colleges. An attorney representing the DeSantis administration finally explained what they believe the definition of “woke” is, and they defined it as the belief that there are systemic injustices in American society that need to be addressed. So essentially they are saying that anyone who perceives there are systemic injustices should be barred from having a voice in Florida. That is not the way America has always operated. Our best days—the days we celebrate [such as] the Voting Rights Act, the end of the Civil War, D-Day—those are the days our nation solved crises and the days that the arc of the universe bent towards justice. [DeSantis] is basically saying that there is no more injustice, and if you disagree, you have no voice, no room [in] Florida. I doubt this is going to sell in Peoria.
Q: Over the years, there have been a number of ballot initiatives promoting charter schools and school vouchers for private schools that lost. Do you anticipate more ballot initiatives in the near future that promote charter schools and private school vouchers?
Weingarten: Yes, because the billionaires and rightwing extremists like Betsy DeVos want to end public education as we know it. They have a lot of money and they will keep putting [initiatives] on the ballot and they will keep going to the U.S. Supreme Court with them. The attorney general in Oklahoma just said that charters and private schools that get public money can be religious schools, deciding essentially that the Constitutional clause separating church and state no longer applies.
“The new code word they brandish is ‘indoctrination.’ Critical thinking is not indoctrination. Critical thinking is giving kids the tools to make their own decisions.”
You are going to see the antipathy that the billionaire class has towards public education and towards helping every single child have the tools, skills, and knowledge to be able to navigate the world—including the critical thinking skills to discern fact versus fiction—and to be able to draw their own conclusions. That is something they either are very afraid of or want to stop. The new code word they brandish is “indoctrination.” Critical thinking is not indoctrination. Critical thinking is giving kids the tools to make their own decisions.
Q: On the flip side of that, there were a lot of successful pro-public school ballot initiatives around the country. To name a few: the Massachusetts “millionaires tax” to fund education and transportation and the Colorado law to fund free school lunches. Do you anticipate the success of those pro-public-school initiatives, in this cycle, will spawn more pro-public-school initiatives in the future?
Weingarten: There are lots of people who love the initiative process. Initiatives are a part of electoral decision making in America, and they have a place. But what I would want to see is real investment by state legislatures in schooling. The Biden Administration, in the wake of COVID-19, really tried to do a one shot investment in schooling to help kids recover, to help schools have the operational facilities they needed to deal with the pandemic. That investment needs to continue, but it is [up to] state legislatures to do that.
Q: Is there a set of any races in the 2022 election cycle where you can point to moderates and progressives successfully countering the anti-critical-race-theory and anti-LGBT messaging from rightwing education backers?
Weingarten: Take New Hampshire, where they easily reelected Republican Governor [Chris] Sununu, but over the course of several months, every school board member who was elected was a pro-public education school board member. [This was in a state] where Moms for Liberty put $500 bounties on the heads of teachers and where a state school superintendent tried to chill the efforts of teachers to teach honest history—school board races were won by pro-public-education school board candidates.
In Berrien County, Michigan, which had been electing Republicans since the 1800s—so it is a very red area—twenty-one out of twenty-five extremist school candidates lost their elections. In West Virginia, the anti-public education forces lost two referendums, while at the same time, the state has turned ruby red. In New York State, we saw a lot of Congressional races go to Republicans, but 85 percent of the pro-public-education school board candidates won, and 99 percent of school budgets passed.
Sure, in Florida, where DeSantis put hundreds of thousands of dollars into school board races, he won more than he lost because nobody has that kind of money to compete, and most of the time these races are basically locally run races. But by and large, in the marquee races around the country, what you saw was the pro-public-education forces win. And in places where they didn’t, like in South Carolina, I believe you’ll see a lot of resistance develop.
This culture war, where the right spends a lot of money attacking trans kids and creating fear and division and hate, generally isn’t winning, even if sometimes their candidates do. Even after Youngkin won, he had to stop his tip line because the tips he was getting were people calling in to say how great teachers were. The tip line, which was a snitch line to intimidate teaching and learning, didn’t get the tips they wanted because parents rely on and need their kids’ teachers, and they want their teachers to have good relationships with parents and their kids. They don’t want these divisions.