Randi Weingarten promises to ‘educate’ Betsy DeVos as AFT kicks off campaign against Trump agenda
At Edsel Ford High School Tuesday morning, students took turns sharing their goals for the semester. Sixteen-year-old Kamal Mohamad wants to get better grades. His classmate Almjd Alghaithi wants to finish all of his math assignments.
Nodding along was Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers who spent the morning at the Dearborn, Michigan school to advance a goal of her own: getting the Trump administration to redirect public funding from cracking down on immigration to supporting public schools.
She was there to kick off a campaign called Building Schools, Not Walls, just two days before she will visit schools with U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. DeVos has faced criticism for her focus on school choice — especially private-school vouchers — and her lack of personal experience with public schools.
“I see the secretary of education as a student,” Weingarten told Chalkbeat. “We’re educators — we have an abiding belief that people are educable, including secretaries of education.”
“That’s why we are making the effort, despite lots of people wondering, given her track record, why we’d even bother.”
Weingarten chose Ohio’s Van Wert City Schools, a small district in northwest Ohio, about an hour and a half away from Toledo, for that joint visit. It’s in “Trump country,” she said. “It’s schools that do project based learning, have grappled with rural poverty, schools that engage in children’s well-being, and that’s why we wanted her to see it.”Randi Weingarten promises to ‘educate’ Betsy DeVos as AFT kicks off campaign against Trump agenda | Chalkbeat:
