Teachers Union Boss: Guns in Schools Harm Community with 'Fending for Themselves' Mentality
WASHINGTON – Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, argued that school choice and voucher programs wrongly create “winners and losers.”
She lamented that supporting school choice programs has led to attempts to establish “an alternative system that is used to undermine public schools.”
“There’s been the kind of policy that creates, in some ways, winners and losers and you see it in terms of school choice and charter schools and vouchers and things like that,” Weingarten said during a recent conference call organized by The Jewish Democratic Council of America on education policy in the Trump administration.
“There are some people who came to this totally because of legitimate frustration that said ‘we can’t shake the system up enough – we need to have alternatives to the system.’ And, frankly, some of those people were people like my predecessor, Al Shanker, who said ‘we hate bureaucracy – can’t we do things like charter schools or other kinds of alternatives where teachers and parents have a right to actually figure out what they want for schooling and make it an incubator,’ and so if something really works then you bring it to the main system,” she added.
Weingarten said advocating for new ideas in education has been “hijacked” as a way to convince states to move funds away from public schools and into other education programs.
“So, I understand there are folks who are saying let’s try something new, and I Continue reading: Teachers Union Boss: Guns in Schools 'Fending for Themselves' Mentality
