What Betsy Devos Did Before Becoming Education Secretary Shows She's Long Been A GOP Powerhouse

What Betsy Devos Did Before Becoming Education Secretary Shows She's Long Been A GOP Powerhouse
What Betsy Devos Did Before Becoming Education Secretary Shows She's Long Been A GOP Powerhouse

Betsy DeVos is a wealthy, Christian, conservative Midwesterner who also happens to be the current U.S. Secretary of Education. She's a businesswoman who’s known best for her efforts to promote school choice, a controversial idea that critics say takes money out of public schools. But what did DeVos do before she started working as Trump's secretary education?

DeVos comes from family money, both from her parents and her husbands’. Her dad, Edgar Prince, founded a company that eventually came to be worth a billion dollars, according to Politico, a fortune that was built in part due to innovations like a light-up vanity mirror on the sun visor in cars. Her father-in-law founded the lucrative marketing company Amway.

Even before she pulled up a seat to the table in Washington, DeVos was a power player. In fact, the DeVos family fortune is so plentiful that they get help managing their funds from a family office named RDV Corp., which has something called a Family Council made up of DeVos relatives who vote on family business decisions, according to theWall Street Journal. (DeVos resigned from the council in 2016.)

One perk of having so much money and power is that the DeVoses are loaded with assistants. Through RDV Corp.'s Family Council, they reportedly have a household administrative assistant, a person who makes sure “doors are well-oiled,” and a “boat matinee assistant” who is tasked with making sure proper table etiquette is followed, among other things, WSJ reported. They even have an assistant for the Christmas season, including managing the Christmas card list, wrapping presents, and coming up with gift ideas for the DeVoses and their business associates.

Given her breadth of experience, some might say DeVos, 60, is a jack of all trades — but certainly almost all of those trades have had something to do with promoting Christian and conservative ideas.

What DeVos Did Before She Was Secretary Of Education

DeVos started getting active in politics at a young age. As a freshman earning her degree in business economics at Christian liberal arts Calvin College in the ‘70s in Grand Rapids, Michigan, she volunteered for Gerald Ford’s presidential campaign, as Politico's Zack Stanton reported in a profile about the secretary.

She got involved with the Republican Party starting in 1982, with school choice almost always at the top of her agenda of important issues to take on. She served as the National Committeewoman in Michigan from 1992 to 1997 and was the chair of the state’s Republican Party from 1996 to 2000, as The New York Times reported.

She resigned in 2000 after the state’s governor at the time, John Engler, opposed her ideas to change the laws surrounding school vouchers. But after Engler was out of office, she was re-elected in 2003.

She also served as a chair of the privately held investment company, Windquest Continue reading: What Betsy Devos Did Before Becoming Education Secretary Shows She's Long Been A GOP Powerhouse

Opinion | The Bane That Is Betsy DeVos - The New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/opinion/betsy-devos-for-profit-colleges.html

Transgender students asked Betsy DeVos for help. Here's what happened. - POLITICO

Transgender students asked Betsy DeVos for help. Here's what happened. - POLITICO
Transgender students asked Betsy DeVos for help. Here's what happened.
The Trump administration 'has absolutely no clue' what families go through, one mother said.

Alex Howe dreaded the long walk he had to take just to use the bathroom at his Texas high school — two unisex stalls in the middle of the sprawling building, far from his classrooms.

Because he’s a transgender boy, his school district barred him from the much more convenient boy’s restrooms. “It was isolating and alienating,” Howe, who was identified at birth as female, told POLITICO, the first time he has spoken publicly about being a transgender high school kid. And it didn’t stop there.

Conservative parents told the debate coach they didn’t want Howe sharing a room with their sons on trips to competitions. The frustrated coach argued that Howe should be treated the same as the other kids, but school administrators sided with the parents and wouldn’t budge. He roomed alone, singled out again.

Howe struggled with depression and his mother, Stacey Burg, said the treatment at school took its toll. “He would see his therapist and they would increase his antidepressants,” she said. “He would say it’s school work and debate, but I thought it was more. He was stressed all the time. He was upset, he was depressed, he was anxious. He would get angry at home.”

After his graduation in 2017 Howe filed a complaint with federal civil rights officials at the Department of Education, hoping to ease the way for other transgender students at his school to use the bathrooms of their choice. But an examination of federal records by POLITICO shows that his complaint is one of at least five involving transgender students denied bathroom access that was thrown out by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who has halted such investigations.

Another transgender student interviewed by POLITICO and also speaking publicly for the first time said his bathroom-related complaint hasn’t been dismissed, but his case has stalled for three years. He doesn’t know why.

Both Howe and the second student, who wants to be identified only by his first name, Drake, described the human cost of DeVos’ decision to turn down and hold Continue reading: Transgender students asked Betsy DeVos for help. Here's what happened. - POLITICO

Trump and DeVos are moving on a radical anti-student agenda

Trump and DeVos are moving on a radical anti-student agenda

Anti-student agenda at Education Department under DeVos is Trump's most radical move
The Trump Education Department is operating like a K Street lobbying firm. Betsy DeVos now wants your tax dollars to fund for-profit colleges that defraud students.

A week ago, on a sleepy August Friday in Washington, Betsy DeVos took what is her most radical step yet. The Education Department proposed to eliminate — not just weaken, as many people had expected — so-called “gainful employment” guidelines  that cut off federal student loans to colleges if the majority of graduates earned so little that they were not able to pay off their loans.

Under the DeVos proposal, for-profit colleges could use any trick in the book to lure in students with grandiose images of career success, charge them far above the actual cost of instruction, and leave them steeped in debt and unable to find a good paying job. And that’s exactly what will happen.

The gainful employment rules, like the DeVos plan last month to limit loan relief for defrauded students, were designed in response to a long history of predatory recruiting and abuse in the for-profit college sector. When I was in the Obama administration, we thoughtschools like Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institutes should be held accountable for trapping students — often vulnerable people like veterans, low-wage workers and first-generation college-goers — in programs that give them worthless degrees.

For-profit colleges have a history of abuse

At the very least, taxpayers shouldn’t be propping up these predatory schools in the form of billions of dollars in federal student aid flowing to for-profit colleges. In putting a measure of accountability into a largely unregulated, scandal-ridden sector, the gainful employment rules were a baseline minimum standard of consumer and taxpayer protection.  

Betsy DeVos thinks students are just not being good shoppers, but the real problem is that the federal government enables and endorses career programs that are way overpriced. By how much? A whopping 78 percent, according to economists who compared tuition at training programs where federal aid was available to those where it was not. To for-profit schools, the amount of aid available is a signal of the price they should charge for tuition, regardless of the underlying costs. Taking every penny maximizes profits, after all. The gainful employment rule would have repaired that problematic incentive.

The Education Department would make it so that even if schools cheat students, it is the student who must navigate a byzantine process and prove that the school acted with malicious intent. And if a borrower succeeds in that near impossible feat, they’ll be granted only partial relief on their loans. Say you’re buried in debt and can’t earn enough to dig out? Too bad, you should have done a better job recognizing charlatans and researching default and earnings data before enrolling. 

More: Don't ask college applicants about juvenile records. Teens grow up and need opportunity.

Charter schools want to share how they are helping more low-income students finish college

College dorms are training grounds in political civility. Could they save democracy?

Betsy DeVos insists that the gainful employment rule unfairly targets for-profit schools. But by eliminating the rules, for-profit colleges will now be held to lower standards than public and nonprofit schools, which have strict financial controls to prevent the misuse of federal funds. Those financial controls, n determining an institution’s incentives, make a big difference.

As the Century Foundation revealed this year, of the more than 130,000 borrowers who have filed fraud complaints with the Education Department, more than 98 percent involved for-profit colleges. Put differently, students who enrolled at a for-profit college in recent years were 1,000 times more likely to file a fraud claim than someone who enrolled at a public university.

The Trump administration’s proposal is sure to lead to a repeat of the scandals that have besieged the federal student loan program time and again, harming hundreds of Continue reading: Trump and DeVos are moving on a radical anti-student agenda

Fewer and Fewer States Escaping School Privatization's Reach

Fewer and Fewer States Escaping School Privatization's Reach

Fewer and Fewer States Escaping School Privatization’s Reach

According to a 2017 national poll, a strong majority of public school parents give the traditional public schools in their neighborhoods either an A or a B – higher grades than they have given in years. The same survey also found that the majority of the public believes that lack of funding is the biggest problem facing schools today.

While creating and supporting great public schools should be the focus of lawmakers across the country, the reality is quite different. The commitment in state legislatures to the “great equalizer” that is public education has eroded quite dramatically.

That is the sobering conclusion of a recent report released by the Network for Public Education and the Schott Foundation titled “Grading the States: A Report Card on the Nation’s Commitment to Public Schools.”

“Grading the States” examines the far reach of the school privatization movement and its impact on public schools and students. Across the nation, states have implemented and expanded charter schools that are unaccountable to the public and voucher programs that have siphoned off public taxpayer money to pay for private school tuition.

The proponents of these policies and the corporate interests that bankroll them insist their goal is to improve the quality of education – a dubious claim, the report states, “in the face of the reality that too often there is little to no public accountability, fiscal transparency, or maintenance of civil rights protections for students in privatized programs.”

Private schools and charters are not designed to serve all students, but this hasn’t stopped these programs from establishing a strong foothold in communities across the country. Every state except three have charter schools and 28 states have in place some sort of school voucher program. The trend – which shows little sign of letting up – has sown exclusivity and division into the educational system and depleted public schools of valuable resources.

“Although parents always have a right to send their children to private schools at their own expense,” the report states, “they are not and never can be the model for educating all of this nation’s children, nor should they be supported by public dollars.”

The State Report Card

The researchers assigned all 50 states and the District of Columbia with a letter grade, deducting points based on the presence of charter schools and voucher or “neo-voucher” programs (merely voucher programs tweaked to circumvent legal restrictions against giving public money to private schools through tuition tax credits and education savings accounts.)

Twenty-two states received overall grades between a C and a B+. Six states and the Continue reading: Fewer and Fewer States Escaping School Privatization's Reach

What Is DFER (Democrats for Education Reform)? | Diane Ravitch's blog

What Is DFER (Democrats for Education Reform)? | Diane Ravitch's blog

What Is DFER (Democrats for Education Reform)?

Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) was created by a group of guys who work as hedge fund managers. Some are Democrats, other are Republicans. They support charter schools and high-stakes testing. They never support public schools. They support Teach for America. They think that teachers should be evaluated by the test scores of their students, even though research overwhelmingly shows that this method is a failure (see the recent RAND-AIR report on the flop of the Gates-funded demonstration of evaluating teachers by test scores). They believe in merit pay, even though merit pay has never worked anywhere. There is no evidence that any active member of DFER ever attended a public school, ever taught in a public school, or ever sent his children to a public school. DFER doesn’t like public schools. Like Betsy DeVos, which it pretends to oppose, DFER believes in free-market reform of schools. If I am wrong, I hope that one of these hedge fund managers contacts me to let me know.

DFER loves corporate charter chains and doesn’t like local democratic control of schools. They see nothing unsavory about out-of-state billionaires buying an election for their favorite candidate, even in a local school board election.

Here is the DFER list for this year’s election. Cory Booker and Michael Bennet are perennial favorites of DFER. I don’t know if Congressman Bobby Scott of Virginia is aligned with their philosophy or if DFER is trying to establish a relationship. He is chair of the House Education Committee in the Congress. His predecessor, Congressman George Miller of California, was fully aligned with DFER’s views and was richly rewarded with fundraisers, even when he didn’t have an opponent. His former chief of staff, Charles Barone, now runs the DFER office in D.C.

Suffice it to say that DFER pays no attention to research that does not  Continue reading: What Is DFER (Democrats for Education Reform)? | Diane Ravitch's blog

OneApp audit says most N.O. public school students attend class outside their neighborhoods | NOLA.com

OneApp audit says most N.O. public school students attend class outside their neighborhoods | NOLA.com

OneApp audit says most N.O. public school students attend class outside their neighborhoods

A New Orleans public school enrollment system analysis says most students get admitted into their top choices. However, the system has experienced a drop in applicants getting their top choices in recent years as more high-performing schools begin to join the centralized process.

Eighty-four public schools in New Orleans use a computerized enrollment lottery system called OneApp to assign students to seats based on family preference and school priorities. Families can apply to up to 12 schools in OneApp for their child during a "main round" process. Parents unhappy with their choice from the main round get another chance to select their desired school during "round 2" of OneApp. 

State auditors reviewed first-round OneApp results in New Orleans from the 2014-15 school year to the 2018-19 academic year, according to a 31-page report released Tuesday afternoon (Aug. 14) by the Louisiana Legislative Auditor's office. An early summary of the auditwas obtained by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune last week. The full audit provides more details and tweaks to some of the report's numbers.

The full performance audit, spurred by a request by State Rep. Joseph Bouie, D-New Orleans, now says 65.5 percent of the 10,749 applicants received one of their top three choices for the 2018-19 school year. The earlier version of the audit's summary said about 75 percent of students received one of their top choices.

N.O. parents slam school board for issues surrounding OneApp

The concerns spurred State Rep. Joseph Bouie to request a OneApp performance audit from the state Legislative Auditor in April.

The audit said 44.8 percent of students received their first choice. However, the percentage of students receiving their top choice in the first round decreased from 58 percent to 44.8 percent over the time period that was studied.

The percentage of students receiving one of their top three choices overall also dropped from 77.7 percent to 65.5 percent during that Continue reading: OneApp audit says most N.O. public school students attend class outside their neighborhoods | NOLA.com

Big Education Ape: How meaningful is school choice in New Orleans, the city of charters? - The Hechinger Report - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2015/05/how-meaningful-is-school-choice-in-new.html

Big Education Ape: Lack of quality schools will doom common enrollment in New Orleans: Andre Perry | NOLA.com - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2016/02/lack-of-quality-schools-will-doom.html

Big Education Ape: New Orleans “Parental Choice” and the Walton-funded OneApp | deutsch29 - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2013/07/new-orleans-parental-choice-and-walton.html

Big Education Ape: UPDATE: School choice sounds great in theory—but who does the choosing? | Hechinger Report - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2013/12/school-choice-sounds-great-in-theorybut.html

Crisis deepens in Puerto Rico as Junta seizes educational system – Workers World

Crisis deepens in Puerto Rico as Junta seizes educational system – Workers World

Crisis deepens in Puerto Rico as Junta seizes educational system

The crisis of the Puerto Rican nation continues spiraling downward and is about to hit bottom. The main news every day only increases people’s indignation. Each day proves without a doubt Puerto Rico’s character as a colony. Each event adds another nail in the coffin of the farcical “pact between Puerto Rico and the United States” that was the “Free Associated State of 1952,” a false autonomy for the archipelago.

During the second week of August, it was clearly exposed who really, directly governs in Puerto Rico: the Congress of the United States, through its imposed Fiscal Control Board (a dictatorial Junta). Those who voted in past Puerto Rican elections, thinking that they would elect their leaders, have seen that their vote was a fantasy exercise in vain. The reduced participation in the last elections indicated Puerto Ricans’ growing lack of confidence in their government.

Fiscal board’s power over Puerto Rico’s government

Judge Laura Taylor Swain, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, presides over the bankruptcy cases concerning Puerto Rico’s government. Since Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory and not a municipality, bankruptcy cases cannot be heard by bankruptcy court judges, only by federal district court judges.

The last decision resolved two lawsuits filed by the Puerto Rican government, one from the Legislature and another from Gov. Ricardo Roselló. It referred to the FCB’s power over the insular government under the Puerto Rican Constitution. It must be remembered that this Constitution was authorized by Law 600 of 1952, which was approved by the U.S. Congress.

With a sentence, the judge dismisses any aspirations of local autonomy: “The power granted to the board by section 205 (b) (1) (K) of PROMESA allows the FCB to make binding policy choices for the commonwealth government, despite the governor’s objection of the recommendations under section 205.” ­(elnuevodia.com, Aug. 8)

Section 205 of the PROMESA law refers to public policy recommendations and is basically the implementation of the interests of the U.S. Congress: to control payrolls, reduce expenses (pensions, benefits, etc.) and privatize government agencies that are potential profit generators.

Although the judge establishes that the FCB cannot pass laws, she said that it has “budgetary” and “negotiation tools.” As the saying goes, “Whoever pays the piper calls the tune.” When the FCB imposes a fiscal plan that satisfies U.S. interests, it goes above and beyond any Puerto Rican law. For example: What difference does it make if the Puerto Rican government wants to preserve the Christmas bonus for public and private workers (an obligation under PR law) if the FCB’s fiscal plan does not include any source to pay for it?

It should be pointed out here that the Junta’s work has two central purposes: to balance the budget and return Puerto Rico to the credit market. Of course, central to this is paying the bondholders as much as possible at the expense of the people.

As a result of this decision, imposing the Junta’s fiscal plan will greatly exacerbate the people’s situation. Apart from reduction of the Christmas bonus — which is the annual stimulus that helps families and small businesses balance their budgets and stay afloat for the rest of the year — layoffs will increase; employment positions will decrease and retirement plans will be reduced, pushing the elderly population into poverty. Also, government services will be cut and worsened at the central level and in the municipalities where budgets will shrink even further.

Consequences for educational system

Classes start at the beginning of August in Puerto Rican schools. How will the dictatorship of the U.S. Congress through the seven Junta members impact the Puerto Rican educational system? Never before has a school year started in such a clumsy manner, with so much uncertainty for teachers, students and their families and with so much disorganization and incongruence, especially for students in elementary school and those who need special education.

It should be noted that even though Gov. “Ricky” Roselló filed a lawsuit against the Junta, his government is politically in synch with the Junta. Congress has used the Puerto Rican government as an “easy fool” to achieve Continue reading:  Crisis deepens in Puerto Rico as Junta seizes educational system – Workers World

Oakland Unified Moves to Save Gülen Movement Charter School | East Bay Express

Oakland Unified Moves to Save Gülen Movement Charter School | East Bay Express

Oakland Unified Moves to Save Gülen Movement Charter School 
OUSD plans to appoint a director to BayTech's board while an ongoing investigation delves into allegations of financial mismanagement.

Amid a management crisis and allegations of fraud at Oakland's BayTech charter school, the Oakland Unified School District is exploring the possibility of appointing an independent director to the school's board. State law allows public school districts to make board appointments to charter schools under their supervisions. BayTech has also hired Kathleen Daugherty, a retired superintendent from Sacramento who runs an education consulting firm, to assist with the school's recovery. Classes began on Monday at BayTech, even though the school's principal and several other senior administrators all abruptly quit at the end of the last school year.

Meanwhile, OUSD is continuing to investigate allegations that the school's former principal, Hayri Hatipoglu, defrauded BayTech by modifying his employment contract to obtain a lucrative three-year payout, instead of a standard six-month severance package. BayTech's three current board members, Fatih Dagdelen, Kairat Sabyrov, and Volkan Ulukoylu, allege that Hatipoglu made the contract modification without their knowledge.

But Hatipoglu wrote in an email to the Express that the allegations are untrue and have unfairly damaged his reputation.
"This allegation is such a big lie that even OUSD, CSMC (BayTech back office) would be able to refute that immediately as they can view/have access to school finances," Hatipoglu wrote.

OUSD hasn't commented about the school's situation or the allegations against Hatipoglu except to confirm several weeks ago that the district is conducting an investigation. School district records show that OUSD has obtained detailed financial information from BayTech.

Hatipoglu's employment contract, which is on file with OUSD, provided him with a three-year term of employment at an annual salary of $142,992, and if terminated without cause by either the school or Hatipoglu, BayTech is obligated to pay in one lump sum the remainder Continue reading: Oakland Unified Moves to Save Gülen Movement Charter School | East Bay Express

Opinion | School Choice Is the Enemy of Justice - The New York Times

Opinion | School Choice Is the Enemy of Justice - The New York Times
School Choice Is the Enemy of Justice

LOS ANGELES — In 1947, my father was one of a small group of black students at the largely white Fremont High School in South Central Los Angeles. The group was met with naked hostility, including a white mob hanging blacks in effigy. But such painful confrontations were the nature of progress, of fulfilling the promise of equality that had driven my father’s family from Louisiana to Los Angeles in the first place.

In 1972, I was one of a slightly bigger group of black students bused to a predominantly white elementary school in Westchester, a community close to the beach in Los Angeles. While I didn’t encounter the overt hostility my father had, I did experience resistance, including being barred once from entering a white classmate’s home because, she said matter-of-factly as she stood in the doorway, she didn’t let black people (she used a different word) in her house.

Still, I believed, even as a fifth grader, that education is a social contract and that Los Angeles was uniquely suited to carry it out. Los Angeles would surely accomplish what Louisiana could not.

I was wrong. Today Los Angeles and California as a whole have abandoned integration as the chief mechanism of school reform and embraced charter schools instead.

This has happened all over the country, of course, but California has led the way — it has 630,000 students in charter schools, more than any other state, and the Los Angeles Unified School District has more than 154,000 of them. Charters are associated with choice and innovation, important elements of the good life that California is famous for. In a deep-blue state, that good life theoretically includes diversity, and many white liberals believe charters can achieve that, too. After all, a do-it-yourself school can do anything it wants.

But that’s what makes me uneasy, the notion that public schools, which charters technically are, have a choice about how or to what degree to enforce the social contract. There are many charter success stories, I know, and many make a diverse student body part of their mission. But charters as a group are ill suited to the task of justice because they are a legacy of failed justice.

Integration did not happen. The effect of my father’s and my foray into those white schools was not more equality but white flight. Largely white schools became largely black, and Latino schools were stigmatized as “bad” and never had a place in the California good life.

It’s partly because diversity can be managed — or minimized — that charters have become the public schools that liberal whites here can get behind. This is in direct contrast to the risky, almost revolutionary energy that fueled past integration efforts, which by their nature created tension and confrontation. But as a society — certainly as a state — we have lost Continue reading: Opinion | School Choice Is the Enemy of Justice - The New York Times

REALLY CHARTER SCHOOL BOUNTY HUNTERS: Arizona charter school paying publicly funded commission to poach students

Arizona charter school paying publicly funded commission to poach students

Why are charter schools paying a bounty (with public funds) to get students?

Opinion: An Arizona charter school is paying a finder’s fee for delivering a student – and the thousands of dollars in public funding that go with that child -- to its door. This, with your money.

It’s bad enough that the No. 2 guy at the Arizona Charter Schools Association is using his position to throw business to the company he co-owns with his wife.

Bad enough that some charter school operators are getting rich by “winning” lucrative contracts for services that never are put out to bid.

Now, we learn that at least one charter school is treating kids like shoes.

Just as a department store shoe salesman earns a commission if he can sell you a pair of loafers, at least one consultant is earning a commission if she can sell parents on enrolling their child in a certain charter school.

A commission paid for with your money.

It seems our kids are no longer just students to be educated, they're commodities to be sold. Valuable ones, for which at least one charter school will pay a finder’s fee for delivering a kid – and the thousands of dollars in public funding that go with that child -- to its door.

The Republic's Craig Harris reported this week that Self Development Academy is paying $550 a head for kids. The central Phoenix charter school  actually has a contract with a "student recruiter", Paola Leyton Salas, who runs Enrollment Experts.

Last week, when another charter school closed due to low enrollment, Arizona Charter Schools Association Chief Operating Officer Robert Di Bacco contacted the closing school to get contact information for its 32 displaced students.

He then passed along that information to Leyton Salas, the recuiter, who also happens Continue reading: Arizona charter school paying publicly funded commission to poach students

For Unions, A ‘Which Side Are You On’ Moment - POLITICO Magazine

For Unions, A ‘Which Side Are You On’ Moment - POLITICO Magazine

For Unions, A ‘Which Side Are You On’ Moment
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten says that union members haven’t just cooled on Trump—they’ve turned on him.

Subscribe to Off Message on Apple Podcasts here. | Subscribe via Stitcher here.

Randi Weingarten says there’s an upside of being a year and a half into the most anti-organized labor administration in modern history and just two months removed a Supreme Court decision which socked union power and finances: clarity.

Union leaders and members now “know who the bad guys are,” says Weingarten, the longtime head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — President Donald Trump and the five justices who signed on to the court’s Janus decision in June.

Early on, Trump’s support among organized labor was at astronomical levels for a modern-day Republican, with November 2016 exit polls showing him with the support of more than 40 percent of union households. A March 2017 Reuters-Ipsos poll gave him a 62 percent approval rating among union members, but by spring 2018, it had dropped to 47 percent. The union members who ruled out voting for Hillary Clinton don’t appear to be sticking around as the president actually moves forward on his trade war and economic agenda.

The combination of an antagonistic administration and hostile high court has driven union members to the barricades, Weingarten says. And though she acknowledges that the AFT and its allies may now be in a fight for their existence, at least they’re in the fight.

To Weingarten, that’s a key difference between now and the past 20 years, which labor leaders spent distracted from the basics of organizing and engaging members while instead focused on incremental fights that were harder to activate around. The result was unions that either atrophied or saw their members drift toward the politics like Trump’s.

She hates that Trump is president, but she clings to the silver lining.

“We’re seeing, in terms of our membership, that things are holding because people are talking about values, and they’re engaged with each other,” Weingarten told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “But we’re also seeing huge activism against this kind of cruelty that you see from the Trump administration, against the kind of faux populism.”

Weingarten’s proof is in last week’s lopsided defeat of Missouri’s proposed “Right to Work” law in a statewide referendum. Pushed too far, she says, unions, union members and union supporters have started to actually fight back — even in a state under heavy Republican control, and where Sen. Claire McCaskill is a top GOP target for defeat.

Weingarten is a committed Democrat, so deeply involved in the party that she was seriously considered for the appointment to Clinton’s New York Senate seat in 2009. Still, she says the opposition to Trump has moved far beyond the usual partisanship, and other labor leaders —including AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, who earlier this month floated an Continue reading: For Unions, A ‘Which Side Are You On’ Moment - POLITICO Magazine