Teachers’ Unions Lies: Randi Weingarten’s Despicable Defense of Public-School Monopoly

There’s no depth to which they won’t sink in defense of the public-school monopoly.

I am starting to think that the teachers’ unions are incapable of shame. In a speech to her union’s convention Thursday, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten asserted that “The real pioneers of private school choice were the white politicians who resisted school integration.” She called school-choice programs the “only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” She compared Betsy DeVos, the U.S. secretary of education, to climate-change deniers for supporting school-voucher programs. And she exhorted the crowd to resist school-choice advocates’ “decades-long campaign to protect the economic and political power of the few against the rights of the many.”

What nonsense. Weingarten’s segregation claim comes from a recent report entitled “The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers.” Written by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a left-wing advocacy group, the historically inaccurate report was ready-made for her stump speeches.

“Weingarten’s claim doesn’t pass the laugh test,” says Jason Bedrick, director of policy for EdChoice. “She distorts the history of education policy and ignores the facts on the ground. Public schools were once racially segregated by law and they are de facto segregated today. Meanwhile, disadvantaged minorities gain the most from expanded educational choice.” In fact, as the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Hess pointed out earlier this week, the long history of vouchers begins with Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill seeking to help poor families to educate their children in the 18th and 19th centuries. The first major push to let American families send their children to schools of their choice using public funds was led by Catholics seeking to escape discriminatory public schools. Moreover, American voucher programs were not “pioneered” by resisters to school integration. Hess shows that America’s first school-voucher program was the GI Bill, which paid for WWII veterans to attend college. Afterward, even the liberals in Lyndon Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity turned to vouchers as a way to help black children suffering in segregated public schools. “Vouchers were seized upon by racists as one of the many tools they used to resist desegregation. That is true,” Hess writes. “But that’s only a small piece of a much larger story. Vouchers have long been proposed as a tool to empower families, temper the reach of the state, democratize access to education, and offer better options to those failed by the state.” Weingarten and the AFT deliberately ignore this history.

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