Teachers union leader bashes Betsy DeVos

There’s no more pretending to play nice between Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

In April, the two visited a traditional public school in Ohio together in what was a short-lived experiment in “getting to know you,” and they were supposed to visit a charter school together, too. But on Thursday, Weingarten gave a blistering speech at her union’s convention in Washington, calling DeVos an “ideologue who wants to destabilize and privatize the public schools that millions of Americans value and rely upon.”

A few hours later, DeVos went after the teachers unions — and the AFT, in particular — in a speech she gave in Denver to the American Legislative Executive Council, a powerful conservative organization of lobbyists and state legislators.

DeVos accused the unions of being “defenders of the status quo” who care only about “school systems” and not about individual children. She mentioned — and had displayed — an AFT tweet criticizing her for saying that public money should be invested in individual students and arguing instead that “we should invest in a system of great public schools for all kids.”

DeVos said: “I couldn’t believe it when I read it, but you have to admire their candor. They’ve made it clear that they care more about a system, one created in the 1800s, than they do about individual students.”

President Trump and DeVos have made clear that their chief educational priority is to expand school choice, including privately run charter schools, voucher and similar programs that use public money to pay for private and religious school education. They both have criticized the traditional public school system, America’s most important civic institution, which educates the vast majority of the country’s schoolchildren.

Weingarten said in her speech that defenders of America’s public education system are in a “David versus Goliath battle, and in this battle, we are all David.” While the unions contribute a good deal of money to candidates and causes they support, she was setting up union members as the “Davids” against ultra-wealthy philanthropists, including DeVos, a Michigan billionaire, who have been financially supporting efforts to expand school choice and privatize the public education system.

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