Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, testifies during a House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee hearing on COVID-19 school closures, Wednesday, April 26, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib) more >
By Valerie Richardson – The Washington Times – Thursday, September 14, 2023
Teachers’ union chief Randi Weingarten equated parents who seek alternatives to traditional public schools to segregationists, a comparison that didn’t sit well with conservatives, starting with Sen. Tim Scott.
The South Carolina Republican fired off an email declaring “I’m so sick and tired of liberals, too many of them happening to be white, crying racism every single time they’re losing an argument.”
“I can’t think of anything more racist than teachers’ unions trapping poor Black kids in failing schools in big blue cities,” Mr. Scott said in a Thursday tweet. “Randi Weingarten, you’ve done enough damage.”
Ms. Weingarten said in an interview that school-choice advocates like former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman have used the “same words” as 1950s-era segregationists, namely “choice” and “parental rights.”
“Those same words that you heard in terms of wanting segregation post-Brown v. Board of Education, those same words you hear today,” said Ms. Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union.