Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy, by Randi Weingarten (Thesis, 256 pp., $30)
The title of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten’s new book is eye-catching and designed to attract readers, though by now the word “fascist” is thrown around routinely. The book’s subtitle, Public Education and the Future of Democracy, is more significant—and deceptive.
The book’s purported intention is to argue for public schools’ crucial role in our democratic society. But it offers little in the way of education policy or ideas that would truly benefit teachers and students.
The real aim is revealed in Weingarten’s choice to devote most of its pages to attacking her political opponents—especially supporters of school choice—and defending the interests of the American Federation of Teachers.
Claiming that 90 percent of kids in America attend public schools, Weingarten argues that the school-choice movement will destroy the institutions responsible for educating our citizens and nurturing democracy. For starters, that figure is outdated. Data from the 2021 Census indicate that the share of public school students stood at 81.9 percent. And that’s before the expansion of universal school choice in states like Texas and New Hampshire. Half of American children now have access to school choice.
Weingarten characterizes the school-choice movement as a conspiracy orchestrated by Christopher Rufo, Moms for Liberty, and other right-wing activists—a “plot to destroy public education,” in her words. The real drivers of the choice movement, however, are parents like Virginia Walden Ford, a black, low-income mother in Washington, D.C., who grew frustrated watching her son struggle in public school and helped create the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program—the nation’s first federally funded voucher initiative.
Weingarten also insists that vouchers are devised by whites to undermine desegregation. This isn’t just wrong—it gets the history completely backward. In fact, some teachers’ unions fought vouchers because they facilitated integration.
Weingarten claims that she is “willing to work with anyone who wants to actually address the problems facing our public schools.” But she refuses to engage with school-choice advocates, who propose concrete and constructive options for students underserved by traditional district schools.
Weingarten is correct to point out that the Right sometimes goes too far in its efforts to remove inappropriate books from school libraries—ill-considered campaigns against Toni Morrison’s Beloved and even the Bible come to mind. She’s also right to criticize President Trump’s budget cuts, which have negatively affected administration of the Nation’s Report Card, forcing it do fewer voluntary assessments; and the Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction, who tried to integrate the Bible into lesson plans.
These mostly sound points aside, she goes out of her way to denigrate “religious schools, whose very purpose is indoctrination.” This animus causes her to overlook the many advantages of faith-based education, such as the “Catholic school effect,” which has been demonstrated to benefit disadvantaged minority students in particular.
The biggest deception in Weingarten’s book is its portrayal of her role during the pandemic. “I led the AFT in developing a concrete plan to reopen schools as quickly and safely as possible,” she claims. Not so. Weingarten and her union colleagues kept American children out of schools until the government approved her request for a $750 billion federal aid package. It has since come to light that Weingarten was texting Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to pressure the CDC into keeping schools closed in 2021.
The book is primarily an attempt to rehabilitate Weingarten’s image after she backed the longest school closures in American history, which yielded the largest drop in student performance ever recorded. Weingarten writes that the “fascists” of her title “replace facts and critical thinking with propaganda that romanticizes the nation’s past.” Yet this is precisely what her book does in misrepresenting her actions during Covid.
Parents like me, who vividly remember attending reopened restaurants and gyms long before our children were allowed to return to the classroom, will not be fooled by Weingarten’s revisionist narrative. We will continue to cite her disastrous record and to advocate for our children’s interests.
