Democrats need to break up with Randi Weingarten 

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten recently resigned with great fanfare from the Democratic National Committee, part of a public rift with DNC Chair Ken Martin. Democratic leaders should thank Weingarten for her service, then lock the door behind her as she makes her way out.  

As one of the most powerful labor leaders in America, Weingarten was a key architect of the disastrous Biden-Harris pandemic school closures. Those closures managed to simultaneously erase two decades of learning progress for an entire generation of American children, while also eliminating Democrats’ massive electoral advantage on the issue of education dating back to Bill Clinton.    

As a party leader, Weingarten gaslit Democrats into believing that the best response to the Republican free market smorgasbord of school choice with loosely regulated vouchers is to make sure there is no choice of any kind. 

To be clear, I am a former SEIU Local 721 member who strongly supports unions. I have worked in a Democratic White House and on five Democratic presidential campaigns. I am a big-government liberal. I just happen to believe that the purpose of government should be to serve people, not public employee unions like teachers unions, administrators unions, police unions and prison guard unions.

That might sound like common sense, but those are fighting words in Weingarten’s Democratic Party — something l learned firsthand as a dad during the pandemic school closures. 

I had a front row seat as Weingarten’s affiliate, United Teachers Los Angeles, leveraged its school board majority to close Los Angeles schools for a year and a half, with its president defiantly declaring, “There is no such thing as learning loss.”  

While United Teachers Los Angeles was ignoring learning loss, it was taking stands on far-flung issues like boycotting Israel years before the Gaza war. It was hardly reassuring to Jewish students like my daughters, isolating at home, to know that their own teachers didn’t think our people should have a homeland.

Weingarten’s affiliate also wielded its considerable power to bully politicians and defiant parents into fealty during the school closures.  

When the closures started in March 2020, I began organizing with a group of Los Angeles Unified School District moms whose kids went to school with my daughters. In the beginning, we were just trying to figure out how to get through each day. But after weeks turned into months, we began organizing with parents from other Los Angeles Unified School District schools to get our great teachers back into the classroom.

It would be an understatement to say that United Teachers Los Angeles didn’t take kindly to that.

Weingarten’s affiliate initially opposed teaching over zoom. And while United Teachers Los Angeles trapped Los Angeles Unified School District students at home indefinitely, cut off from learning, they rooted their opposition to reopening schools in bizarre racial ideology, not science. 

By August 2021, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s president was describing parents advocating for reopening (some of whom were Persian Jews) as “wealthy, white, Middle Eastern” stalkers. She commissioned a “racial profiling study” opposition researching families organizing to reopen schools, and endorsed a social media post characterizing reopening schools as “white supremacist thinking” with: “right on!”

Right on?

Unfortunately, those aren’t the musings of a fringe gadfly. That’s the leadership of today’s Democratic Party which has driven American democracy into a ditch.

These Los Angeles Unified School District parents encountered endless Kafkaesque roadblocks erected by Weingarten’s union. And as it happened, I watched a group of smart progressive parents I’d been organizing with transform into Trump voters. one-by-one. It was like a real-time focus group of the damage Weingarten and her allies were doing to my party’s credibility.  

Similar stories played out in blue cities across the country, as the historic Democratic advantage on education melted away. 

With leaders like Weingarten, it is not surprising Democrats haven’t had a robust debate since the Obama administration about how to build an abundant education agenda to translate “high quality public schools” from a soundbite into a civil right for all Americans.  

The party that invented public charter schools under Bill Clinton, then scaled them under Barack Obama, can’t even say “charter school” in mixed company under Randi Weingarten, without whispering and peeking to check who might be listening.  

Kamala Harris talked about choice and freedom in every campaign speech, but never about schools. That wasn’t an oversight — it was by design.

While the consequences of Weingarten’s leadership have been tragic for American children, the implications are also devastating for a Democratic Party struggling to regain credibility with working class voters.

Here’s a lesson plan for my party: Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama won because they had the guts to challenge party orthodoxy on behalf of the American people. Democrats like Harris — along with every nominee since Walter Mondale who lost in the general election — ran as avatars of party orthodoxy and offshored education policymaking to Weingarten and the teachers unions.

You do the math.

Democrats became the party of public education because they had the courage to fight for it. That courage is needed again today — to challenge failed leaders, stand with parents, take back power and fight for democracy.  

Ben Austin is a Democratic Party insider, former staffer for Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign and founding director of Education Civil Rights Now.