Weingarten’s ‘Why Fascists Fear Teachers’ Provides No Real Answers To The Rise Of Fascism And How To Fight It
Cover of Randi Weingarten’s “Why Fascists Fear Teachers.”
Editor’s Note: Carol Lang is a CUNY Professor and PSC Delagate and Steve Zeltzer is the producer and host of the WorkWeek Radio program.
American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten attempts to provide an understanding of the ever increasing problem of Why Fascists Fear Teachers, but, in my opinion, fails miserably. Her book provides no solution that will meet the immediate crisis because she is unable to understand the crisis from a class perspective. This is because she misses the class question and so the book is more a set of anecdotes as opposed to a full-fledged analysis of fascism or even the current situation. Instead of going to the root of why fascism has become a global movement and why it is growing in the US, she covers up the class contradictions and with it the decline of US capitalism and imperialism.
World Socialist Website argues: “During the first Trump administration, she crisscrossed the country to shut down the 2018 wave of wildcat teacher strikes. Over the last year, she blocked strikes in Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities against austerity demands due to Biden’s ending of pandemic relief funding and Trump’s cuts. During the Obama years, Weingarten colluded with billionaire Bill Gates and other school privatizers. The AFT’s slogan was “School reform with us, not against us.”
Weingarten’s fascists may fear teachers, as the title of her book suggests, but they have nothing to fear from Randi Weingarten. With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, she allied herself with right-wing anti-vaxxers against teachers opposed to reopening COVID-infested schools.”
After reading 178 pages I have yet to figure out the point of the book or who it is addressed to. It is, unfortunately, nothing more than a feel-good book that praises teachers for their wonderful work with children, but gives little insight into where the problem has originated or how to solve it. It is generally ahistorical, understands only the surface meaning of fascism and gives us no insight into why this problem is occurring. It offers no solutions, (nor is meant to) to the dire and very real circumstances fascism causes for public education.
It is not grounded in material reality. Historically, Weingarden points to such loathsome characters as John Locke, the founding fathers, etc. who she argues all believed that everyone should be educated, without even questioning who these people were. Of the first twelve U.S. presidents, who are considered among the Founding Fathers, ten were slave owners, with the only exceptions being John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams. Although John Adams was not himself a slaveowner he supported the establishment of capitalist America, and his role was no less reactionary. As president he passed the Alien and Sedition act in 1798 the very same Act that Trump is now using to try to deport immigrants.
Can Bourgeois Democracy Allow for Critical Thought?
Weingarten’s argument , and this is made throughout the book, is that a democratic society where everyone has the opportunity to learn critical thinking will repel the fascists, not only has proven incorrect on the face of it because it is the decline of capitalism that produces fascism, but even in her case , a teacher and the leader of the teachers’ union, understands little how material conditions promotes the decline of education as opposed to fostering it. These rich white men were never concerned about, and in fact discouraged the masses from learning, so that they, the wealthy, would not be checked in their insatiable desire for profit. The fact that we have an electoral college as opposed to everyone having an equal vote is because James Madison distrusted the masses. Moreover, these white men were slaveholders, not likely that they believed that all men were created equal. She argues that we (teachers) teach young people to have agency, “but we also teach core American values such as patriotism” [pg. 6]. Rather than being an internationalist, she promotes support for the American government and its imperialist policies around the world. She has not called for the end to genocide in Gaza because she is a Zionist and has given millions to both the Israeli state and to Ukraine in its never-ending war with Russia.
From its inception and throughout its history, the US has been a class society and as it became a dominant player on the world scene, it became a colonialist and then an imperialist country where millions were sacrificed on the altar of the American dollar. Weingarten, too, is a multi-millionaire. Its democratic nature was and continues to be a ruse, pretending that the US is a non-class society, and is open to all. During many of the wars that the US has engaged in, there were surely millions of victims in those countries that the US hoped to dominate, but there were victims in the US as well who went to prison for fighting against US imperialism. And yet Weigarten writes when discussing critical thinking: “Having a different opinion from someone else doesn’t make you evil, it makes you an American.” [pg. 24]
Once again, this shameless support of some abstract America, leaves people being doxed over their position on Palestine. There is nothing more utopian than this. Her complete idealization of teachers’ sacrifices, and she mentions many, is without the express need to organize a fightback. For Weingarten, martyrdom is sufficient in and of itself to show that teachers were and are willing to sacrifice for their students. And while in many circumstances teachers are incredibly brave and should be applauded for their commitment to their students, Weingarten thinks this is enough to prove the nobility of teachers and therefore the fascists should be condemned for their attacks. (She discusses teachers who refused to leave their students during the Nazi period in Germany on pg. 32).
She quotes Diane Raviitch who argues, “Without knowledge and understanding one tends to become a passive spectator rather than an active participant in the great decision of our time.” [pg. 35] And yet the working class makes no decisions that impact the government, nor do they make decisions in the AFT. This is all pomp and circumstance. I can attest to that since I am a member of the AFT.
Weingarten wants her cake and eat it too. She mentions on pg. 44 that thousands of books have been banned in the US and compares that to Nazi Germany. And while this is a sign that fascism has arrived, she makes no mention that something needs to be done about the ever-growing fascist threat to our society. WHAT IS TO BE DONE is never posed, let alone answered in her lovefest of “democracy.”
It almost makes me crazy when I read, “But I know that we, the people, believe in the promise of our nation-that all of us are created equal-and that working together while thinking for ourselves is the essence of American liberty.” [pg. 51] What utter bullshit. What does this even mean? The best teachers try to inculcate critical thinking in their classes, but they must teach to the test or they will be penalized by their administration. How many teachers have been fired for asking, “What about Palestine? Randi has done nothing to fight for academic freedom. With over a million workers in the AFT we are not powerless to challenge this bullying. She claims that the AFT “is committed to defending teachers who get in trouble for teaching honest history and basic truth (pg. 56), and I ask “What about Palestine?”
Weingarten is a Zionist and Thus Pro-Israel
As a longtime supporter of the Zionist regime and a big supporter of the Histadrut, the Zionist apartheid labor federation, she has also refused to mobilize the union against the massive witch hunt and retaliations against US teachers and faculty members who have opposed the US supported genocide in Gaza and the pogroms going on in the West Bank. She has worked overtime to shutdown debate at the last AFT convention so there could be no real debate in the union about why the AFT should break with support for Zionism and the genocide and oppose US military aid to Israel. While entire educational institutions in Gaza have been bombed and destroyed killing thousands of students, teachers and staff, Weingarten has been a stalwart supporter both in the AFT and AFL-CIO for silence of this fascist, murderous agenda.
Weingarten reaches for one of the worst union leaders as an example of a model of an exemplary union leader, and of course, in combing the depths she finds Albert Shanker. She argues, as her mentor, that he is “arguably one of the greatest union leaders and civic leaders of the twentieth century” “Shanker wrote: ‘…the point of schools is to inculcate and safeguard the very important foundational principle and practice in the United States that is democracy.’” And yet, in Oceanhill-Brownsville in the 1970s, the people backed community control of the schools because the school system was racist and Shanker organized a strike to defeat the community having any say in their schools. Besides being a big supporter of the anti-communists witch hunts, he was also a big supporter of collaboration with the CIA around the world. CIA operative and AFT International Director Tom Kahn operated internationally to support US corporate interests.
Weingarten goes on to quote another pillar of American equality; that is Lyndon Baines Johnson. She argues that because he taught in a Mexican American community LBJ was committed to equality. Not only was he reluctant to sign the civil rights and voting rights act, and did only when he was forced to do so by thousands of people taking to the streets causing a tremendous embarrassment for his administration, but he also killed hundreds of thousands of people in Vietnam. Weingarten is an incredible idealist. While her book purports to understand little about class, she in fact understands all too well that if her members go out on strike along with the rest of the working class in a general strike—we will have the power to defeat Trump and his fascist bullies. That is why she has attempted to keep workers weak, relying only on the Democratic Party for crumbs.
Weingarten Supports Privatization
Weingarten is a traitor to her class writing a book that is absolutely meaningless and only further confuses teachers who are concerned about the growth of fascism and Project 2025’s plan to completely privatize public education and replace it with Christian fundamentalist schools funded by the state. This has already happened in Texas and in some charter schools even in California. Both the AFT & NEA have accepted charter schools as long as they are unionized and have refused to challenge the fundamental nature of privatized education in which charter schools and vouchers are a vital tool in destroying public education by setting up a two-tier system undermining public schools and allowing massive corruption and theft by the operators of these charters. This of course was pushed by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Arne Duncan who gleefully welcomed the Katrina New Orleans hurricane so that the public schools in the Crescent City could be destroyed and replaced with charter schools destroying the jobs of thousands of mostly Black women public school teachers. This racist scheme was never fought by Weingarten and the AFT which allowed these crimes against not only public education but the Black community as well.
Attacks on the Working Class
Basically, while Weingarten understands the class nature of capitalist society, she is forced to blame the problem on someone or something and thus, the Republicans—especially Trump—is the reason, she would argue, for the degradation of our school system. Trump, according to Randi, is to blame for the “great replacement theory” so that whites can feel protected from the immigrants who will replace them. But the Democrats have done little to dissuade poor whites that the economy can work for all because they know full well that capitalism cannot work for working-class people since it is not designed to do so. In fact, the rich are getting much richer at the expense of workers. Important social services are being cut constantly, especially for people of color, and the Democratic Party provides no challenge to the Republicans.
As for her claim that Republicans oppose free lunch for children while the Democrats support it, if we look back to the 1970s we will find that free breakfast programs only came about because the Panthers and the Young Lords insisted on it. President Bill Clinton at his first opportunity cut welfare programs for poor women.
Weingarten’s idealist view of America leads her at one point to pretend that this is something achievable by all Americans, but then she acknowledges America’s real history, that it is racist and fundamentally unequal. But rather than learning from it, that racism can be traced back to its long history of slavery and segregation, the US has never confronted its past because it has no intention of changing its present circumstances. While it promised democracy, the US could never deliver on its promise. Capitalism, by its very nature, creates wealth only for the few and misery for the rest, especially if one is a person of color.
Weingarten writes, “But sadly, far from challenging inequality, fascists and their far-right allies condone or even champion inequality. In this regard, American history is repeating itself, and not for the best. Today’s attacks on public education are rooted in our nation’s history of segregation. [pg. 101] History is not to be ignored; it is to be reckoned with. The class and race nature of American society begins with the inception of this country. To root out these deeply entrenched menaces to our “democracy” we must change the very nature of our society; that is the reason why they persist. As an example of the law being unable to root out the deep-seated racism in this country, Weingarten writes about the case of Brown v Bd of Education which was a landmark case in the desegregation of the school system. This landmark case voted on by the Supreme Court did not change the desegregation laws in Prince Edward County, Virginia until the 1970s. But rather than understanding the gift that racism bestows on capitalism, allowing it to maintain the status quo, Weingarten blames its continuance on the far right and its desire to destroy public education. But, at the same time, she could not stay away, and rightly so, from criticizing Barack Obama around his race to the top and how that undermines public education. (pg. 105) And so the Democrats are just as likely to accept the class divisions in American society as do the Republicans. Her plea for strengthening public education to “level the playing field” will never jibe with reality.
Vouchers came into existence right after the Brown decision allowing white parents, on the taxpayers’ dime, to send their kids to white private schools, thus getting around the decision. The government went to great lengths to try to maintain segregated schools, not only by instituting the voucher system, but by even shutting down all schools and canceling taxes so that Prince Edward County would not have to live with the Brown decision. Ultimately, Weingarten writes “segregation academies” were set up to resolve the problem. (pg. 107)
Charter Schools Steal Needed Funds From Public Schools
Eventually, charter schools replaced vouchers, putting a tremendous amount of money into the hands of privatizers of which Weingarten is one. Her book is filled with contradictions.
Not only did she open a charter in the Bronx in a partnership with privatizer Steve Barr, but reached an agreement to jointly run the New York charter high school in 2007. Her mentor Shanker had proposed reforming the k-12 education system with these new schools and this was taken forward by capitalists who used this scheme by spending billions to push their charter school empires.
She even helped expand Barr's charter school chain to California where she personally used her power to establish the Green Dot charter school chain in LAUSD undermining public schools in the Golden State. Moreover, Weingarten, to settle some very unsettling teachers’ contracts in New Jersey, had to play ball with the politicians. Jay Arena’s Expelling Public Schools, exposes Ms. Weingarten’s hypocrisy and her willingness to hand over the New Jersey public school teachers to management.
He writes:
“But to make real headway on changing teachers’ evaluations, reforming compensation, and weakening tenure and other labor protections, there had to be changed to the state’s tenure law and a renegotiation of the teachers’ union contract. In these initiatives, Anderson (management) got plenty of assistance from all levels of government—the Obama, Christie, and Booker administrations—as well as from the bureaucratic leadership of the National Education Association (NEA) and AFT unions. The Obama administration, as part of its Race to the Top grant program, required states to make it easier to strip tenure from teachers to be eligible for the program’s funds. With the support of the two teacher union federations, in summer 2012, the state legislature passed, and the governor signed, a new tenure law. The new regime allowed tenure to be stripped from teachers with two consecutive years of poor performance and, crucially, made student test scores a ‘predominant’ factor in evaluating teachers. The administration, with the collaboration of the NTU leadership, had been stalling on negotiating a new contract, which expired in 2009. Now, armed with the new state legislation, Anderson and Cerf moved to sign a deal that weakened tenure and tied teacher pay to ‘performance,; a major part of which would be measured by test scores and arbitrary evaluations. A January 2012 meeting Cerf held with AFT president Randi Weingarten at the union’s D.C. office paved the way for the deal. The two lawyers had developed a cooperative relationship in the early to mid-2000s when Cerf was Joel Klein’s chief deputy and Weingarten, before taking the AFT helm in 2008, headed the New York City local, the most powerful within the federation. At the 2012 meeting, Cerf presented an offer she couldn’t refuse—either she would agree to a contract with the neoliberal labor reforms or Cerf would ensure a New Orleans solution of full charterization. With the aid of Obama-driven state changes, and a compliant union leadership, the contract included a veritable neoliberal wish list.”
In her book, Weingarten tries to mount a defence of her own charter school by claiming that her school "remains among one of the most effective charter schools in the Bronx.” [pg. 127] This begs so many questions since we know that charters not only siphon away money from public schools, but that they are allowed to self-select the students they teach.
Moreover, Weingarden acknowledges the class divisions in schools which are exacerbated by our taxation system where schools rely on neighborhoods to fund them, and that “Local funding for public education means that wealth and income inequalities between communities shape inequalities in schools.” [pg. 121'] But once again, while acknowledging that wealth privileges wealthier districts, she provides no solution to class-based education.
Nothing in This Fiction Adds Up
If this is not a polemic against the Republicans and the neoliberal “reformers” I can’t imagine what this vision is about. Weingarten seems not to mind that nothing adds up. Obama, a Democrat, hired neoliberal Arne Duncan to be his Secretary of Education, while Duncan was a defender of privatization and a “staunch defender of corporate involvement” [pg. 138'] with the intention of closing schools. Weingarten plays a major role in Democratic Party politics. It would be hard to then argue that the Democratic Party somehow promotes working class ideals. Unions, she argues, make a tremendous difference in the lives of their members. Unions, she contends, raise wages for their members “by an average of 10 to 15 percent” (pg. 142)—but over how much time we do not know.
These statistics are nothing but a slight of hand. Had Weingarten organized a national strike with her 1.8 million members, the results may be very different. She illustrates labor’s lack of resolve to defend its members by focusing on the Air Traffic Controllers when they went out on strike in 1981 and then President Ronald Reagan fired them all, bringing down a hammer blow that the working class has yet to recover from. Rather than saying that the working class had an opportunity to show its power, she uses this as an example of how little power we have.
The AFL-CIO stood by while all these workers were fired. The lesson for the rest of the working class was indelibly carved into our brains, that is, never to strike. This was a tragedy of momentous proportions, and the blame must be squarely put on the labor bureaucrats’ shoulders. Randi Weingarten is not unique in her collaboration with management, she is just one example of why workers see themselves as being weak and thus the only solution is to vote for someone who will hopefully deliver—that is the Democratic Party. She is an ideologue for the capitalist class and opposes a labor party which would threaten her relation with the billionaires who she has colluded with her entire career. She and her special guest Bill Gates were booed during the 2010 national AFT convention in Seattle and throughout her history she has taken money from not only billionaires like Gates and other “reformers” of education—but has recently signed a $27 million dollar deal with the techno fascists and their AI firms like Anthropic to “train” teachers on how to use AI in the classroom.
The purpose of these AI billionaires is to eliminate teachers and replace them with robots thereby further increasing their profits—and Weingarten is helping to prepare the way for this anti-working class fascist agenda.
As some teachers know, the commodification of education including testing by corporations like Pearson has been welcomed by Weingarten. She helped welcome the whole testing scam and even took money from these scammers to supposedly help teachers learn the testing techniques profiting these privateers. She, along with the bosses, has helped turn the education profession into an appendage of the drive for profits with Google and other software companies and billionaires turning education into a profit center all under the support of Weingarten and company. In addition to her salary of over $500,000 a year, she also has income from her other profit making ventures while teachers have to use their meager pay to help families of color and other poor working class students get supplies in the schools.
The Way Forward to Weingarten Only Leads Us Into the Abyss
The remaining part of the book, that is the final chapter, is called The Way Forward, and it rails against Trump and his billionaire fascists, but still provides no solution. By page 176 she talks about a poster in her office given to her by a member that states:
“I Inspire, I encourage, I empower, I Nurture, I activate, I motivate, I change the world, I am a teacher. And while teachers do all those things, and should be given tremendous credit for all we do, we should be compensated for it. But with the reformist approach of our leaders, never wanting to confront management by withholding our labor, but instead as the Newark fiasco demonstrates, we will continue to live in this downward spiral of lack of funds and the closing of schools and the excuses by the government that we can’t save the schools because of declining enrolment, etc. This will lead, with our fascist state already in existence, to further degradation of the school system and much worse, that is, the possibility of workers being rounded up when they finally are let loose from the shackles of the union bureaucrats to the incarceration of those of us who finally protest. Without preparing, the government will simply fire people as they are doing with the federal workers now, or they will incarcerate workers who get out of hand. We need to unshackle ourselves and fight for a leadership which will break with the Democrats and organize the power of the workers in a general strike.
Ultimately, Weingarten goes nowhere and has no program that she advances that will turn the situation around. These are nothing but crocodile tears. Unions, according to her, are the solution, but with the draconian measures being advanced, there must be a fightback.
As an open supporter of US imperialism run by the Democrats and Republicans, she refuses to even mention both capitalist parties spend trillions on 800 military bases around the world and that the military industrial complex, which she supports through the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, which is in turn funded by USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, not only serves to defend American imperialism, but siphons off money to much needed services such as education. The idea that the leader of an education workers union would have nothing to say about the US war machine which is sucking education dry shows her real reactionary capitalist ideology. Refusing to mention the war machine and US imperialist interventions around the world, including supporting the genocide in Gaza, are an indictment of her own role as an accomplice of these crimes against the working class of the world and the millions of US workers who have been sent to wars destroying them and their families.
Finally, the book is filled with minutia about the organization of the union, locals, etc. But she will not discuss the big picture that is uniting the working class, or at least all the locals in the AFT, to mount a challenge to the billionaires and the state itself. This is not something that she is willing to do in her book because she is unwilling to do that in the streets. Why Fascists fear Teachers is filled with too much hot air and little substance and thus is a danger to teachers because it obscures the reality of capitalist collapse into fascism which we are seeing right now in front of us.