The president of the American Federation of Teachers slammed President-elect’s Trump’s nominee to head the Education Department, Betsy DeVos, in a speech Monday, saying that the nominee’s “goal is to undermine public schools.”
Randi Weingarten made the attack two days before DeVos, a major advocate of charter schools, will have her first Senate hearing on her Cabinet nomination.
In a speech at the National Press Club, Weingarten said Trump chose “the most anti-public education nominee in the history of the department. Betsy DeVos lacks the qualifications and experience to serve as secretary of education. Her drive to privatize education is demonstrably destructive to public schools and to the educational success of all of our children.”
DeVos is the chairwoman of the American Federation for Children, a nonprofit that promotes private school choice programs such as education savings accounts, opportunity scholarships and tax-credit scholarships.
Teachers unions oppose charter schools, arguing that they drain resources from public schools, leaving their students worse off. Charter schools are often nonunion, so the move toward them and away from public schools, which are heavily unionized, represents a threat to labor leaders such as Weingarten.
While Trump did not talk much about education policy during the campaign, when he did, he said teachers unions were the main problem and that school choice, either through vouchers or charter schools, was the way to fix the schools.
Weingarten, a close friend of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, was one of Trump’s most persistent critics during the campaign, even working behind the scenes with the Democratic National Committee to promote the claim that the Republican was responsible for a rise in bullying at schools.
“We were all in and we lost. Trump tapped into big time the winds of change and won,” Weingarten tweeted after the election.
