How Randi Weingarten’s career prepared her to take on Trump

Randi Weingarten has spent most of her career waging high-profile battles in New York politics and on the national stage. Now, she finds herself in the middle of a war over the American education system. The longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers is up against the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, impose control over higher education and end diversity initiatives. With years of experience in New York City’s labor movement, including serving as president of the influential United Federation of Teachers, Weingarten has spent her career preparing for this moment. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your career has included being a lawyer, a teacher, a union leader, all of which are areas that are interconnected with a focus on education. How did this very diverse but interconnected career trajectory come together?

If you told a 14- or 15-year-old Randi Weingarten that this would be my career, I would have said, “Absolutely not,” with probably a curse or two. “You’re nuts.”

Neither my sister nor I thought we would go into education, and both of us did this as our second career, meaning she became a doctor initially, and she still teaches. I became a lawyer, and then I started teaching high school. Both of us really love it.

And so that was one piece of it, and the second piece of it, on the labor side, was three things that happened that I think changed the course of my life and made me think about this – made me think about the power dynamics between workers and their bosses, and also the power dynamics in politics. One, my mother was on strike in 1975 for about six weeks or so and she didn’t get a paycheck. And my father had been laid off a few years before. He was an electrical engineer, and in one of the recessions, he was laid off, and it was very hard for him to get another job. The recession just took all these jobs, so thinking about what happened to so many workers in the Midwest, when a company would just close, or a layoff would just happen, and the stripping of dignity. I saw and felt it in my own family, and I saw the struggle in terms of having power, the power of a union and the solidarity and people staying together. The last thing was during the ’70s, there was the big recession. We saw many of our favorite teachers being laid off because of budget cuts and the work we tried to do to try to get those courses back and those teachers back.

What career accomplishment are you most proud of?

I would say two things I’m most proud of. When I left the UFT, we really had overcome many of the scars and the wounds of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers strike and brought the community together. In fact, my first speech as president of the AFT was a call for community schools and really wrapping services and really making schools, public schools, the centers of community again. Those scars went really deep in New York City.

I used to chuckle when Mayor (Mike) Bloomberg took credit for the 43% across-the-board increases that we negotiated in three contracts. A lot of blood and tears in both contracts, but doing something that was significant enough in a short period, so people felt like they were earning a better wage. We have really stood up an institute of collective bargaining within the AFT and really done a lot of work to make the work of collective bargaining, the teaching of collective bargaining, ensure that our members and our leaders understood the practice of collective bargaining.

The Trump administration is downsizing and has proposed eliminating the U.S. Department of Education. What will the impact be?

The president, first off, as much as the president keeps saying that he wants education to go back to the states and to local control, his actions in (late April) are the exact opposite. The level of intrusion and control for his ideological purposes are clear and are intense.

What they really want to do is to defund the public schools. They want to dismantle public schools, and they’re engaging in this practice. 

Dismantling the Department of Education, my concern is the money. What’s going to happen in terms of the money? Over the last 60 years, the $100 billion that we have fought for, and that’s used in schools across the country or for kids across the country, that’s what actually helps level the playing field. So am I concerned about what they’re doing? Yes. Are we fighting it in the courts and the court of public opinion? Yes. But the bigger issue is, what country in the modern age believes its best days are in front of it, not behind, and one of the first things it does is take away education. Who does that? Why would you do that to the students of America?

On April 25, a federal judge in Maryland issued a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit UFT brought against the Trump administration regarding the administration’s directive regarding diversity, equity and inclusion teaching in schools. What is the impact of this injunction and what will be the overall impact of this case?

The immediate impact is going to be the attestation letters, where they try to tell every school district you have to stop engaging in anything remotely connected to civil rights, including the teaching of honest history. I think that attestation is now put on hold. And the consequences of that attestation that they said that they would make every school district sign, or they would lose their Title I money. That’s put on hold because our injunction is a nationwide injunction.

How can public education be strengthened? 

There’s lots of things we have to do to strengthen schools. I think that COVID really did break us, and we have an outmoded and outdated accountability system that sees success based upon who can effectively fill out a standardized test. We have to think about how we help create how every single public school is a safe and welcoming place, and how every and how we are making schooling relevant for all kids and making it engaging for all kids. So I’ve become a big believer in things like hands-on instruction and career tech ed, and thinking about high school as not simply college prep, but how we open the aperture and make it about career prep and life prep, to how we have things like service learning, how we do things like stackable credentials as well as dual enrollment, how we engage kids in a meaningful way, how we build their critical thinking and their problem-solving skills, their resilience, their relationship skills.We need to do different kinds of things in public education, we need to strengthen it. We need to meet kids’ needs. We need to overcome the fixation on social media and on devices. We need to do all of these things, but what’s happened is that the cultural wars don’t help us do any of that. What it just does is devise and create division and try to undermine the public schools that should be there and should be great for all kids.

What is the path forward for the Democratic Party?

Before you can look to 2026, to 2028, you have to look to 2025, and you have to look to right now. What the party has to do is the party has always had a value system of valuing the people of America and trying to be the working people’s party, particularly in the modern age. You know, we are the party of FDR. We are the party of working folks. But when people don’t believe it, then you have to do the work that you can do, and people don’t believe it, because they’re so angry about their own lives and they’re right to be angry because of the inequality in America.

I worked as an intern in Warren, Ohio, between my junior and senior year in college. And I watched what happened when plants closed, and watched what happened to people, and the dignity that people have had, and then all of a sudden that dignity was gone because a plant closed, or because a coal mine closed. The Democratic Party has to act its values every single day so that people believe us.