Randi Weingarten
speaker
253 appearances
6 recordings
3 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 10 Nov
Randi Weingarten’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
have a good job with decent benefits when, you know, the bottom is being pulled out of both Social Security as well as Medicare and Medicaid. So when you get to education, it's like the epitome of taking away opportunity. As you said, The states run schools right now. Localities run schools right now.
The federal government, the law that we did in a bipartisan way that we helped shepherd through in the last days of the Obama administration... says that the Department of Education can't do curriculum. It can't be the human resource officer of schools.
It basically is there to fill in opportunity gaps and to ensure that a kid who feels schmiced, a kid who feels like there's an anti-Semitic incident that happened, a kid who is disabled or a kid with disabilities who's not getting the services, they can go to the Department of Education and say, help me. And the funding, and this will be my last point, the funding, the funding is for poor kids.
The funding is for kids with disabilities. The funding is for career tech ed pathways. The funding is for kids who are trying to become English proficient. The funding is for rural kids. The funding is for kids who are going to college as the first one in their families, the first generation to go to college, and they're trying to make it work and have a little scholarship. That's why
you saw that kids are basically saying, I'm having none of this because they see their futures being snatched.
When they say abolish, so there's three things. Essentially, when they say abolish the Department of Education, I'm a civics teacher, AP Gov, Clara Barton High School, Brooklyn, New York. If you look at the Constitution, it's the Congress who appropriates. It's a Congress that makes laws. The president signs it and executes the law.
But it's really only the Congress that can abolish the Department of Education. So but what the president can do and what they're doing and you see it in all of the, you know, with with the chainsaw that Elon Musk used, you know, over and over again in these last month or so, they can make government basically ineffective, not work by a thousand cuts. And that's what they're doing.
So if you essentially fire Trump. the entire staff or 80% of the staff of Social Security, and somebody needs to get their Social Security card, they're not going to be able to get it in a timely way. If you fire everybody who's doing Hurricane Watch, you're not going to have Hurricane Watch. If you fire everybody at USAID, the farmers...
who are basically selling their foodstuffs to USAID because they don't have a market in the United States, they're not going to be able to do that. And the same is true in terms of education. If you fire everybody or you make it non-feasible for it to work, then none of the laws that are supposed to be affected or effectuated by the department will work. So
If Title I is supposed to go to like Truman High School or to a high school in Staten Island, and there's supposed to be $5 million that goes there, and all of a sudden it doesn't, and they don't have the money, then that means the programs go away.
So that means the reading programs, the computer programs, the after-school programs, all the programs that are funded by Title I, and every school teacher in America understands what that means. They go away. The same in terms of the programs for kids with disabilities under IDEA.
If a school system or a school, because these things go directly to schools, if the funding goes away, a kid doesn't get physical therapy or occupational therapy. And to your point about red states versus blue states, more of this money goes to red states. So I've said to our folks in red states in particular, go to your school board because states and localities run schools.
Go to your school board. Ask them what's going to happen. How much money are we going to lose if we don't have Title I? If we don't have IDEA and how is that money going to be replaced? Is it going to be property taxes raised in Jackson, Mississippi? Is it going to be property taxes raised in Montgomery, Alabama? How are we going to have that funding that helps kids in schools?
Well, number one, the... We've been filing lawsuits on a timely basis when we see an action that we think we can, that we need to raise ruckus about. And so... It's it's both the court, but it's the court of public opinion that is as I mean, the courts are important. You and I are both lawyers. The courts are really important. The rule of law is really important.
And and and we have an obligation to actually make sure that democracy, that that we don't lose the republic. Sorry for being so. you know, for being so emotional about this. So the courts are really important because they basically are the umpire. They call balls and strikes. But it's a court of public opinion, as well as the Congress, that we have to work with as well.
They are the checks and balances of a government run amok, a government not doing what the people want. So
For example, number one, when we saw that Elon Musk was stealing, appropriating, taking, whatever word you want to use, jeopardizing private information of individuals, whether it was social security information, whether it was taxes, or whether it was in the Department of Education, when parents filed
for financial aid for their kids, when you file for a student loan, all that information goes to the Department of Education. Now it's all in Doge's hands. Nobody put that information out to give it to the government to weaponize it. So we filed a lawsuit saying, stop. And we got a temporary restraining order against Doge to stop giving them that financial and personal information.
That was number one. Number two, we filed a lawsuit when we saw that February 14th Dear Colleague letter, which essentially said, it's like they have weaponized the words diversity, inclusion, equity, to essentially say you can't teach any of the history of the United States of America if that history is about discrimination. So you can't teach Jim Crow.
You can't teach the effects of the Civil War. Now, how do you not teach that if you are a history teacher, about America? And how do you not teach about American exceptionalism in terms of how we change that? So we filed and said, no, how do you put teachers in this situation, history teachers in this situation, that we're going to get in trouble if we actually teach honest history?
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