Free Republic

President Biden vowed on Friday that the federal government would cover the cost of rebuilding the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore – and that the work would be done by union labor, potentially setting up a funding fight with the conservative wing of the House of Representatives. Biden has promised from the outset that the federal government would pay for the bridge to be rebuilt. His comments on Friday came after the House Freedom Caucus — the conservative wing of the House of Representatives — released a series of conditions for federal funding for the bridge. The conditions include...

A New York University professor claimed last week homeschooled students can easily become victims of indoctrination.During an American Federation of Teachers (AFT) book club meeting, Ruth Ben-Ghiat argued the recent opposition against public schooling stems originates with authoritarians who want to indoctrinate their children via homeschooling.One of the reasons that they all go after education and one of the reasons that schools are being targeted ... A big thing is to destroy liberal, democratic models of secular education – get everybody out of the system, put them in homeschools so they can be indoctrinated,” Ben-Ghiat told AFT President Randi Weingarten,...

The publisher describes the booklet as ‘a pocket-sized flip book that graphically models condom use between two men.’ But they are not ‘two men.’ They are a man and a teen. As such, the graphic booklet overtly suggests male homosexual pederasty. (LifeSiteNews) — Materials given to students to take home by a high school in Canada as part of a sex-ed program look less like they’re intended for educational purposes and more like a brazen attempt to groom vulnerable teen boys for sex with older males. Student mom Janine Stephanie Penner reported on Facebook that “My grade 10 son was...

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten recently said that school choice “undermines democracy.” In a video of her remarks, Weingarten slammed former White House Education Secretary Betsy Devos, City Journal journalist Christopher Rufo, and prominent school choice activist Corey DeAngelis. “[School choice proponents] have not one thing that they offer as a solution other than privatizing or voucherizing schools, which is about undermining democracy and undermining civil discourse and undermining pluralism, because 90 percent of our kids goes to public schools still. They just divided. Divided, divide, divide, divide,” Weingarten claimed. “What did Rufo say? Rufo, DeAngelis, Devos,...

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) PresidentRandi Weingarten was slapped with an X community note after asking where the “women” were during an all-male Jewish prayer service. Weingarten, who said in 2010 she considers herself to be a “deeply religious” Jew, quoted Jewish conservative commentator Mark Levin’s video footage of the minyan — a quorum of Jewish adults, traditionally male, required for certain religious observances — outside the White House. “Where are the women?” Weingarten asked in the post, which has its comments section limited to Weingarten’s followers. The post garnered a response from Levin as well as a community note...

Want to have some ability to choose where your child goes to school? Well, then you’re a racist. So says Randi Weingarten, leader of the American Federation of Teachers. Words like “school choice” or “parental rights,” she maintains, are the “same kinds of words” used by segregationists, so if you use them too, you’re one of them. Predictably, Weingarten is now furiously backpedaling, claiming that she was just making an innocent comment about “language” rather than actually accusing anyone of being racist, but this isn’t the first time she’s beat this drum. In 2017, she called school-choice programs the “only...

One of the nation's largest teachers unions in America has reportedly offered instruction to teachers on how to insert lessons on gender identity into classroom discussions, according to a right-leaning public policy institute. The Defense of Freedom Institute, founded by two former Trump administration Department of Education officials, released a report earlier this month describing the topics promoted by the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. Before its Together Educating America's Children (TEACH) conference in July, DFI noted that AFT released a resolution on LGBT issues that touted "age-appropriate and inclusive" bathroom and locker room policies. In...

Columbia Law journals are delaying admissions decisions in the wake of the Court's landmark ruling. The move highlights how the verdict could have implications beyond undergraduate admissions. Law journals at Columbia University Law School are delaying their masthead decisions in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling last week outlawing race-based college admissions, a sign that the ban on affirmative action is already having an effect beyond undergraduate programs. The law school's office of student services, which coordinates applications to all journals including the flagship Columbia Law Review, said Sunday that journal acceptances had been postponed until the school could...

...The education system’s failure to prepare non-white students for college admissions on the merits is not just an accident of Democratic one-party rule. It is a feature of Democratic machine politics. The two major teachers unions — the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — tell Democrats to jump; Democrats lack the spine to do anything but ask, “How high?”...

“That woman murdered babies, and she knew it. And five days after we posted [Pfizer] Report 69, she announced her resignation. So that’s what Congress should be asking her about.” Walensky seemed less cool in this appearance for Congress. This is the least composed and the most nervous, I feel, like I’ve seen this woman who’s usually kind of cool as a cucumber,” noted conservative podcaster Emerald Robinson Thursday. She also “perjured herself twice,” expressed special guest and DailyClout CEO Dr. Naomi Wolf. The soon-to-be former CDC Director (June 30), Rochelle Walensky, testified before Congress for two hours on Tuesday....

Despite only spending a few years in the classroom, taxpayers could end up shelling out over $200,000 in a public pension for AFT president Randi Weingarten.Randi Weingarten has spent only a small portion of her career in the classroom despite leading the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the second-largest national teachers union in the United States. Trained as a lawyer, Weingarten taught full-time for just three years and was a substitute teacher for three more. However, according to a report by Freedom Foundation, a think tank, she will collect over 15 years' worth of public pension when she retires. That...

There is a reason why you know who Randi Weingarten, the leader of the second-largest teachers union in the country, is. She’s the one who threatened to strike if schools did not close in 2020. She is the one who said that school closures were not that big of a deal because “kids are resilient." She is the one who influenced the CDC to change its COVID-19 guidelines using almost her exact language. She is the one who introduced a campaign to bring Ibram X. Kendi’s simplistic ideas on race into “every classroom.” In other words, you know who Randi...

There are many reasons why so many US public schools remained persistently closed for well over a year, but at the top of the list is Randi Weingarten. She is the President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and served as the self-appointed and media-anointed spokesperson for teachers’ unions throughout the pandemic. Weingarten appeared regularly across national media outlets for well over two years, relentlessly touting the dangers of public schools and the risk to teachers from in-person instruction. She also painted anyone who advocated for schools to open as heartless and cruel. Now that it’s become clear what...

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten was hit with a Twitter fact-check on Monday after she claimed she tried to get students back into the classroom during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Weingarten made the hyperbolic claims in a tweet on Monday, acknowledging a post from Kyle Belokopisky — the executive director of the New York State Congress of Parents and Teachers — on the supposed 3-year anniversary of planning to reopen New York schools. “We worked together 3 years ago to get our kids back to in person schooling in a way that was safe for...

There are several features of the pandemic policy response that still astonish me. It does not surprise me that bureaucrats couldn’t suppress, control, much less eradicate, a respiratory virus by scrapping the Bill of Rights. What I cannot get over is all the ways that the response ended up achieving the opposite of what it was supposed to do. The planners, mostly of the Progressive left perspective, ended up totally discrediting the very things they have heretofore championed. What they did was unbearably idiotic even when judged by whether and to what extent they bolstered the institutions they had previously...

Some of the people most strongly associated with promoting lockdown measures during the COVID-19 pandemic have recently sought to recast their positions. Examples include Anthony Fauci, former leader of the federal COVID-19 response, teachers’ union head Randi Weingarten, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Fauci seemed eager to shirk responsibility for the lockdowns when talking to The New York Times last week. “Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did,” he said. It was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that produced the lockdown recommendations,...

When the former secretary of state and C.I.A. director Mike Pompeo, a man who had dealt firsthand with autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, described Randi Weingarten as “the most dangerous person in the world” last November, it seemed as though he couldn’t possibly be serious. Weingarten is 65 and just over five feet tall. She is Jewish and openly gay — she’s married to a rabbi — and lives in Upper Manhattan. She is the longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, which is not even the country’s biggest union of public-school educators. (The A.F.T. has 1.7...

On Wednesday, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten appeared in a House hearing held by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to discuss the impact of school closures due to COVID-19. In the hearing, Weingarten was pressed about the union’s influence on the federal government during this decision making process throughout the pandemic. In her opening remarks at the hearing, Weingarten claimed that in-person learning was the driving force behind the decisions made during the pandemic about school closures and re-openings. Once questioning began, Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), who is a doctor, asked Weingarten if AFT...

American Federation of Teachers comrade-in-chief Randi Weingarten recently asserted in a national newspaper that “Republicans are destroying our public schools. Teachers and parents must fight back.” Talk about pots and kettles. With a rogue person like Weingarten, it’s always about hyper-partisan politics and a faux “fight,” not the children or public education at large. She clearly will never apologize for the incalculable damage she and her allies did to vulnerable children in recent years with lies and will continue destroying them. Weingarten deems anyone who dissents an “extremist,” wishing to put “their political vendettas and ideologies ahead of children’s education....

Teachers union boss Randi Weingarten ripped into Americans critical of public education, accusing them of advancing an “extremist scheme” to replace government-run schools with private, religious, online, and homeschools. Speaking to the National Press Club this week, Weingarten — whose American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is the second largest teachers’ labor union in the nation — targeted the DeVos, Bradley, Koch, Uihlein, and Walton family foundations for their criticism of public schools. “The Betsy DeVos wing of the school privatization movement is methodically working its plan: Starve public schools of the funds they need to succeed,” Weingarten said. “Criticize them...