Why Randi Weingarten Fears Parents' Freedom to Choose
In Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy (Thesis, 2025) Randi Weingarten, the President of the American Federation of Teachers, exposes just how far union leaders will go in deluding themselves as well as the public. Rather than addressing the declining student proficiency in reading, math, and science, she attacks reformers who propose alternatives to traditional public schools. And rather than taking seriously the educational reformers' concerns, she resorts to the time-honored tradition of schoolyard bullies: name-calling.
To read this book is to understand how many of our public schools lost their way, shifting their focus from verifiable student learning to social engineering. And to maintain that agenda, union leaders such as Weingarten must obstruct parents' opportunities to choose alternatives to public schooling.
"The Warning": Or, How to Conflate Terms and Confuse Readers
Weingarten's title signals her strategy. Although she liberally uses "racism" and "authoritarianism," "fascism" is her favorite. Against this supposed threat, Weingarten depicts teachers as standing strong, defending their students and "our democracy." Never mind that there are no military officers stalking teachers in America. Weingarten's opening anecdote insinuates that it could happen because during World War II, Norwegian teachers defied Hitler by teaching students while wearing paper clips.
Weingarten defines "fascism" as "an approach to politics that rejects independent critical thinking and instead mobilizes people around fear and rage—which makes them more receptive to strongmen leaders who then strip away collective rights and freedoms." However, she reminds readers, "this is not an academic book. This book is a warning." And her "warning"—not to be confused with an attempt to mobilize people around fear—is that our country is in trouble. Presumably, this threat justifies her attempt to make readers "more receptive" to her own rejection of critical thinking:
While there are important, subtle distinctions between fascism, authoritarianism, oligarchy, anti-government extremism, and the far right, in practice at this moment in history, these forces and others are conspiring to destroy our public education system and, with it, the building blocks of opportunity for all. Which exact word we use isn't as important as the warning. I will use these terms and others interchangeably because the attacks they are launching on our education system, our students, and our teachers are interchangeable and interconnected.
This willingness to conflate disparate terms as a "warning" provides a clue as to why students are struggling in school. For educators such as Weingarten, politics matter more than precision. Why skip a good fascist hunt when all one needs ot do is point to a family sending their children to a private school? Weingarten opines, "The more important point, whatever the wording, is that the fascist agenda is not only antithetical to public education but poses an existential threat to public schools, to young people, and to democracy." Further displaying her disregard for accuracy, Weingarten also asserts, "today, fascism is an amalgam of people who either outright oppose diversity and pluralism, want to shrink government as much as possible, or both."
That's right, readers. Hoping to cut government waste and taxes? Think you know best about how to spend your tax dollars currently siphoned away to support "restorative justice programs" in junior high schools? You're a fascist.
Free to Choose
Weingarten frequently descends to such absurdity, particularly in relation to alternatives to public schools. School vouchers, she argues, are designed to send taxpayer dollars "toward elites and bankrupt public education." Like a good socialist, she produces the greed card: "the wealthy don't want to share opportunity—they want to hoard opportunity by funneling money into private education that benefits their own children and no one else."
But Weingarten's most reprehensible move is to libel the economist Milton Friedman. His influential Free To Choose (1980), co-written with Rose Friedman, includes a chapter delineating the history of American public education, which he praises as historically playing a role in "preventing fragmentation and divisiveness." Yet in the late twentieth century, "our schools are increasingly a source of the very fragmentation that they earlier did so much to prevent." No wonder Weingarten loathes him, given her argument that school choice leads to division.
The problem, Friedman argues, is that control over children's schooling increasingly "gravitated to professional educators" with burgeoning budgets and bureaucracies. The result has been a decline in school discipline and student learning. The solution, he insists, is giving parents the freedom to choose their children's schools through school voucher programs. And he was willing to advance children's education by discussing such programs with anyone willing to implement them, including Augusto Pinochet.
Weingarten observes, "Friedman, notably, went on to confirm his fascist bona fides when he advised Chile's authoritarian military dictator Augusto Pinochet on how to institute universal school vouchers in Chile." So much for Weingarten's self-righteous focus on truth and rejection of "name-calling."
"Tell . . . the Truth, but Tell it Slant"
But Weingarten writes like a bad student of Emily Dickinson. While the poet chooses to "Tell All the Truth, but Tell it Slant," Weingarten ditches "All" and just focuses on the slant. For instance, on page 76, she blames the death of a student in Oklahoma on the "extremist anti-LGBTQ climate." The death of Nex Benedict was a tragedy, though the documented facts vary significantly from Weingarten's narrative. She writes,
Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt signed a law in 2022 preventing trans students from using the bathroom that matches their gender identity. A few months later, a sixteen-year-old nonbinary student named Nex Benedict started being bullied at school. In February 2024, Nex was knocked to the ground during a fight with three older girls in the girls' bathroom. The next day, Nex died.
The death of any teenager is a tragedy at which no moral person rejoices. At the same time, Weingarten's phrasing insinuates that Nex died due to being beaten by girls in the bathroom. In fact, "Investigators later determined Benedict's death was a suicide caused by an overdose of Prozac and Benadryl." The handwritten notes in Benedict's room were "suggestive of self-harm." This was a medical finding affirmed by President Biden on March 23, 2024, who deplores the "suicide crisis." In addition, Tulsa County District Attorney affirmed the bathroom altercation was "mutual combat."
But Weingarten is not interested in transparency. Her mission is to depict teachers as the saviors of not only students but our "fascist" country.
"But they're even": Equitable Funding
Specifically, Weingarten's agenda is to remake our educational system and society into her vision of equality. It's no coincidence that "equal" (including variations, such as "equalizer" and "equality") occurs 46 times in this book, frequently in relation to wealth.
Weingarten complains that the schools in the Panther Valley School District in Pennsylvania spend $10,313 per pupil per year, while those in New Hope-Solebury spend $28,437 per year . The children in those districts have different "access." Moreover, "Black students" are particularly disadvantaged, as are rural schools. Everything must be even.
Reading Weingarten is a bit like watching episode 2:1 of the popular Monk television series, where "Mr. Monk goes Back to School." Adrian Monk enters a school break room and, in his compulsive fashion, begins pouring coffee between pots of regular and decaffeinated coffee. When the character Derek asks what he is doing, Monk replies, "making them even." When Derek objects, "but they're mixed together," Monk replies, "But they're even." To him, that is all that matters.
Like Monk, Weingarten is less interested in people's situations, desires, or actual results: everything must be equal. And this goal necessitates that more wealth flow from taxpayers toward schools, where administrators decide how to spend money. "We could fund every school equitably and adequately tomorrow if politicians wanted to. And if the far right and oligarchs weren't doing everything they could to stop it." It's back to fearmongering: "Billionaires want lower school taxes—as if they need more money—and they want the masses to be just educated enough to work for them, but not so educated that they feel empowered to demand change."
Fortunately, Weingarten implies, we have teachers saving America by doing what government won't so that children can learn: "That's why teachers also work on policy solutions to poverty and addiction and health care and homelessness—because we care about children and families and every facet of their well-being." As usual, her refrain is that they must do this because of the evil, racist right: "But fascists and oligarchs and extremists simply don't care."
Who's the Real Hero?
Ironically, Weingarten's "warning" against supposed "fascism" and insistence on "equality" confirm that Milton Friedman was right in his assessment: "Public schools teach religion, too—not a formal, theistic religion, but a set of values and beliefs that constitute a religion in all but name." Taxpayers are forced to fund it, and parents "are forced to pay to have their children indoctrinated with it."
Some parents may agree with Weingarten's approach to education, including "restorative justice" methods, even though such methods in many New York City schools have led to "the collapse of structure inside classrooms," stress for instructors, and constant disruptions. That is their choice.
And that is my point: parents and children deserve options. Randi Weingarten tries to distract readers from this truth by spinning a tale of heroic teachers who defy fascists. Weingarten's conclusion begins, "Teachers are the heroes in the American story." While that may be true of many teachers, Weingarten's book exposes her as a demagogue who retains power by distorting language and libeling opponents. But what else can one expect from someone who fears the freedom to choose?
