Mariely Sanchez spent the last school year using generative artificial intelligence nearly every day in her classroom.

The Miami fourth-grade teacher began each morning by asking a chatbot — teachers in Miami-Dade have access not only to ChatGPT, but to Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Co-Pilot — to comb through Florida state standards and create reading passages for students. She’d also ask the AI to produce multiple-choice and short-response quizzes to test how well students understood the reading. 

The assignments, she said, weren’t easy for students. She built them by using “difficult standards that students need more practice with” and prompting the AI to create materials.

Sanchez is spending her summer break learning more about AI, including its ethics, and helping colleagues do the same, warning:

That effort got a big boost earlier last month, when the American Federation of Teachers that it would open an AI training center for educators in New York City, with $23 million in funding from OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft, three of the leading players in the generative AI marketplace.

AFT says it’ll open the National Academy for AI Instruction in Manhattan this fall, offering hands-on workshops for teachers. Over five years, it said, the academy will train 400,000 educators, or one in 10 U.S. teachers, effectively reaching the more than 7.2 million students they teach. 

When she announced the academy in early July, AFT President Randi Weingarten said teachers face “huge challenges,” including navigating AI wisely, ethically and safely. “The question was whether we would be chasing it — or whether we would be trying to harness it.”

‘It’s the Wild West’

AFT, the nation’s second largest teachers’ union, envisions the academy working much like those that train carpenters, electricians and construction workers,“where the companies, where the corporations actually come to the union to create the kind of standards that are needed” for success, Weingarten said. 

Microsoft, for example, has said it plans to give more than $4 billion in cash and technology services to train millions of people to use AI, underwriting efforts at schools, community colleges, technical colleges and nonprofits. The tech giant already boasts an AI to train members of the larger AFL-CIO labor union, of which AFT is a member. And it’s creating a new training program, , to help 20 million people earn certificates in AI.

Rob Weil — AFT’s director of research, policy and field programs — said the new academy will bring high-quality training to a profession that so far has seen uneven opportunity for it.

“It’s the Wild West,” he said in an interview during a training session at the union’s annual conference in July. “It’s all over the place. You have some school districts that are out front, and they’re doing a lot of pretty good work.” But others are banning AI or simply ignoring it, he said, leaving teachers to fend for themselves at a time when students need them perhaps more than ever.

“We have to make our instruction better. We have to be better on engagement. We have a crisis of engagement in our schools, and these tools can help with that.”

AFT’s move has been met with equal parts cautious optimism and weary skepticism.

Writing in her , ed-tech critic and AI skeptic Audrey Watters called  AFT’s partnership with the tech companies “a gigantic public experiment that no one has asked for.”

Unions, she wrote, “should be one of the ways in which workers resist, rather than acquiesce to 
 the tech industry’s vision of the future.” By joining forces with big tech, she said, AFT is implicitly endorsing its products. “Teaching teachers how to use a suite of Microsoft tools does not help students as much as it helps Microsoft. Teaching teachers how to use a suite of Microsoft tools is not so much an ‘academy’ as a storefront.”

Benjamin Riley, who has also about generative AI in education, said observers should “100% worry” that the new partnerships represent a play for market share. 

“It’s very obvious from a product standpoint that they see education as one of, if not the primary, place to go with their product,” said Riley. “And the fact that AFT is willing to say, ‘Cool, let’s get some of that money and we’ll build a training center to help teachers use it,’ I can see why OpenAI would jump all over that.”

But he questioned whether AI training is what AFT members really want. He suggested instead that the union should recommit to helping teachers more deeply understand how learning works. “They haven’t been opposed to it,” he said, noting that it has long run an “” column in the magazine it mails to members. “But in reality it just hasn’t been a priority. Improving pedagogy hasn’t really been, to my eyes, a union priority for a long time.”

Riley, who in 2024 founded the think tank to explore AI issues, said an organization like AFT should ideally be thinking about whether embracing AI will lead to better outcomes for children — or whether it could “potentially erode and devalue the work of human teaching” while opening up schools as customers for AI companies. 

Representatives of OpenAI and Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but in an email, Microsoft’s Naria Santa Lucia said, “This isn’t about Microsoft’s technology, our focus is on making AI broadly accessible, so everyone has a fair shot at the future. If we collectively get this right, AI becomes a bridge to opportunity — not a barrier.”

During the academy’s unveiling, Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, said AI technology “is coming — it is going to drive productivity gains. Can we ensure that those productivity gains are democratized so as many people as possible participate in them? And there is no better place to begin that work than in the classroom.”

OpenAI has noted that many of its users are students. In February, it said that of college-aged young adults in the U.S. use ChatGPT, with one in four of their queries related to learning and school work.

While a few observers said the tech giants are making a play for market share among the nation’s K-12 students, they noted that the companies are also filling an important role. 

“It’s welcome news that technology companies are bidding against each other — to outdo each other — to invest in public education,” said Zarek Drozda, executive director of , a coalition of groups advancing data science education. “I think that’s exciting at a time when federal investment in education is uncertain. Seeing industry step up is quite meaningful.”

But he said he’s concerned that the training might stop short after teaching teachers — and by extension students — simply how to use AI. “Training needs to go beyond use,” he said. “If we want to train a generation of students to be AI-ready, internationally competitive, they have to understand how these tools work under the hood, when and why the tool might be wrong, and how they can customize LLMs [Large Language Models] or other models for their own pursuits, versus simply taking what’s given.”

He’s also concerned that the AFT has laid out a vision spanning just five years. “We want there to be a deep investment in upskilling teachers for the skills that they will need to adapt to, not just AI, but what is the AI model five years from now?” he said. “What is the next emerging technology that the field should be ready to adapt to?”

More than just a commitment to training, Drozda said, the union and its partners should commit to a long-term sustainability plan for teacher training to attract new, young career professionals to the field.

Alex Kotran, founder and CEO of the , agreed that investing in teacher training is worthwhile. “That’s a very big rock that needs to be moved.” But the reported $23 million commitment from the three tech giants “is a bit of a drop in the bucket” considering their valuations, “symbolic at best.”

That said, AFT’s involvement could make the training more palatable for many school district leaders, he noted, since one of the uncertainties in training efforts typically is whether unions will allow members to attend under contract rules. By taking the lead in developing the training academy, “the unions have planted a flag and said, ‘PD [professional development] is important.’”

All the same, tech companies are in the business of selling their products, making them imperfect messengers for AI literacy, he said. “They’re deeply incentivized on one side, and it isn’t necessarily for the benefit of students.” 

Other industry watchers fear the partnership could be viewed as a high-profile bid for market share at a critical time in the AI industry’s history. 

“This is a land-grab moment,” said Alex Sarlin, co-host of the podcast. “I mean, this technology is only three years old. There are already three or four major players in it, if you don’t count China, and they all want to be the one left standing.”

For its part, Google has said its suite of Gemini educational AI tools would for free to all educators with Google Workspace for Education accounts.

While it was the only major player not included in the AFT announcement, Sarlin said Google is, in some ways, “playing the incumbent in this because in K-12, they’re already there.” Given the dominance of Chromebook laptops, the management tool and its programs, the search giant is “embedded in K-12,” he said. “Open AI and Anthropic, they’re basically consumer products that are being used by teachers.”

‘Oh yeah, what could go wrong?’

Matt Miller, an Indiana high school Spanish teacher, educational consultant and for teachers, said his colleagues are hungry for high-quality, classroom-tested training, but that what they often get from AI companies is over-the-top talk about “how much the world is going to change and how we’re revolutionizing education,” with promises to help teachers work more efficiently.

Trainings typically skim over the fact that most students are simply using generative AI for “cognitive offloading,” Miller said, avoiding critical thinking and skill development  “and letting AI do it for them.” Many teachers, meanwhile, are searching for ways to “AI-proof” their classrooms. 

The sessions typically all end the same way, he said: “It all sort of funnels back to their product.” 

Miller, whose latest book, in 2023, was , said the AFT/OpenAI/Anthropic partnership “scares the crap out of me.”

“Whenever you get that marriage between an organization and big companies, we just keep asking ourselves, ‘Oh, yeah, what could go wrong?’”

Money means influence, Miller said, so will the curriculum be “tool-agnostic? Is it going to be about the technology? Is it going to be about pedagogy? Or is it going to be a customized tutorial of how you can use our tool to do X, Y and Z?”

AFT’s Weil said those concerns are understandable but short-sighted. AI developers, he said, “don’t get to engage with us if you’re not going to be agnostic about the tools.” The academy’s directors talk openly to the developers “about how we have to have a practical, real relationship. This can’t be about product selling.”

More broadly, the partnerships are a way to exert influence upon how AI operates in schools and classrooms.

During the academy’s unveiling, Weingarten said its lessons will be “as open-source as possible,” not just for the union’s 1.8 million members but more broadly through its free platform.

For his part, Weil said AI is “not going to go away. Nobody’s going to put AI back in the bottle. It’s here. The young people, for them to be successful in their jobs in the future, are going to have to know how to effectively and efficiently and safely use these tools. So why wouldn’t the education system help with that process?”

That’s likely the message that union leaders have been getting from members, said Sarlin, the podcast co-host. “There was probably a moment a couple years ago where they were sort of teetering, where they could have gone anti-AI,” he said. “But I think at this point that’s not where the puck is headed.”

The nation’s second-largest teachers union was joined by its Maryland affiliate in the suit, filed in a Baltimore district court. It targets guidance from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in a Feb. 14 “Dear Colleague” letter sent to school officials across the country.

threatens to deny federal funding to any school that considers race in admissions, hirings, financial aid, scholarships, discipline policy and “all other aspects of student, academic and campus life.” 

“The Department will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that

has become widespread in this Nation’s educational institutions,” the letter says. “The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice or equity is illegal.”

The lawsuit argues that the order’s vague language implies that all schools should get rid of all programming related to race and is actually an attempt at rewriting civil rights law.

The letter says all educational institutions must “cease all efforts to circumvent prohibitions on the use of race” and stop reliance on third-party agencies that are being used to “circumvent prohibited uses of race.” Schools have until Feb. 28 to comply.

“The activities and programs that are described as unlawful include: classroom instruction

that confronts difficult and uncomfortable subjects and imparts critical thinking skills,” the lawsuit says. “Orientations and training that equip students with the communication skills and tools to navigate complex social dynamics 
 and support services and extracurricular activities.”

In the suit, the AFT argues that the Trump administration and the department misrepresented the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination on the basis of race in federally funded programs. The letter also leans on the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard — which outlawed race in college admissions — and argues that the ruling applies more broadly.

“This Letter is an unlawful attempt by the Department to impose this administration’s particular views of how schools should operate as if it were the law,” the suit says.

Earlier this week, a different division of the Maryland district court granted a temporary restraining order in a separate lawsuit filed by the union. That one alleges that the department illegally gave Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access to millions of private and sensitive records.

Six individuals joined the suit, filed by the nation’s second-largest teacher’s union, alongside a coalition of labor unions representing over 2 million workers. Those impacted include teachers, who relied on federal student loans to pay for their college tuition, and high school students, who recently filed their federal financial aid forms with the department.

“When I filled out the FAFSA, I gave my Social Security number and my parent’s income information as well as their investment information,” Maryland high school student Sara Porcari said at an AFT Wednesday. “I thought that information would be private and secure. Now I’m not sure what’s happening.”

“I’m only 17 years old,” she continued, “and I don’t know who has access to my personal information or how this data breach will affect my future in college and in general.”

AFT President Randi Weingarten questioned why Musk, a billionaire given free rein by the president to remake the federal government, and DOGE want access to that information, expressing doubts about their stated purpose of improving government efficiency. 

 An AFT press release Tuesday called for “Elon Musk and his minions to be immediately evicted from the U.S. Department of Education,” alleging they were feeding the data from millions of people’s private student loan accounts “into artificial intelligence in one of the biggest data hacks in U.S. history.”

Ernesh Stewart, a Washington, D.C., school counselor and mom, echoed those concerns Wednesday, “Why do you need to access my daughter’s scholarship information? Why do you even need my home address? I can’t help but wonder if there is a hidden agenda. If one of the country’s wealthiest men, who also happens to be deeply invested in AI, has access to all this information, whatever it is, I feel like it’s a gross violation of privacy.”

The Education Department, which oversees the private information of 43 million student borrowers who hold $1.6 trillion in student debt, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A DOGE representative did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.

Weingarten and other panelists at the conference expressed their hope that President Donald Trump’s nominee for education secretary, Linda McMahon, would join them in condemning this “data breach,” during her Thursday confirmation hearing.

“I would hope that what she would do is protect students and protect families from this kind of financial intrusion and invasion and 
 say to the millions of people that have been affected the steps she’s taking to stop it,” Weingarten said.

While the lawsuit contends government agencies have valid purposes for maintaining these record systems, the makes clear they can only provide access to them in very specific situations. Here, though, the filing argues, DOGE representatives have accessed the data to shut down payments “and in the case of the Education Department, the agency itself.”

After gaining access to the systems last week, Musk, who is not an elected official, turned to X, the social media platform he owns, to boast that the Department of Education no longer exists. 

What is this “Department of Education” you keep talking about?

I just checked and it doesn’t exist.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)

In another DOGE-led effort, the Trump administration moved Monday to gut the Institute of Education Sciences, temporarily disabling an essential source of data on a host of basic information, ranging from high school graduation rates to school safety. 

DOGE was created by a Trump executive order in January. Supporters argue Musk is working to cut federal bloat and streamline systems. But critics say Musk, whose companies, including SpaceX, receive billions in government contracts, lacks transparency and has immense conflicts of interest.  

The suit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Maryland, also alleges that the U.S. Department of Education, along with the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Treasury, has exposed millions of Americans to “the risk of identity theft, harassment, intimidation, and embarrassment” by improperly disclosing their sensitive records to DOGE employees who lack appropriate security clearances. The staff includes a 19-year-old who has previously leaked proprietary information, according to the suit.

WIRED magazine broke the story earlier this month that at the center of DOGE’s effort to take over various federal departments and agencies are six male engineers, with ties to Musk.

In particular, plaintiffs claim that the Department of Education and its acting head, Denise Carter, have released data from the National Student Loan Data System, a financial aid-related database housed within the Education Department that contains information on almost 34 million borrowers and their families. It includes a plethora of sensitive information, including Social Security numbers, bank records, home addresses and immigration status. 

About 20 people with DOGE have begun working inside the education department, looking to cut According to reporting from some of these representatives have fed sensitive and personally identifiable data from across the department into artificial intelligence software to look into the agency’s programs and spending.

Plaintiffs are asking the court to end the data disclosure immediately by restoring Privacy Act protections and are demanding that any data currently in DOGE’s possession be deleted and destroyed. The act, put in place in the wake of the Watergate scandal, regulates the circumstances in which agency records about individuals can be shared; disclosing anything beyond this is illegal. 

On Tuesday, a federal judge in a against the Education Department blocked Musk’s team from accessing several systems that store sensitive data including student loans, but only temporarily. In a hearing for that case, Musk said he did not see how DOGE’s access to student loan data caused harm.

While it has previously been reported that DOGE representatives are political appointees, it now appears that some have received official government credentials, including email addresses, at multiple agencies, including at the Department of Education, leading to confusion about who actually employs them.

The union’s political action committee began the 2024 cycle with $4 million in cash on hand, raised $12 million and has spent $13 million – leaving it with roughly $2 million to dole out before Election Day, according to the latest data from , the non-partisan organization that tracks money in politics.

The vast majority of its spending this election cycle – roughly $9 million – was donated to super PACs supporting Democrats and to local, state and federal candidates and parties. Among the top receivers: $3 million to the Senate Majority PAC, $1.6 to House Majority PAC, $445,000 to the Harris Victory Fund ($300,000 of which was originally donated to the Biden Victory Fund before the president stepped aside), and $420,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.  

The AFT is traditionally one of the biggest supporters of Democrats, lending both the power of its PAC’s purse for advertising and mailings, and its strength in numbers for boots-on-the-ground get-out-the-vote operations.

Among the top 20 PACs based on contributions to Democratic candidates, total fundraising, total spent, and total spent in independent expenditures and communication costs, the AFT’s PACs place 8th. It’s donated $1.5 million to democratic congressional candidates, including to 196 House Democrats and 19 Senate Democrats.

“Kamala Harris and Tim Walz believe in the promise of America and will spend their time solving problems, not sowing fear, so every American can partake in that promise,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said in a . “But it’s not just what we can gain, it’s also what we will lose with Trump and Vance: our democracy, our freedoms, our public schools, our right to have a union, a vote and a voice. Extending the ladder of opportunity or destroying it.” 

“Union members get this,” she said. “And that’s why we will fight every hour of every day for the next fortnight to get out the vote to elect candidates who proudly stand for freedom, democracy and opportunity.”

Earlier this month, the AFT teamed up with the National Education Association, the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees – the nation’s largest public service unions – in a coordinated, multi-state voter outreach initiative across battleground states.

“This joint action represents a significant escalation of labor’s political engagement, with the unions pooling resources and mobilizing their combined membership of several million workers and includes people of all backgrounds working across the public service – as nurses, child care providers, sanitation workers, first responders, teachers, education support professionals and higher education workers, among others,” the of the effort reads.

Notably, labor unions play an outsized role in many of the election’s most crucial swing states: 21% of votes cast in Michigan in the 2020 presidential election were from union households, representing approximately one-fifth of the electorate, according to the union. The same is true for Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where union households accounted for 18% and 13% of votes cast, respectively.

But in late 2023, Abbott began speaking out against him. With the support of other lawmakers and several political action committees, the governor began portraying Allison as weak on border security and property tax relief — two no-compromise issues for Texas GOP voters. In February, one PAC ran a calling Allison “wrong for Texas.”

The San Antonio Express-News as “easily the most qualified candidate in this race,” but the attacks stuck: Voters in his district in the March 5 primary, overwhelmingly choosing Marc LaHood, a criminal defense attorney with no political experience, as the Republican nominee.

In an interview, Allison said his defeat came down to one unlikely issue: school choice, specifically his opposition to Abbott’s long-stalled effort to enact a statewide Education Savings Account to help families pay for private and homeschool expenses.

It’s a scenario that’s playing out in Texas and beyond as lawmakers, pushing to remake legislative maps, increasingly turn for assistance to groups like the American Federation for Children and the School Freedom Fund, a pro-ESA group tied to tech billionaire Jeff Yass. Yass, a well-known Pennsylvania-based school choice proponent and investor in TikTok parent company Byte Dance, has spent millions to promote ESAs.

The effort has already changed the ballot this November and produced an unprecedented shift in statehouses, with lawmakers increasingly approving taxpayer support for private education. Seventeen states now have universal or near-universal ESA programs. 

Whether it’s via a traditional voucher, which gives families tuition for private education, a tax credit, or a less restrictive ESA fund, the idea is increasingly finding favor in state legislatures. In Florida, families can receive 72% of what the state spends per-pupil; in Arizona, it equals 90%. The pro-school-choice group EdChoice has estimated that more than now take advantage of ESAs, up from 40,000 in 2022.

But many rural conservatives fear the funding won’t be useful in isolated areas where private schools are unlikely to open. In many small towns, school districts are the largest employer, making ESAs political kryptonite.

A few observers say the development also could backfire. Mark P. Jones, a political scientist at Rice University, warned that a rightward primary shift could spell defeat for Republicans in the Nov. 5 general election.

“It is possible, even after all the craziness, even after all the attacks and the millions of dollars spent, particularly by a particular TikTok owner, that you’ve got a situation where Abbott may not get his vouchers after all,” Jones said.

‘So wrong for Tennessee taxpayers’

For the moment, school choice efforts are moving full-speed ahead. FutureEd, a Georgetown University think tank, private-school choice bills in 34 states, with most aiming to broaden options like ESAs.

The effort is playing out in states like , and, most recently, in Tennessee, where the School Freedom Fund spent an estimated against Republicans who stopped a in 2024. Among their targets: Sen. Frank S. Niceley, a 20-year legislative veteran who boasted a lifetime on the conservative Tennessee Legislative Report Card. 

The fund painted him as “liberal Frank Niceley,” with one ad to give undocumented students in-state tuition benefits at Tennessee colleges, adding, “No wonder there’s an invasion.” Playing on his last name, it concluded: “Nice to illegals, but so wrong for Tennessee taxpayers.”

Niceley in July that allowing out-of-state PACs to label the most conservative senator as a liberal amounted to trashing elections in favor of pre-determined outcomes by interest groups. “Just call up and ask ’em who they want.”

A statewide voucher, Niceley said, ran counter to Tennessee’s reputation for curbing what he called wasteful spending.

Early evidence in other states suggests that while ESAs are popular, their benefits often take the form of tuition discounts for families whose children are . In Iowa last year, for the state’s ESA came from such students. In Florida, .

Despite Niceley’s plea for frugality, in August, primary voters ousted him in favor of Jessie Seal, a public relations director for a medical facility. 

Celebrating the defeat of Niceley and others, David McIntosh, a former Indiana congressman and the School Freedom Fund president, said, “Make no mistake: if you call yourself a Republican and oppose school freedom, you should expect to lose your next primary.” 

McIntosh declined an interview request.

Abbott’s ‘white whale’

On the flip side, teachers’ unions are well-known for supporting both Democratic candidates and anti-school-choice legislation. In this political cycle, the National Education Association has spent $21,800,773, according to , a nonprofit that follows money in politics. The American Federation of Teachers has spent $3,949,330.

In Texas, anti-ESA Republicans earned support from a PAC funded by H-E-B grocery store chain heir Charles Butt. It threw in more than $4 million last winter, equal to what the School Freedom Fund a dozen Republicans who blocked Abbott’s voucher legislation.

Voters have rewarded the Freedom Fund’s efforts: Over the past few months, they’ve sent more than a dozen anti-ESA lawmakers packing. Abbott has persuaded a handful of others to retire rather than face difficult primaries. 

Yass, the TikTok billionaire, more than $12 million in this political cycle, while Miriam Adelson, owner of the Las Vegas Sands casinos, about $13 million, making the pair — residents of Pennsylvania and Nevada, respectively — Texas’ two biggest political donors.

School choice backers hope that kind of support ultimately results in a win for ESAs, a goal that has repeatedly eluded Abbott. 

Jon Taylor, a political scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio, joked that ESAs have become Abbott’s “white whale,” one of the few legislative wins he can’t seem to earn.

Jones, the Rice political scientist, noted that several red-leaning states, including Florida, Georgia and Arizona, have ESAs. Texas Republicans have enjoyed a unified government since 2003, he said, creating a kind of “dissonance” between Texas’ perception as the most conservative state and Abbott’s inability to seal the deal.

While the financial support of Yass and groups like the School Freedom Fund may seem unprecedented, Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform, said it merely serves to counterbalance “the enormously, humongously large coffers” of teachers’ unions and the educational establishment.

“The choice movement support, even with lots of wealthy people, pales in comparison to the tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars of in-kind and financial support that the unions put into legislative races,” said Allen, who also directs the . She called the development “obviously overdue.”

Allison said he opposed Abbott’s plan because Texas families already have many options, from magnet schools to charters to a program that lets students in low-performing schools transfer out. Lawmakers, he said, have approved countless programs that provide “choice on top of choice on top of choice” within districts.

Recent polling on school choice isn’t necessarily conclusive: of respondents to a recent University of Texas survey said they support spending taxpayer dollars to help families pay for private school. Meanwhile, a poll from the University of Houston and Texas Southern University found 65% support.  

‘We lost some very good members’

On occasion, the push to defeat lawmakers like Allison has taken an ugly turn. Last October, while he was down in Austin for one of several special sessions, an activist pulled a onto his suburban street. Mounted on the back were huge video screens that broadcast messages saying the former school board member “hates children” and “supports rogue administrators.”

“They also came up on the lawn and videoed and scared my wife and scared kids in the neighborhood,” he said. The truck’s commotion forced police to reroute a school bus.

Though lawmakers in Texas don’t convene again until early 2025, the effects are already playing out, said Allison. “We lost some very good members because of this — and some very experienced members.”

That could affect the legislature’s institutional memory and its ability to deal not just with education but other urgent issues, he said. “We’ve got a population that is growing by leaps and bounds. We’ve got some serious infrastructure problems: water, roads, bridges. Property taxes. I mean, it just goes on and on. So to single us out and to focus so much by the governor on this one issue is very shortsighted.”

Jones, the Rice political scientist, noted that while legislatures turn over regularly, the more immediate impact will be the “de facto purge” of House moderates. While he predicted that Abbott will likely gain enough support on Nov. 5 to pass some sort of voucher — perhaps not a particularly robust one — Taylor said Abbott’s aggressive pursuit of centrists could backfire, tilting as many as nine House districts into Democratic hands. Texas Democrats have said they hope to flip several seats based on what they call Abbotts’ .

In what may be the final irony of his ordeal, Allison reluctantly predicted that LaHood, who beat him in the primary, may have difficulty winning the seat against newcomer Democrat . LaHood in 2022 lost a race for county district attorney to a Democratic incumbent. 

One of Allison’s soon-to-be-former colleagues, Democratic Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, who represents a nearby district, in June Democrats’ hopes to gain seats “increased tenfold” with LaHood’s primary win.

For his part, Allison didn’t hesitate when asked if he thought the district might flip blue in November. “I think there’s a very good chance,” he said.

“I spoke in support of the resolution — for our students, our patients, our families, our communities, our democracy and ourselves!” union President Randi Weingarten wrote on from the AFT’s 2024 convention in Houston. “Let’s win this!”

The delegates ratified the AFT Executive Council’s unanimous vote Sunday evening to endorse Harris, mere hours after President Joe Biden upended the race with his historic announcement that he was giving up his embattled candidacy. The council’s swift action positioned the country’s second-largest teachers union as one of the first major labor organizations to get behind the vice president.

“Vice President Harris has fought alongside Joe Biden to deliver historic accomplishments and create a better life for all Americans,” Weingarten said in the statement released early Sunday evening.

“Trump left his successor a country in crisis and chaos, with soaring inflation and an economy in free fall,” she added. “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris turned it around. They stabilized schools, saved pensions for hundreds of thousands of retired union workers and remade the economy.” 

The AFT has placed its significant political heft alongside other key unions supporting Harris, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the nation’s largest private sector union, and the United Farm Workers, the nation’s largest farm workers’ union.

The labor endorsements followed Biden’s own for Harris and were promptly joined by a chorus of other , including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Bill and Hillary Clinton and several governors, who were either being considered themselves as potential Biden successors or , such as Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona also came out in support of Harris on Sunday.

After Biden’s announcement, Weingarten scrambled to rewrite some of her planned remarks at the kickoff to the convention, according to reporting from Just earlier that morning she criticized efforts to push Biden out of the race, telling Weekly Education, “This fantasy that billionaire donors are having, that they can yoke this away from the president because they don’t like his performance at the debate, is wrong.” 

By the afternoon, though, she emphasized the importance of uniting around

In Harris’s for president, she advocated for universal preschool and free college and called for a $13,500 raise for every teacher by the end of her first term.

Becky Pringle, president of the nation’s largest teacher’s union, the National Education Association, took a different approach to the game-changing news, leaving out any mention of Harris in her tweets Sunday thanking President Biden for his service. Instead, she noted that the NEA will “renew our efforts to ensure he is succeeded by a leader equally dedicated to building the future our students, educators, and families deserve.”

The can be found below.

While she could take 12 weeks off through the federal , this only guaranteed her job security — not pay — and her family couldn’t afford to miss out on months of her salary.

“Obviously if I didn’t have those paychecks, I wouldn’t have been able to pay my mortgage or pay for groceries or anything like that. Put gas in my car to go to doctors’ appointments,” the music teacher said on a recent phone call, baby Margot cooing and spilling Cheerios in the background.

Teachers in her district can get paid for those 12 weeks if they’ve accrued enough sick days, but as a career changer, Papa only had four weeks banked. Even before her unexpected C-section and health complications related to an autoimmune disorder, she knew that wouldn’t be enough time.

There was one workaround, though: In Papa’s district, teachers are allowed to donate up to five of their sick days to colleagues in need. A teacher at her school distributed a link — much like a GoFundMe page — and was ultimately able to raise the remaining 30-or-so days. 

Without clear confirmation from HR on just how many paid days she had, she gave birth trusting that her colleagues’ donated ones would come through.

Papa is one of many public school teachers forced to scrimp and save sick days, pay for their own substitute teachers, go without pay or perfectly time their pregnancies to align with summer break in order to care for their babies and recover. Many end up returning to the classroom , sometimes as early as after giving birth. 

While it is difficult to pin down an exact figure, as of 2022, 18% of the largest school districts in the country provided paid parental leave beyond sick days to public school teachers, according to a National Council on Teacher Quality For those that do, the amount of leave offered varies widely, ranging from one day to five months, with most districts offering less than 31 days— all at varying levels of pay and with differing eligibility.

Most teachers receive an average of 10-14 sick days a year, according to NCTQ, and many districts require that they exhaust all their accumulated sick time before they can access paid leave. And some go even further: seven of the districts subtract the cost of a substitute from the teachers’ paychecks during their time on leave, effectively getting them to pay for their own coverage.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the share of state and local government workers that have access to paid family leave is 28% — significantly higher than NCTQ’s figure — though this includes all school-based occupations, including superintendents and principals. An internal 2019 survey conducted by the American Federation of Teachers of about 50 district contracts found that only about 10% offered dedicated paid parental leave. Most districts relied on a sick day accrual system that disadvantages younger teachers, who likely have the least banked time and the greatest need for parental leave, according to an AFT spokesperson. 

“Teachers, for the most part, are women and mothers,” said Ashley Jochim, a freelance education researcher and consulting principal at Arizona State University’s Center on Reinventing Public Education. “And so the fact that there is sort of an inattention to these issues around parent leave is startling.”

In the 2020-21 school year, there were full- and part-time public school teachers, 77% of whom were women and a majority of whom were of childbearing age. About half — 48% — of all public school teachers have children living at home, according to an analysis of data spanning 2012-16 by the Brookings Institution’s Michael Hansen and Diana Quintero. 

The National Council on Teacher Quality analyzed in the U.S., including the 100 largest as well as the largest in each state, and found that 18% offered paid parental leave beyond sick days. Though a few of these districts fall in states that offer paid leave, the organization said it’s not confident that schools are necessarily following state policy. 

Of the analyzed districts, 27 offer paid leave for a birthing parent and 18 offer some amount to fathers or non-birthing parents. Eleven districts offer all days at full pay, while 15 offer partial pay. Thirteen districts provide some leave for adoption. 

Teachers across the country, like Papa, know the struggles associated with these patchwork policies. But those outside the classroom are often surprised to learn the lengths to which teachers must go, according to various experts. There’s a general understanding that though teacher pay may lag, the fringe benefits are often much more robust than what you’d see in the private sector, leading to a misperception that paid parental leave is included, said Jochim. 

“Parental leave shouldn’t feel like a miracle,”wrote AFT President Randi Weingarten in a statement to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “It should be a basic benefit that school districts and states offer to all employees.”

This system exists against the backdrop of a , particularly stark for mothers of color and worsened by the pandemic. Amid record high , a shortage of   and for paid parental leave policies nationally, experts note that family leave could be an important recruitment and retention tool— especially for female teachers of color, who are underrepresented in the field. About 79% of public school teachers are white, 9% are Hispanic and 7% are Black, according to the most recent

There’s a clear cost to school communities— particularly students — anytime a teacher is gone for an extended period, said NCTQ President Heather Peske, but “I also think that we can’t ask teachers to sacrifice having children of their own in order to teach ours. It’s just not right and not fair.” And often teachers are asked to return to the classroom far earlier than the ’s 18-week recommendation. 

In August 2023, Papa, the music teacher, returned to work, grateful her coworkers’ donated time had allowed her to take a paid maternity leave, but anxious that she was beginning a new school year with a 6-month-old baby and a completely drained bank of sick days. 

She tried to schedule her baby’s doctor appointments before or after the school day, but that wasn’t always possible. She said she felt guilty anytime she had to leave early or take time away for her kid, putting more work on her colleagues in the throes of staffing shortages. On days she was sick or exhausted from being up all night with a newborn, she forced herself to push through, not wanting to burden others and not able to afford the unpaid time, a common refrain heard among teachers who are also parents. 

Because of the fragile nature of schools, it’s treated as shameful when a teacher needs to be absent, even when it’s to care for a sick child, said Jochim, the researcher who works with CRPE. But, she added, “Nobody’s really asking themselves 
 ‘Why did we design the system in a way that can’t be resilient in the face of caregiving responsibilities that women bear most of the burden of?’”

One day, Papa’s daughter had an allergic reaction and was rushed to the emergency room. Papa said she found herself sitting there, thinking, “‘Oh my God, am I not able to go to work tomorrow?’ And it’s so awful to think that. Here I am, rushing my child, my baby to the ER. She’s got hives on her face 
 and my thought is, ‘What am I going to do about work tomorrow if I can’t go in?’”

Not just teachers

The United States is the only country that does not mandate any paid leave for new parents, among the almost 40 nations included in The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development , according to compiled by the organization. The smallest amount of paid leave required in any of the other nations, including the United Kingdom and Canada, is about two months, marking the United States as a major outlier.

Despite of workers reporting that it’s either extremely or very important for them to have a job that offers paid parental, family or medical leave, currently only 13 states and Washington, D.C. mandate paid parental leave, according to the An additional eight have voluntary systems that rely on private insurance. But not all of these include public employees, such as teachers. For example, in the early 2000s, California became the first state to pass a paid family leave policy, but as state employees, teachers were not automatically included.

According to the on average teachers fare about the same as all civilian workers, 27% of whom have access to paid family leave. That number rapidly climbs, though, for public and private workers in management, professional, and related occupations — of whom receive the benefit — and private industry workers in finance and insurance — of whom do. Generally, there’s an inverse relationship between income and access to paid leave: among the only 6% had access.

The economic argument that paid parental leave is to fund — either through the government or private industry — doesn’t properly account for what it costs not to offer it, said Peske. “Given how much time it takes to recruit and hire a new teacher and inject that new teacher into the school, you really want to consider parental leave policies and figure out how you can afford [them],” she said. “Because it’s so much more costly to lose a really strong, good teacher than it would be to pay for the parental leave.”

Katherine Bishop, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, said educators in their family-building years are frequently in their first five years of teaching — when most leave the profession.

Oklahoma is one of at least — including Tennessee and South Carolina — to enact paid parental leave policies for teachers over the last year, along with the nation’s fourth-largest school system, Chicago Public Schools. In 2018, New York City, the country’s largest district, rolled out six weeks of paid leave at full salary for mothers, fathers, and foster parents after a petition garnered 85,000  

“In an era where our educators are feeling so disrespected, it is bills like this that give our worth and dignity back and that we are seen as the professionals that we are,” said Bishop, whose state whittled the initially proposed 12-week paid leave down to six. “I think that is so important for people to understand.”

‘There’s no one to help me out’

By the time Jeremy Hight and his wife had their first child in 2019, he had been teaching at a small, rural public school in Nevada for over a decade and had accrued 110 sick days — the equivalent of 22 months. 

Yet, when his wife gave birth, his district would only allow him to take four weeks off paid, he said. At the time, regardless of how many sick days a teacher had banked, only 20 could be used for paternity leave. He could take an additional two months through FMLA, but they would be unpaid, which Hight’s family couldn’t afford.

So, four weeks after his wife’s emergency C-section he returned to the classroom. 

“It was painful for her,” he said. “For me it was emotionally painful just to not be able to be there and help out my wife. She did have some family nearby but not anybody who could get there and help her to stand up, help her to move around as easily as she could. Or just to put the baby down in a crib very easily. She couldn’t bend over to put the baby down very well. Having to leave after a month — four weeks — was just heartbreaking.”

Despite the challenges, he recognized he was lucky to even have those 20 days set aside in the first place. He said for an early career teacher, that kind of time with their family would be out of reach.

While some may conceive of parental leave policies as relevant only to the person who gives birth, Ruth Martin, senior vice president of advocacy group , said it’s important for policies to incorporate men and non-birthing parents. When dads are able to access paid time away from work they feel more bonded to their child, she said, and are more likely to play a larger role in the household labor that is unpaid, time-consuming and typically left for women.

Since then Hight’s district has updated its contract, allowing fathers to take six weeks off paid and mothers to take eight — but only if they have the sick days banked. 

Parents and the public are represented by superintendents and school boards, but at school sites they rely on principals and other supervisors. However, in many of the largest districts, these school managers are also union members.

Having seen the gains teachers unions made for their members both in salary and working conditions, administrators unions would like to copy that success.

There are 92,000 principals working in the public schools, and another 100,000 assistant principals. The vast majority have long backgrounds in teaching. The average principal had 12 years in the classroom before moving to an administrative role.

In many states, public school teachers are banned or restricted from bargaining collectively, and the hurdles are even higher for administrators, who can be viewed as both labor and management.

Principals unions were originally formed along with teachers unions in the 1960s and 1970s, but it wasn’t just superintendents and other district managers who found the event problematic. The passed a resolution in 1977 demanding the ouster of school administrators from the AFL-CIO, with which both are affiliated, citing their managerial responsibilities. AFT also claimed the administrators would “subvert collective bargaining achievements of organized teachers” and “cast teachers in an anti-union role.”

Despite these differences, principals unions mirrored AFT in policies, structure and composition. is the national umbrella union for five state chapters and 85 local affiliates. It’s small, with a budget of just $1.5 million, and acts primarily as a federal lobbying arm. The union’s priorities are very similar to those of the teachers unions.

Last month, union President Leonard Pugliese , calling on him to “develop and implement a Marshall Plan for public education.” This is something both and have advocated.

supported legislation to mandate an assistant principal in every public school and to integrate social-emotional learning concepts into pre-K-12 education.

Naturally, it wants to expand its membership as well. “In districts without school leader unions, the workload has increased, but the compensation hasn’t moved accordingly. We need to help organize the unorganized school leaders, so they can protect themselves, too,” said Pugliese.

As with the AFT, by far the largest portion of federation membership works in the New York City Public Schools, represented by the . The New York City administrators account for more than 63% of the national union’s 22,000 members.

The council has an additional quirk that may be unique among all labor unions: More than 53% of its total membership are retirees. While the national union operates on a shoestring, the New York City branch collects $18.4 million in dues, and its president was paid more than $287,000 in 2022.

Principals unions tend to form in large cities. AFSA has locals in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, Oakland, San Diego, Denver, Seattle, Portland and Washington, D.C. Los Angeles also has an administrators union, but it is independent.

While some of these unions have existed for many years, they can’t all bargain collectively. The Chicago Principals and Administrators Association

Acting alone, administrators unions have no more power or influence than any other small advocacy group. But when they act in concert with teachers unions, they can leave school sites with all labor and no management. Without it, parents and the public lose much of their influence over their schools.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

And Weingarten largely complied, saying it “made sense to consult with the CDC” as the pandemic progressed in 2021.

But in testimony on Wednesday before the House , Weingarten pushed back forcefully against GOP claims that the union exerted “inappropriate influence” over the guidance or worked behind the scenes to keep U.S. public schools closed for longer than necessary.

She said any allegations of undue influence over prolonged closures are inaccurate, noting that the CDC approved just “one particular edit” to a policy about accommodations for immunocompromised teachers.

Weingarten also noted that neither the CDC nor teachers unions had the authority to open or close schools, despite the AFT’s aggressive moves to ensure members’ workplaces were safe. In one instance in 2020, the union threatened “” if school reopening plans didn’t meet their health and safety standards.

The subcommittee’s Republican chairman, U.S. Rep. Brad Wenstrup of Ohio, last month previewed Wednesday’s hearing, alleging in a March 28 that the CDC let the AFT edit its operational strategy for reopening schools prior to its February 2021 release. The guidance, Wenstrup said, advised keeping schools closed in more than 90 percent of U.S. counties, “contrary to the prevailing science.”

He said the AFT and Weingarten got “uncommon” access to the draft plan, even making line-by-line additions that “coincidently shifted the CDC’s guidance to align with AFT’s agenda — keeping schools closed.”

The issue of closures remains contentious more than three years after the pandemic shuttered virtually every public school in America. Researchers are quantifying their human cost in lost learning time, lower school attendance, worsening mental health, deteriorating school behavior and lower childhood vaccination rates, among other indicators.

have shown that widespread reliance on remote and hybrid schooling during the pandemic had “profound consequences” for achievement, with students, especially those in high-poverty areas, losing more ground in math the longer they learned remotely. Learning gaps in math didn’t worsen in places where schools remained in-person.

During the hearing, Weingarten said it was appropriate for public health authorities to consult with education groups — she said CDC Director Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky noted that the agency conferred with more than 50 organizations about the guidance.

“It was not only appropriate for the CDC to confer with educators. It would have been irresponsible for them not to,” Weingarten said.

She told committee members that it was the Biden administration’s idea to approach the AFT about the guidance, not the other way around. But she denied that the AFT provided, in Wenstrup’s words, “suggested revisions to the CDC’s operational strategy regarding school closures or reopenings.”

“What we suggested, sir, was ideas,” she said. 

But Republicans on the committee, trying to make the case that the politically powerful union shouldn’t have a hand in U.S. health policy, pushed to tie Weingarten as closely as possible to the Biden administration. At one point, Rep. Debbie Lesko of Arizona told her, “I’m a member of Congress that sits on two committees that deal with the CDC. I don’t have a direct number to Director Walensky. Do you?”

Weingarten admitted she did.

“Well, hopefully she’ll give it to me too,” Lesko said. 

The hearing was delayed for nearly half an hour as House lawmakers approved legislation to raise the U.S.’s debt ceiling while cutting federal spending, including President Biden’s proposal to forgive student debt.

While Weingarten was Wednesday’s only witness, the subcommittee has also requested documents from other education groups about advice they gave to the CDC. They include the the and the , among others.

Midway through the hearing, Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, told Wenstrup, “I’ve been to some weird hearings in this Congress, Mr. Chairman, but this one might be the weirdest, because it’s convened in order to accuse a federal agency of the crime of consorting with American citizens.”

The AFT expected a contentious hearing: In preparation, it hired veteran Washington, D.C., attorney Michael Bromwich, a former U.S. Justice Department inspector general, who has already complained of “scapegoating built on false allegations that appear to be the basis for this Subcommittee’s ‘investigation.’ ”

For the hearing, the AFT also released a lengthy letter from Bromwich, who last week told Wenstrup and ranking member Rep. Raul Ruiz of California that the union’s role in CDC school closure policies “has been exaggerated and falsified to support pre-conceived conclusions” about closure strategy.

Actually, he said, the AFT’s role was “extremely limited,” amounting to a few sentences in a 38-page document. He noted that the union’s February 2021 proposal of a “trigger” threshold of positive COVID cases that would signal schools to close was actually rejected by the CDC.

Asked during the hearing if she had any regrets about the AFT’s work during the pandemic, Weingarten said, “I regret the fear that was there. And part of the reason we wanted clear information was because we had a role in terms of overcoming fear.”

She noted that proper ventilation and testing, for instance, turned out to be more important than social distancing. “There were things that we really didn’t get right.” 

While Republicans sharply criticized the union’s role in often-disastrous closures, one line of questioning, from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, drew a sharp rebuke from Democrats. Greene asked Weingarten, a lesbian, “Are you a mother?”

Weingarten replied, “I am a mother by marriage.” In 2018, she , who came to the relationship with two daughters.

Greene said she questioned Weingarten’s recommendations to the CDC “as not a medical doctor, not a biological mother, and really not a teacher either.” She later added, “Let me tell you: I am a mother, and all three of my children were directly affected by the school closures, by your recommendations, which is something that you really can’t understand.”

Democrats on the committee asked that Greene’s comments be stricken from the record — a request Wenstrup denied.

International that schools weren’t associated with accelerating community transmission of the disease during the pandemic. While infections affected schools, researchers found, most of the outbreaks were small, with fewer than 10 cases. And they couldn’t be definitively linked to in-school transmission.

Yet evidence from other nations suggests that the U.S. took a much more cautious approach to reopening. Andreas Schleicher of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in November 2020 that while schools in Europe were initially closed, “Research has shown that if you put social distancing protocols in place, school is actually quite a safe environment, certainly safer than having children running around outside school.”

Prolonged U.S. public school closures have long been a sore spot for educators and public health officials, who now admit that policies keeping students out of school for months could have been rethought.

In an with The New York Times, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the recently retired head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, “I certainly think things could have been done differently — and better 
 Anybody who thinks that what we or anybody else did was perfect is not looking at reality.”

The has been probing several school-related aspects of the pandemic. Last month, its into closures testimony from University of California-San Francisco epidemiologist , who said scientists had evidence before the epidemic that wearing masks was “largely ineffective” at preventing the spread of flu and similar viruses — and that CDC recommendations on distancing six feet apart were “arbitrary” and not based on science.

10. “I understand that we have elections, but at the end of the day, we need politics out of schools.” — Randi Weingarten, president, American Federation of Teachers (Feb. 7, )

9. “Anybody who believes this teachers union is merely a union hasn’t been paying attention. They believe themselves to be a political movement or political party, and that is the lens through which we have to view every one of their actions.” — Lori Lightfoot, mayor of Chicago (Jan. 5,)

8. “And it’s going to get worse, as more and more people look at other ways of educating their children, particularly with the Hope Scholarship, and getting money for that. You’re going to see decline in all the counties.” — Dale Lee, president of the West Virginia Education Association, discussing declining public school enrollment and staff cuts, referring to the state’s school choice program. (May 23, )

7. “What I know from my experience with these negotiations is 6,000 educators stood behind every word in this contract.” — Uti Hawkins, vice president of the Seattle Education Association, commenting on the agreement reached after a week-long strike. Only 4,000 members participated in the ratification vote, and of those, 29% voted against it. (Sept. 28, )

6. “In fact, there is little evidence in data from the Ohio Department of Education, the retirement systems or our membership suggesting a mass exodus. To the contrary, most of our colleagues are staying.” — Scott DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association (December-January )

5. “Greco recalls a recent conversation with a teacher who said, ‘I live 13 miles from here, and I’m ready to leave, and I’m on top pay. The road construction on the turnpike is ridiculous, there’s no parking.’ Says Greco, ‘These external factors are forcing people to leave. I’ve heard that from many, many people.’ ” — Ron Greco, president of the Jersey City Education Association (Nov. 16, )

4. “We will not celebrate scraps when thousands of educators in this city are struggling to afford to live doing the job they love.” — Arlene Inouye, secretary of United Teachers Los Angeles. The district has offered a 23% increase in compensation over the next two years. (Sept. 10, )

3. “National Education Association President Becky Pringle doesn’t use the term ‘learning loss’ because she said students are always learning, even if not in the ways policymakers typically measure.” — from WTTW, Chicago’s PBS station, on

2. “Yes, educators, we should be starting at $100,000 and then moving up that scale.” — Danette Stokes, president of the United Education Association of Shelby County, Tennessee (Oct. 26, )

1. “Our power only matters if we organize to create the kind of conditions in our schools that will retain and recruit the next generation of union educators. This includes a minimum six-figure salary — now. It includes fully paid health care without caps. And it includes a fully paid retirement where we don’t have our members having to contribute 10% or more of their salaries.” — Joe Boyd, executive director of the California Teachers Association, in a May 2022 speech to the union’s State Council (May 22, )

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

AFT President Randi Weingarten said the union’s current effort — to bolster the science of reading, strengthen the school-family connection and give kids “free books to read, love and keep” — pre-dates the backlash, but stands in contrast to it.

“We have [long] been trying to increase the titles that are available for children,” Weingarten told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. Still, “this [campaign] does counter 
 all those who are trying to either burn books, or to censor books,” she added. 

The nation’s second-largest teachers union has nurtured a years-long partnership, Weingarten said, with , a marketplace that provides affordable children’s books to educators of high-needs students. The “Reading Opens the World” campaign’s 1 million books will be sourced from their site and distributed at events beginning this holiday season and running through 2022.

“In the aftermath of this [pandemic,]” Weingarten said, “we thought we would step in and do something muscular and fun.”

The $2 million, multi-year campaign kicked off Tuesday in the cafeteria of Malcolm X Elementary School in Washington, D.C., a majority-Black school where a hand-drawn banner reading “My Black is Beautiful” hung above the lectern. After the event, which concluded with read-aloud groups, students were sent home with books by Black authors or that featured Black main characters, including and . 

The AFT’s ambitious effort drops as controversies over what students learn — and read — roil to fever pitch. In late November, the American Library Association said that schools had seen than at any previous point in recent decades.

“What we’re observing, really in the last year, is a real effort to remove books dealing with the LGBTQ person’s experience, or the experiences of persons who are Black, Indigenous or persons of color,” ALA Director Deborah Caldwell-Stone told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. 

Many of those challenges have come from parents and community members who have received materials from conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education and No Left Turn in Education, Caldwell-Stone said. Social media frequently accelerates complaints, she added, noting that the ALA often sees parents from disparate locations object to the same titles in the days after a video or post goes viral online.

In mid-November, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to look into “criminal activity in our public schools involving the availability of pornography” — as legislators also passed legislation tamping down how teachers can approach conversations related to race and gender in the classroom. Amid the fervor, state GOP Rep. Matt Krause reached out directly to superintendents asking whether books on an list could be found on their shelves.

None of the works that the AFT specified it will give to students are on that list, but many do address race and racial identity.

“The titles that we’re distributing today are ensuring that kids have diversity in the books that they’re reading,” Weingarten said. 

Rep. Krause did not respond to requests for comment on the union’s new initiative.

Numerous studies document persistent racial and gender gaps in representation within the youth literature genre. In 2018, , while Black, Asian, Hispanic and Indigenous people led 10 percent, 7 percent, 5 percent and 1 percent of titles, respectively, according to numbers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center.

Throughout the rest of December, 20 local AFT affiliates from Puerto Rico to Houston to Indiana will hold literacy events similar to Tuesday’s kick-off in the nation’s capital. In the new year, book-laden buses will distribute volumes to students in harder-to-reach areas.

Books will be reflective of those students’ linguistic and racial background, AFT communications director Leslie Getzinger wrote in an email to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

In addition to distributing books, the 1.7 million-member union also intends to equip teachers and parents with tips for boosting literacy, including providing instructors with information on the science of reading. The approach, long backed by research, emphasizes phonics and decoding words over text recognition through exposure and context. While more and more teacher training programs have adopted the science of reading, there is still dissension at the district and classroom level over how best to teach reading and confront a national epidemic of illiteracy.

Collaboration between schools and families will also be a lynchpin of the new efforts, the AFT said in a .

The union hopes that its campaign will help students catch up on learning they may have missed during the pandemic. The latest research on academic achievement finds that, overall, students are three months behind in reading, and that students at majority-Black schools may be as many as 12 months behind their peers at majority-white schools.

But in addition to making up for academic losses, some officials involved in the literacy effort know that the possibilities extend far beyond the classroom. In the AFT’s release, Weingarten refers to reading as “key to life, to joy—to our very existence,”

From the Malcolm X Elementary School cafeteria, D.C. union President Jacqueline Pogue-Lyons read the young students a quote from their building’s namesake:

“People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.”

Recommendations include ways schools can reduce carbon emissions, utilize infrastructure as a teaching tool, support communities of color disproportionately affected by weather crises and create pathways for students to pursue green jobs.

“Ultimately, there are a lot of technical fixes that we need in addressing climate change. But we will need people to actually advance a sustainable society,” said Laura Schifter, senior fellow with the Aspen Institute and founder of the new initiative, .

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Synthesizing a year of listening tours and research, the connects one of the country’s most sizable public sectors to actionable climate solutions — like warming effects by replacing the nation’s largest diesel fleet with electric school buses and swapping the common asphalt plots that surround schools with green spaces.

Organized by federal, state and local impact, all recommendations detail what partnerships can and do look like with business, philanthropy, media and advocacy organizations across the country.

In comparison with private homes, public safety offices and businesses, , according to the New Buildings Institute, a nonprofit that tracks and helps to redesign commercial spaces’ energy performance. Annually, K-12 schools in the U.S. produce emissions equivalent to or roughly 15 million cars. Energy is the second most costly expense for school districts on average.

The K12 Climate Action of students, teachers, education administrators and environmental leaders includes incoming Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez, researcher and president of the Learning Policy Institute and the presidents of the country’s two largest teachers unions, representing roughly 4 million educators combined. The group is co-led by Republican Christine Todd Whitman, former New Jersey governor and head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush, and Democrat John King, former U.S. secretary of education under President Obama who is now running for Maryland governor.

With the action plan now live, the commission is coalition building with districts and businesses nationwide. Their focus is educating more leaders about how small and large school infrastructure changes or partnerships can support a cleaner environment, so that they’re able to follow through on recommendations.

“All the things that we’re calling for are achievable. There’s someplace somewhere that is doing each of the things we recommend,” King told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

Some suggested changes, like improving air quality for students, are highly anticipated by parents and already underway in efforts to ameliorate pandemic health concerns. Beginning next year, more than 500 schools across New York state will further improve air quality, reduce emissions and add energy career and tech opportunities under Gov. Kathy Hochul’s just-announced $59 million . New York officials are partnering with the New Buildings Institute on the effort.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers who sometimes clashed with King in her role as a labor leader, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ that the union “leaped” at the opportunity to be involved in K12 Climate Action, seeing it as part of the AFT’s broader goal to make schools safe and healthy spaces for learning.

“The way you teach people is by not telling them, but having them see, feel, touch, use whatever senses they have to really envision a future,” she said.

Weingarten and other commission leaders toured Alice West Fleet Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia Sept. 21 to learn how a small school has become a model of sustainability for the affluent, D.C. area county. The school’s geothermal heating system and solar panels save roughly $100,000 in energy costs each year, enough to fund two teachers’ starting salaries, according to the Aspen Institute’s Laura Schifter.

In the center of Alice West Fleet, the red and blue lights of a “solar pole” show students how much energy is being produced and used at any given moment. Any surplus goes to greater Arlington County, and upper grade students use data collected to make comparisons and predictions about how much energy will be produced at different points in the year.

On the first floor is the yet-to-be-named “Power Pole,” showing students the amount of power the school has generated. The blue is from the solar panels, the red is the power being used. Extra power goes back to the county.

— AFT (@AFTunion)

Weingarten, whose enthusiasm was evident during the tour when she slid down a slide that connects Fleet’s third and second floors, added that the AFT recently established a climate task force, including members from states heavily dependent on the fossil fuel industry, like Texas, West Virginia and Alaska. The growing urgency to address climate needs across political parties and geography gives her hope that what unites us is greater than what divides us.

“Just like our responsibility to educate kids, there’s a responsibility to keep a climate that’s going to be there,” Weingarten said.

Commission member Nikki Pitre, executive director for the told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ that there’s also a responsibility to keep Indigenous people and values at the forefront of climate solutions, given that Native peoples have always stewarded the land and acted as environmentalists.

The action plan emphasizes that Indigenous communities’ knowledge systems — their local culture and ecological practices — must be included in climate solutions.

Pitre said she walked away from the tour of Alice Fleet questioning, “What do we need to advocate for in our policies to ensure that these schools are not the exception? That we’re providing equal access across the country — including tribal reservations, including urban spaces?”

School leaders on the commission say that equity considerations play a key part in deciding which sustainable infrastructure improvements are prioritized because solutions cannot be one-size-fit-all. For some districts, climate issues are just as urgent as addressing unfinished learning and mental health concerns related to the pandemic as families face unprecedented flooding in the South and upper Atlantic.

As Los Angeles County’s superintendent of schools, Debra Duardo leads the that constitute the nation’s largest K-12 consolidated school system. She told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ she hesitated when first approached by the commission, given all the urgent challenges facing students during the pandemic.

“I hadn’t really placed as much of an emphasis on my own time and knowledge on understanding the impact that the education sector has on the environment. For me it was like, we’re super busy right now, but one thing this pandemic has taught us is that schools have to be ready to step up — that people look to schools as the hub of support and resources and communities,” Duardo said.

In Los Angeles, where families increasingly face poor air quality from smog and fire smoke, she said, it’s historically been student and environmental activists leading the charge for climate solutions. However busy leaders might be, she said, they cannot ignore the dread young people feel when confronting climate change and the strains it may place on their learning.

“There’s so much evidence and research that tells us that children thrive when they’re in an environment where it’s safe, beautiful and accommodating to meet their needs …Children aren’t going to learn and thrive in an environment if they don’t feel like anybody is listening, or they’re concerned that their futures, their safety are in danger.”

Advocates and teachers say presents a way to confront some eco-anxiety with positive actions and possibilities for future careers in engineering, green infrastructure and clean energy. K12 Climate Action commissioners contend that infrastructure changes are reducing emissions while preparing the next generation of stewards.

Sustainable changes also open the door for deeper civic and family engagement at a time when the pandemic has strained relationships to schools. As a part of a larger research assignment on the Chesapeake Bay, Ashley Snyder’s fourth-grade students at Alice West Fleet started brainstorming ways to share with the community how best to enhance rain gardens and filtration systems to protect the watershed area.

“I definitely see the students bringing home a lot more of what they’re learning to their families,” she said.

School district leaders might deny that they’re openly teaching critical race theory, but the nation’s largest teachers union is launching a campaign to have them do just that.

Delegates at the National Education Association’s annual meeting last week a calling for a campaign to implement the theory in curriculum and oppose efforts to ban it. Other items approved include researching organizations “attacking educators doing anti-racist work” and naming Oct. 14 — George Floyd’s birthday — as a national day dedicated to teaching about oppression and structural racism.

On Tuesday, the leader of the nation’s other major teachers union joined the fray. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said critical race theory is not taught in schools, but pledged to back any teachers who address topics the laws seek to exclude from classroom conversations.

“Mark my words: Our union will defend any member who gets in trouble for teaching honest history. We have a legal defense fund ready to go,” she said at the opening of the union’s annual professional development conference. She added that “culture warriors want to deprive students of a robust understanding of our common history.”

It’s unclear whether the NEA is encouraging members in states that have already passed anti-critical race theory legislation to violate the law. At the very least, it is arguing that teachers shouldn’t gloss over “unpleasant aspects of American history” according to the union’s adopted statement.

The theory — bitterly dividing communities across the country — teaches that racism is an integral part of U.S. systems and institutions that purposely disadvantage people of color. The unions’ stance comes as nine states have already banned instruction that references structural racism, white supremacy and other key principles of the theory. More than 20 other states have considered similar bills.

The union was “forced to some extent” to enter the fray because of how volatile the debate has become, said Bradley Marianno, an assistant education professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“Their members, particularly those who wish to instruct on elements of critical race theory, want to know that they have a union behind them if their jobs are jeopardized by their classroom instruction,” he said. “This is not a new role for teachers’ unions in the broadest terms but is also somewhat unique in that this one is tied so tightly to instruction informed by a single theory.”

Like the conflict over reopening schools, the clash over critical race theory is pitting parents who want a say in what schools teach against unions seeking to protect teachers’ autonomy, Marianno said, adding that they “will continue to butt heads throughout this school year.”

Weingarten, in fact, predicted that this coming school year could be even more challenging than the last.

“It won’t be easy, and some people will try to make it harder, like those who have disparaged educators, scapegoated our unions and blamed us for things outside our control, like school closures caused by a pandemic,” she said.

Marianno said the NEA’s action could be an effort to preempt any further bans on instruction related to critical race theory, but that the union has also “opened up the avenue for litigation” in the nine states with existing restrictions.

Not all teachers, however, agree with the focus on race and racial oppression in the classroom. The conservative Southeastern Legal Foundation is representing a Chicago-area teacher in , filed last week, that argues antiracist training for teachers and students is unconstitutional. Stacy Deemar, a middle school drama teacher, argues that the Evanston/Skokie School District 65 is violating prohibitions on discrimination by race, color or national origin. According to the lawsuit, the district has organized both teachers and students into racial “affinity groups” and required them to participate in “privilege walks” where they are segregated by color.

Meanwhile, teachers are receiving increasing support from civil rights groups, who are drawing comparisons between the current uproar over critical race theory and the struggles of the 1960s. One group, the , a nonprofit seeking to preserve the history of a student-led organization that participated in the civil rights movement, penned an open letter to teachers.

“We who resisted the laws of segregation by sitting at ‘White Only’ lunch counters, and organized voter registration campaigns among those historically denied the right to vote, stand now in support of those teachers and professors who today defy this new form of McCarthyism by pledging to continue writing, speaking, and teaching about systemic racism, structural inequality, and institutionalized white-supremacy past and present,” the letter said. “To all the courageous teachers who won’t back down from teaching their students the truth, we stand with you.”

Editor’s note: Reporting for this story was based partly on “business items” that the National Education Association passed at its annual meeting last week, but which no longer appear to be on the union’s website.

An item referring to critical race theory in curriculum appeared under prior to its approval and reads that the union will support and lead a campaign that results “in increasing the implementation of culturally responsive education, Critical Race Theory, and Ethnic (Native People, Asian, Black, Latin(o/a/x), Middle Eastern and North African, and Pacific Islander) Studies curriculum in Pre-K-12 and higher education.” The news of its passage also no longer appears to be on the union’s website, but was .

Leading Republicans on the Senate education committee are calling on the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to provide details about how much the agency interacted with teachers unions and whether she has been completely forthcoming about their involvement in .

North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, ranking member of the committee, and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, sent to CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky Thursday with a list of questions about why the guidance was delayed from late January to mid-February. The letter asks Walensky to identify all administration personnel, including political appointees who prepared and reviewed her April 22 letter to the committee, and requests a complete list of “stakeholders” the CDC contacted, including parents. The senators want to see all documents and communications between the CDC and union employees or members.

“That your agency would give teachers’ unions privileged access to the agency’s internal decision-making process on an issue as critical as school re-openings is a betrayal of that trust,” they wrote. “That you then would appear to try to avoid Congressional scrutiny by providing incomplete testimony is deeply troubling.”

The letter is the latest example of concerns about political influence over the agency in charge of the nation’s response to the pandemic. During the Trump administration, Democrats whether senior officials were pressuring the CDC, then led by Dr. Robert Redfield, to downplay the threat of the virus. Now, Republicans are questioning whether President Joe Biden’s supporters have interfered with efforts to reopen schools.

The CDC did not respond to requests for comment.

On Feb. 27, ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ filed a request with the CDC seeking information similar to what the senators want — all documents and communication, such as emails and transcripts of meetings, involving the CDC and any interest groups or individuals consulted in preparing the guidance. The CDC has so far provided internal CDC emails, but not the full list of groups and individuals.

Walensky testified before the committee May 11, saying that the agency sought input from over 50 “consumers.” During that hearing, she said the CDC’s communication with the unions focused on what schools should do if they have immunocompromised teachers.

But obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by Americans for Public Trust and Open Fairfax County Schools, a parents’ group in Virginia, show there was extensive email communication between CDC officials and the unions, especially the American Federation of Teachers.

“Your testimony seems – at a minimum incomplete – if not inaccurate,” the letter said. “The email correspondence makes clear that the involvement of the teachers’ unions went well beyond accommodations for high-risk teachers.”

AFT, for example, pushed for language saying the agency could change its guidance if a new variant of COVID-19 was detected.

In a Feb. 11 email to Walensky, as well as White House officials, Kelly Trautner, AFT’s senior director of health issues, suggested: “In the event high community transmission results from a new variant of SARS-CoV-2, a new update of these guidelines may be necessary.” She wrote that the union was concerned that even with safety protocols in place, some schools in “high-density, crumbling infrastructure areas” would not be able to safely reopen.

The final guidance reads: “As more information becomes available, prevention strategies and school guidance may need to be adjusted to new evidence on risk of transmission and effectiveness of prevention in variants that are circulating in the community.”

The Fairfax group said the senators raise important questions and that the public needs to understand why the guidance didn’t always coincide with the studies and recommendations it received from experts, such as the agency recommending 6 feet of social distancing even when research showed 3 feet was still effective in minimizing transmission. The CDC later reduced its recommendation 3 feet, which the AFT initially opposed.

“The draconian guidelines, many of which the CDC has subsequently pulled back from, resulted in slower reopenings in parts of the country that treat such guidance as mandatory, a result that was in alignment with the positions being advanced by the AFT and NEA but which caused real harm to the nation’s school children,” the Fairfax group said.

Following the initial release of the emails May 1, AFT spokesman Oriana Korin issued a statement saying the union was in touch with the CDC on behalf of its members, just as it was during the Trump administration.

“And while we have at times been concerned about their conclusions — as we were initially with the change in classroom physical distancing rules — we respect deeply that the CDC career staff has always taken its responsibility seriously,” she said. “And we appreciate that under Dr. Walensky’s leadership, the CDC welcomes stakeholder feedback, as opposed to ignoring it.”