Last year, the conservative Freedom Foundation made headlines with a high-profile effort to convince Miami-Dade teachers to dump their union. 

Ultimately, it flopped: 83% of members voted to stick with United Teachers of Dade. Still, Brent Urbanik, president of the rival Miami Dade Education Coalition, said he appreciated the Foundation’s “all-hands-on-deck” support, which included funding mailers to teachers’ homes and to knock on doors. Urbanik said he couldn’t have run the campaign without the Foundation’s help. 

But he’s not a fan of the group’s latest move. In late September, it named anti-union firebrand Ryan Walters, °ż°ì±ôČčłóŽÇłŸČč’s former state chief, as head of its new Teacher Freedom Alliance.  

“Most teachers just want to go to school. They want to teach their subjects, and they want to know that they’re not going to get fired for saying the wrong thing,” he said. With Walters at the helm, he said, the Teacher Freedom Alliance risks becoming “the right’s version of the left’s problem, which is the politicization of classroom material.” 

To Aaron Withe, the Foundation’s CEO, Walters is a “freedom fighter” who brings passion and new energy to a cause that has seen mixed results since the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in . The court ruled that teachers and other public sector employees can opt out of paying fees to unions they don’t want to join. But Walters is escalating the attack. Since resigning from his state job, he’s criticized for striking over their recent loss of collective bargaining and joined members in Florida, where he said unions have turned schools into “Marxist indoctrination centers.” 

One frequent target of his rhetoric doesn’t see the new Alliance as a threat. In a statement, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called the Foundation’s post-Janus efforts a “dismal failure.”  

Urbanik, who teaches AP Psychology at a magnet school in Miami-Dade, is among those educators who think the AFT and the National Education Association have strayed too far from core bargaining issues like salaries, benefits and working conditions. That’s what Mark Janus, a former child support specialist in Illinois, argued when he challenged AFSCME on First Amendment grounds, that he shouldn’t be forced to financially support a union’s political activities or preferred candidates.

“There was an inherent unfairness in requiring people to join a union and spend money on political activities they disagree with in order to hold a government job,” said Dean McGee, senior counsel and director of educational freedom at the Liberty Justice Center, the conservative law firm that represented Janus. 

Since Janus, some teachers say that unions continue to make it hard to opt out by automatically renewing membership without warning or creating short “escape” windows for canceling membership. But in 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear those concerns.

‘Power comes from money’

Teachers’ conflicts with their unions aren’t always political. Members of the Miami-Dade Education Coalition say United Teachers of Dade didn’t fight for raises and merit pay tied to a 2011 state law after the district said it was an unfunded mandate and they couldn’t afford the bonuses. 

And in Chicago, Liberty Justice Center represents members of the Chicago Teachers Union who are union leaders for a required annual audit for the past four years. 

The Teacher Freedom Alliance, McGee said, takes the Janus ruling a step further. “The power comes from money, and the money comes from member dues,” he said. If unions are losing members, he suggested they focus on “members’ interests and not broader political fights.”

He didn’t mention specific priorities, but the NEA this year that aim to counteract President Donald Trump’s “embrace of fascism” and to support “No Kings” protests. 

Opt-out campaigns have generally seen mixed results, experts say. When they’re combined with legislation to undermine the unions, as when Wisconsin stripped public sector unions of collective bargaining in 2011, membership drops, said Eunice Han, an associate economics professor at the University of Utah who studies unions. 

In 2023, Florida passed a law that requires unions to maintain a 60% dues-paying membership. In January 2024, United Teachers of Dade . Urbanik’s group saw an opening. 

A year after the law passed, over 50 public sector unions in the state had been wiped out because they couldn’t reach the 60% threshold, according to . But only three of those were K-12 unions, all of which represented non-instructional staff. 

of the Florida Education Association “have successfully re-certified,” Han said. The Freedom Foundation has seen small victories in other states where it’s been active, like Oregon, California and Washington. 

Larry Delaney, president of the Washington Education Association, said the Foundation frequently sends mailers with messages encouraging teachers and other school staff to opt out. The cards include a section the member can rip off and mail back to the union’s address. Their campaigns get creative, he said. Around Halloween, one mailer portrayed Delaney as a monster. Another said “Give yourself a Christmas bonus! End your monthly union dues.”

But only a handful of members opt out each year, Delaney said.

Some mailers look like a and include a fake check representing how much money members would save in dues each year if they quit the union. Based on his own experience, it costs about $40,000 to send mail to all 84,000 members of the union statewide, and the Freedom Foundation sends a new mailer almost monthly.

“I don’t know what their direct mailing budget is, but it’s large,” he said. The Foundation didn’t comment on its mailing budget.

The Foundation, a $17 million operation, according to its most , is a nonprofit and doesn’t have to disclose donors. In Florida, the free market-oriented , founded by successful futures trader Bill Dunn, donated $100,000 to support the Miami Dade Education Coalition’s opt-out campaign, according to .

by the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive organization that tracks spending by conservative groups, show the Koch Brothers, the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation in Pittsburgh, are also among the Foundation’s contributors. Those organizations often fund right-leaning causes, like efforts to roll back and PragerU, a media operation that produces conservative videos for kids.

‘We won’t be intimidated’

The Foundation used some of its resources to fight that says union members can sue if someone is trying to impersonate them as an opt-out strategy. 

“They say that we’re pretending to be union officials and going to union members’ homes to convince them to leave,” Withe, the Foundation’s CEO, said in an . “We won’t be intimidated. If anything, we’re more emboldened to go and get more of their members.”

The Foundation wasn’t able to keep the bill from passing. It allows union representatives to bring a civil lawsuit against a group or individual that tries to deceive a union member into opting out. Withe said the unions provided no evidence that the Foundation employed deception. 

But his group did manage to get teachers in the small 126-student along the south coast of Oregon, to create a new independent union in June. When all 13 of their teachers voted unanimously to create the new Cruiser Educators Association, the Oregon Education Association didn’t oppose the move. 

Gabe Shorb, a sixth grade teacher in the district, first heard Walters speak at one of the Foundation’s Teacher Freedom Summits and called his message “refreshing.”

He said several teachers had already opted out on their own and a few had joined the Teacher Freedom Alliance. Those remaining felt the Oregon Education Association wasn’t very helpful when they bargained with the district and asked for contract information from comparable districts. Membership in the new union is free.

“I’m hoping that we’ll make connections and show other small districts that, ‘Hey you don’t have to pay a lot of money for something that’s really not that useful,’ ” he said.

The Freedom Foundation also pushed this year for that would prevent teachers from using paid professional development days to attend the Montana Federation of Public Employees’ annual meeting. The sessions, the Foundation argues, are “oriented toward political activism, radical woke ideology and union marketing.” to panels on topics such as equity training and promoting LGBTQ issues. But the bill died in the session.

The Teacher Freedom Alliance aims to give school staff an alternative to the AFT and the NEA. Its free membership includes liability coverage up to $2 million, which protects teachers if they’re sued or need legal representation for other reasons. The American Association of Educators, with about 32,000 members, charges $19.50 per month for that includes liability coverage as well as other benefits, like shopping discounts.

Walters first promoted the new Alliance in March with a , drawing an ethics complaint from Rep. Ellen Pogemiller, a Democrat, who argued that he was using state resources to endorse an organization. The complaint was dismissed, and the state attorney general said he didn’t break the law. Walters did not respond to attempts to reach him by phone or text.

When he accepted the new job, Pogemiller filed , suggesting his promotion of the group was for personal gain. The state ethics commission hasn’t issued any findings. 

Walters might have taken the job because he thought it would “give him a larger national profile,” said Julia Koppich, an independent consultant in San Francisco and expert on teachers unions.

He might also have been seeking a higher salary. His paid $124,000. The Foundation did not disclose his salary at Teacher Freedom Alliance, but past show Withe made $525,000 in 2023, and other top executives earned in the $200,000 range. 

Koppich wonders how the new Alliance will benefit teachers. In states where unions have bargaining rights, teachers who drop their membership can’t negotiate their own salaries and working conditions with school districts, Koppich said. They’re bound by the union contract whether they pay dues or not. 

In non-union states, teacher pay is set by a statewide salary schedule.

“Unionism is baked in where it’s baked in and anathema where it’s always been anathema,” Koppich said. “These [opt-out] organizations don’t have a great track record.” 

In Miami, Urbanik blames part of his group’s poor showing in the election on the Miami- Dade district. He said officials “heavily suppressed” his organization’s message. Some teachers didn’t even know the vote was taking place. About two-thirds of the Miami-Dade teachers didn’t vote.

“We were not allowed to have contact with teachers on school grounds,” he said. “I was not allowed to have a mailer placed in mailboxes.”

Under Walters, opt-out drives are likely to go national and his rhetoric about unions funding agendas unrelated to the classroom are expected to intensify, said Han, with the University of Utah. 

“I believe that with Walters’s leadership,” Han said, “we may see a more politically charged and aggressive version of the Freedom Foundation’s strategy.”

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.”

Experts consider a released by the department late Friday to be more in line with how the courts have traditionally viewed illegal discrimination.

“This is such a far cry from what they put out two weeks ago,” said Jackie Wernz, a civil rights attorney and consultant who worked in both the Obama and first Trump administrations. “It’s downright reasonable.”

Part of the Trump administration’s larger effort to root out diversity, equity and inclusion, the called diversity a “nebulous” goal and warned that districts could be subject to investigations for treating “students differently on the basis of race.” It prompted opposition from , and education . And it left some educators wondering topics like Black History Month.

The Q&A, however, asserts that officials would not automatically consider anything labelled DEI to be illegal and would examine as part of its investigations whether a policy actually resulted in discrimination against students. Cultural and historical observances are fine, the document says, as long as all students are welcome to participate, regardless of race.

“They were trying to see how far they could go, and then they got the pushback,” Wernz said, noting the timing of the department’s guidance. “I love that they say you can celebrate Black history at the end of the month.”

In a on the changes, Wernz noted that the department clarified that it would need evidence that a particular racial group was harmed before it decided to launch an investigation. But she still warned districts to avoid lessons that separate students by race or assignments that ask them to identify their race. 

Neeraja Deshpande, a policy analyst at the conservative Independent Women’s Forum, said there was no need to walk back any instructions to districts.

“I don’t think the earlier letter needed to be softened,” she said. “But, of course, school districts were going to have questions and this seemed to answer them.”

‘Vagueness, Confusion and Chaos’

The department is still likely to get wide-ranging reports of what members of the public consider “divisive ideologies and indoctrination.” The portal it unveiled last week doesn’t define what the department considers to be illegal discrimination. 

The additional guidance hasn’t prompted the American Federation of Teachers to drop its federal lawsuit over the original letter. In a statement, AFT President Randi Weingarten said that the Q&A “just made things murkier.”

Last week, the union, along with AFT-Maryland and the American Sociological Association, sued, appeared to ban the teaching of “systemic and structural racism” in American history. The lawsuit says the teachers would be afraid to discuss Jim Crow laws, the internment of Japanese Americans and other examples of historical discrimination.

The Q&A doesn’t discuss how teachers should approach lessons on history and only says, “OCR’s assessment of school policies and programs depends on the facts and circumstances of each case.”

“If you are a classroom teacher, you still have no idea what you can or can’t teach when it comes to the history of the United States and the world,” Weingarten  said. “It seems like vagueness, confusion and chaos is the point.”

After expressing opposition to the pro-voucher movement he embodied, she added, “Side note — Corey A. DeAngelis, the face of school choice, was a model that catered to the gay community” and included a black-and-white photo of what appeared to be a shirtless DeAngelis in a suggestive pose. 

At the time, the revelation didn’t cause a stir or interfere with DeAngelis’s hectic schedule as a leading lobbyist for “funding students, not systems.” He his book, “The Parent Revolution,” which earned from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. And and other conservative outlets continued to feature him and that schools focus too much on the “LGBT’s as opposed to the ABC’s.”

But that abruptly ended Friday when , a far-right fringe account on Substack, reported that DeAngelis had a gay adult film career under the pseudonym “Seth Rose” and appeared in a 2015 film set in a college. The Betsy DeVos-backed American Federation for Children, where DeAngelis has been a senior fellow pushing school choice bills since 2021, quickly erased him from its website. 

“We have placed the employee on leave as we investigate this matter further,” a spokeswoman for the pro-school choice group said.

Has anyone heard from Corey DeAngelis in the last few days? He normally tweets at me incessantly- he’s been very silent. Hope he’s ok.

— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten)

Known for aggressive online rhetoric aimed at school districts, unions, and particularly American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, DeAngelis has been uncharacteristically silent on social media since the news broke and didn’t return texts or a phone call from ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. His on Thursday referenced a video of Vice President Kamala Harris talking about children being “of the community.”

“They think they own your kids,” he wrote.

Online and in person, DeAngelis has been an avid culture warrior and perhaps the most visible face of a brand of school choice that paints traditional districts as failing institutions that are forcing left-wing ideas on students. “School choice defeats the woke mind virus,” he commented in response to from House Speaker Mike Johnson featuring a “lesson plan” parody that included “drag queen story hours” and transgender students’ participation in school sports. 

He frequently browbeat Democratic opponents to and trolled them when they blocked him.

But the news of DeAngelis’s alleged past ultimately came not from his many critics on the left, but rather has its origins in an intra-MAGA dispute involving right-wing Texas groups that trade in conspiracy theories and oppose Gov. Greg Abbott’s plan for school vouchers.

The Texas Freedom Coalition, which is run by Fields, calls itself a network of “patriots” who opposed COVID lockdowns. They view vouchers as another form of government overreach.

Fields gave Current Revolt, a far-right site that has , credit for digging into gay porn sites to find the film and other photos. But she told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, “My post is what caused several people to start asking questions about his past.”

A screenshot of what appeared to be a policy expert for DeAngelis with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization raised red flags for her and other conservative parents who view talk of “global” partnerships as a threat to U.S. independence. One of UNESCO’s is “inclusive and equitable quality education.”

“School choice isn’t merely a lucrative scam; it’s a cunning ploy to enable government oversight of all educational avenues through a web of regulations and accountability tied to public funding,” Fields wrote in her July post about DeAngelis. 

DeAngelis any connections to the U.N. group.

Mary Lowe, a conservative activist who split from Moms for Liberty — another — over the issue of school choice, was also skeptical. She said she never understood why conservatives flocked toward DeAngelis after in 2020, “I didn’t vote for Trump — and I’m not a Republican.”

But Gov. Greg Abbott and pro-voucher advocates like the Texas Public Policy Foundation — who have for years to pass a school choice law — embraced DeAngelis’s take-no-prisoners style of advocacy. Following other states with similar laws, they want Texas to give parents roughly $10,000 a year to spend on private school tuition or homeschooling. At Republican lawmakers’ invitation, he testified before the Texas House education committee on the topic of “parent empowerment” in 2022, despite the fact that he was single with no children at the time.

“Our moms’ intuition was like ‘There is something missing to this story,’” said Lowe, who founded a new group, Families Engaged for Effective Education, after leaving Moms for Liberty. ‘There is something not right here.’ ”

DeAngelis a “slick salesman” for the school choice movement.

It wasn’t until last week, however, that news linking DeAngelis to porn films spread like wildfire on social media.

Immediate reaction to the graphic images spread on porn-related websites and among who saw the scoop as “” for one of their bitterest foes. , an Oklahoma City attorney, asked how Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and state Superintendent Ryan Walters “who are so anxious to privatize Oklahoma public education never vetted Corey DeAngelis?” DeAngelis supported their campaigns in 2022, and Walters similarly accuses public schools of spreading “woke gender ideology” in schools and frequently posts examples of what he considers left-wing indoctrination.

The school choice grifters at the American Federation for Children deleted Corey DeAngelis off their site

— Jess Piper (@piper4missouri)

The Hoover Institution, a Stanford University think tank where DeAngelis has been a visiting fellow for the past year, no longer lists him as an expert, but retains his articles on the site. There have been no changes to his profiles on the sites of two libertarian organizations where he’s been a contributor, the and the .

On his Eduwonk blog, Andy Rotherham, co-founder of Bellwether, a think tank, “a little grace” toward someone he described as a “deeply troubled person.” But he argued that , which include about drag shows and Pride festivals, are “going to be hard for his allies to defend.”

Other school choice advocates were already pointing fingers back at traditional public schools.

“What’s better? A person with a sinful past trying to do a virtuous thing?” , a conservative Latino broadcaster and political analyst asked on X. “Or those claiming virtue, like defenders of gov-ed’s debauchery, who knowingly push evil today?” 

But others said the episode serves as a warning to education activists who place too much faith in one polarizing individual to carry their message.

“Oftentimes these character traits go hand in hand. Being a very outstanding speaker and charismatic leader 
 comes with a degree of narcissism,” Morgan Polikoff, a University of Southern California education professor, who is gay, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “The feeling that you’re above reproach can lead to questionable judgment.”

Disclosure: Corey DeAngelis wrote several opinion pieces for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ between 2018 and 2023. The Hoover Institution, where DeAngelis served as a visiting fellow until this month, provides financial support to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. Andy Rotherham sits on ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s board of directors.

Kamala Harris’ new running mate is an unabashedly progressive midwestern governor who appeals to veterans, hunters and football fans. If elected, he’d also be the first K-12 educator since Lyndon Johnson to be vice president, boasting the deepest connection to public schools of any candidate in recent memory.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is a former high school teacher and football coach who enacted a free college tuition program and expanded free school lunch statewide. But Walz, 60, a former congressional lawmaker who is in his second term as governor, may also carry left-of-center baggage that weighs down the ticket in a tight presidential race, observers said.

Walz rose to prominence earlier this year by informally leading Democrats’ turn to calling Republicans “weird,” suggesting in interviews that they’re out of touch and relying on culture-war fodder instead of issues Americans care about. 

Tim Walz first year as a high school football coach and geography teacher

— Andy Kaczynski (@KFILE)

“Who’s sitting in a bar in Racine, Wisconsin, saying, ‘You know what we really need? We need to ban “Animal Farm.”’ Nobody is!” Walz with MSNBC.

In a introducing himself released by the campaign Tuesday, Walz described the “small-town” values he learned growing up in Nebraska and later tried to instill in his students: “respect, compromise, service to country. And so when I went into government, that’s what I carried with me.”

Harris echoed those themes in a speech at Temple University in Philadelphia Tuesday evening, calling him “the kind of teacher and mentor that every child in America dreams of having and that every kid deserves.”

As governor, Walz put forward an education agenda that unions have cheered, signing a nearly state budget last year that significantly increased funding for the state’s public schools. He also signed into law a new $1,750-per-child tax credit that he said will help reduce childhood poverty.

Walz enacted for Minnesota families earning less than $80,000 per year. Analysts predict it’ll cost the state around $117 million in fiscal year 2025 and $49.5 million annually after that.

With a $17.5 billion budget surplus last year, Walz promised “to put it behind our teachers so we can educate our children.”

Despite the “historic” spending, school districts throughout Minnesota last spring were facing massive cuts, the one-two punch of the end of COVID recovery aid and enrollment losses. 

The state’s second-largest district, St. Paul Public Schools, projects a $150 million deficit for the 2024-25 academic year. Minneapolis Public Schools anticipates a $116 million shortfall. And even the most prosperous Twin Cities suburbs must explain the disconnect to families who moved there for their well-funded schools.

Free lunch for all

Walz enlisted in the Army National Guard after high school and attended Chadron State College. He earned a social science degree in 1989, and spent a year in one of the first government-sanctioned groups of American educators to teach in China.

Walz went on to serve full time in the Army National Guard, retiring in 2005 as a command sergeant major. 

He and his wife, Gwen, met while teaching in Nebraska. They worked together at Mankato, Minn., West High School, where he taught social studies and coached football. She taught English and later served as a district administrator. 

Former colleagues said the couple were powerhouse teachers who balanced out each other’s energy-levels. He was animated, they . She was more reserved.

“He came in very outgoing, very gregarious,” former social studies teacher Pat Griffiths told The Post. “If there were 100 people in a room and 99 loved him, he would work on the one who didn’t until they did too.”

Another colleague told of a prank that a group of teachers played on Walz during his first semester there: They printed out a fake gift certificate for a free turkey as a bogus “welcome gift,” to be collected at a local grocery store. 

Walz returned to school with the turkey. 

In 2006, he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, defeating a Republican incumbent in Minnesota’s rural First District, which typically leans Republican. He served six terms before being elected governor in 2018.

These days, Walz is widely known on the national stage for last year’s Minnesota Free School Meals law, which made school breakfast and lunch free for all students, regardless of income. It made Minnesota the fourth state to do so after California, Colorado and Maine. Currently, offer free meals to all students.

At the time, Walz said the measure “puts us one step closer to making Minnesota the best state for kids to grow up.”

During debate on the bill in March 2023, state Sen. Steve Drazkowski, a Republican, questioned whether food insecurity was even an issue in the state, saying, “I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that is hungry. I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that says they don’t have access to enough food to eat.”

A video of his speech went viral, garnering on X and plenty of criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike.

Recent coverage suggests that though the program is popular and the state’s surplus helps keep it afloat, the free-meals program than expected: an extra $81 million over the next two years and $95 million in the two years after that.

Walz has also criticized education savings accounts, saying they don’t help rural areas. Support for these accounts, championed by conservatives, may have hurt Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s prospects to become Harris’ running mate. 

A lifelong hunter, Walz shifted substantially on gun safety, moving from an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association in 2016 to endorsing an assault weapons ban after the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. At the time, Walz said his then-17-year-old daughter asked him to do more on gun safety. He donated his NRA contributions to charity.

The move turned his rating to “straight F’s,” . “And I sleep just fine.”

On Tuesday, after word leaked about Harris picking Walz, gun safety activist and Parkland survivor David Hogg on X, “I’m smiling a mile wide right now.” 

Extreme or Norman Rockwell?

Policies like these have earned Walz endorsements on the left — American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on Tuesday called him “an unabashed champion for public education, for educators and workers.” 

It also doesn’t hurt that Mary Cathryn Ricker, Walz’s first state education commissioner, was a former AFT vice president. Before that, she led the St. Paul Federation of Teachers.

At Temple University Tuesday evening, Walz spoke of his 20-year career as a teacher and his wife’s 29-year tenure, saying, “Don’t ever underestimate teachers.”

Walz’s career nearly derailed when he was pulled over in a drunk driving incident as a 31-year-old teacher in Nebraska. As the reported, he was stopped for driving 96 mph in a 55-mph zone. He failed a field sobriety test, but later pleaded guilty to reckless driving, a misdemeanor. He left the state in 1996, when he continued teaching and coaching football in Mankato.

Invoking his time as a coach there, Harris said he was a role model — on and off the field. She recounted the story of one of the first openly gay students at Walz’s school, who sought to start a gay-straight alliance “at a time when acceptance was difficult to find.”

Harris said Walz “knew the signal that it would send to have a football coach get involved. So he signed up to be the group’s faculty advisor. And as students have said, he made the school a safe place for everybody.”

But in a tight race, Walz’s progressive credentials could spell trouble for Harris, said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative .

Hess called the Walz pick “an odd choice” in a race in which Harris already has teachers’ union backing but needs to shore up support among independents and conservatives. He suggested that Shapiro might have been a better match for those constituencies.

“You couldn’t get the NEA and AFT working any harder for Harris than they already are,” he said. “She’s already broken out ‘the full pander’ for them.”

Hess said Harris likely chose Walz as a “vibe pick” who suits midwesterners in style if not substance: “He looks like a big, burly high school football coach, assistant principal, kind of sensible guy from Middle America” who served in the military, “whereas Shapiro looks like an investment banker. Part of the calculation might be that that visual is worth plenty.”

Harris may also be trying to “buy herself a lot more leeway with the left so she can keep tacking back to the middle on issues — and the left will be happy because they feel like Walz is one of them.”

It’s possible centrists or moderates in battleground states will be swayed by Walz, Hess said, but his progressive policy solutions could stop them in their tracks. “The guy’s a high school teacher who has been in the National Guard for 20 years,” he said. “His politics are extreme, but his profile, his biography, is about as Norman Rockwell as you can get.”

That moment when you’re a union president, and find out that a teacher and union member is going to be the next vice-president.

We’re excited for former public school teacher & AFT member to join on the ballot this November!

— AFT (@AFTunion)

But Chris Stewart, CEO of and an education blogger based in Minneapolis, said framing Walz in traditional political terms is misleading. Minnesota may be progressive, but it’s “not wild and crazy. We’re not San Francisco. 
 I don’t think people know how purple Minnesota can be,” he said of . 

Despite the divide, Stewart said, Walz has succeeded with a “very slim majority” in the state legislature. 

But rather than judging Walz on a “left-right continuum,” he said, we should look at him as “just a better version of a great American Democrat. He is not left or right in the way that we traditionally think about things. He kind of breaks that binary.”

listed the conditions necessary for a bilateral ceasefire, including the release of Israeli hostages and the provision of more humanitarian aid. It excoriated Hamas, both for its Oct. 7 terrorist assault and the brutal repression suffered by Gazans under its control, as well as the Netanyahu government for obstructing the possibility of a two-state solution. Further criticism was reserved for antisemitism, Islamophobia and the attempted censorship of dissenting views.

The document was notable for its timing as well as its substance. By the end of January, a growing number of union affiliates and leaders had already made similar pronouncements, though often voiced in much harsher terms. 

Becky Pringle, speaking for the National Education Association’s three million members, demanded a permanent truce on December 8 — a position by the organization’s board of directors. In mid-November, Israel’s military campaign violated the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights, but made no mention of the Oct. 7 attacks or the captivity of over 200 hostages. And in early December, a pro-Palestinian by Oakland Education Association members who developed special lesson plans the local school board.

In an interview with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, AFT president Randi Weingarten said her union’s process moved more slowly in order to build support. Study groups were held to gather the views of internal constituencies, including the organization’s . Partly in order to gain the unanimous backing of its 43-member executive council, she acknowledged, drafting the resolution “took some time.”

“Early on, it was hard to have a real conversation
because it was so fractured,” Weingarten said. 

Four months after the events of Oct. 7, significant political fractures still cleave the labor movement, both within organizations and between unions and their allies in the Democratic Party. Several of the resolutions have been rejected by members as , or even , and while President Biden is now toward a six-week ceasefire, he with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or significantly altered his administration’s stance on the effort to capture or kill Hamas’s leaders. The division threatens to influence the outcome of the 2024 elections, with a faction of NEA members the union’s endorsement of Biden against Donald Trump. 

Those dissenters will almost certainly fail, and Israel’s armed incursion may culminate long before November. But while the war is unlikely to directly unseat Biden, it is a reflection of fissures on the left that very well might. suggests that many Americans favor a ceasefire, but also that Democrats are much more divided than Republicans on whether the U.S. should continue to support its closest ally in the Middle East. That divide is both a product of long-term political trends and a potent short-term threat.

Michael Hartney, a political science professor at Boston College and fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution, said that the decision to take a stance on something as controversial as the Gaza war illustrated how the currents of polarization could determine the course of even formidable political actors: Though distant from the day-to-day priorities of nonprofit and activist groups, hot-button issues like Israel have become central to the political identity of many members and have gradually become boxes that such organizations must check.

“I think it’s due to the changing landscapes of the incentives facing these interest groups,” Hartney said. “For them to fundraise and be influential, they basically have to pick a team.”

Rise in pro-Palestinian sentiment

Teachers unions, and particularly the AFT, have previously been involved in organizing and advocacy in the Middle East. Just two days before Hamas attacked Israel in October, Weingarten — a Jew who has made multiple trips to Israel during her nearly 16-year tenure as the Federation’s president — , a liberal nonprofit that lobbies politicians on American-Israeli relations and security priorities. Her counterpart, the NEA’s Pringle, of schools in Israel and the Palestinian territories last year.

But the posture of some groups within the labor movement as criticisms of Netanyahu’s leadership and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank have grown louder on the left. In 2021, following an outburst of violence in East Jerusalem that left hundreds dead, the United Educators of San Francisco became America’s first teachers’ union supporting the “boycott, divest, and sanction” [BDS] movement, a contentious project Israel. United Teachers Los Angeles, representing 30,000 school employees in America’s second-largest district, debated a similar measure before .

At the same time, perceptions of Israel have become more divided in U.S. politics overall. In public opinion surveys long predating the violence of the last few months, younger Americans have been to directly blame Israel for its periodic clashes with Hamas, and people between the ages of 18 and 29 to Palestinians than Israelis in the wake of Oct. 7. 

Jack Jennings, a former longtime Democratic staffer in the U.S. House, said the emerging generation gap was largely explained by the country’s changing demographics, which have seen in the number of students of Middle Eastern origin. Both Jewish and Muslim Americans have tended to vote Democratic in recent elections, but the mounting salience of Israeli-Palestinian conflict had generated tension that was being felt “first in the classroom,” Jennings said.

“What has caused this change, and caused the local unions to adopt these resolutions, is that the number of Muslims in the country has doubled” , Jennings said. “When the teacher opens her door on Monday morning, she may have five Palestinians in there.”

Weingarten has generally attempted to in the public debate, while also opposing BDS resolutions and as a “progressive Zionist.” The AFT resolution appeared to reflect that nuance, leaving out the invocations of Israeli “genocide” or “settler colonial violence” seen in the rhetoric of some other teachers’ unions.

David Dorn, who headed the AFT’s International Affairs division for decades before retiring 10 years ago, applauded the resolution as one of the best he had seen from an advocacy group. During his time with the union, he remembered, he had found the work of drafting such documents “hard and boring.”

“They mean nothing. It’s a piece of paper that is usually forgotten 24 hours later,” Dorn lamented. “But that was a good resolution, and maybe she can have the union play a good role under the circumstances.”

Dorn represents a tradition of international activism within the labor movement that helped shape geopolitics throughout the 20th century, but isn’t well remembered today.

Under the , who led the AFT from 1974 to 1997, the union energetically worked to bolster democratic movements and labor rights throughout the world. Its maneuverings were sometimes controversial, as when the stridently anticommunist Shanker and his allies Nicaragua’s far-left Sandinista government in the 1980s. But even decades later, the AFT still touts its work to in Poland and challenge apartheid rule in South Africa.

The fall of Soviet Communism — along with the passing from the scene of Shanker and other internationally minded figures at the AFL-CIO — led to a decline in unions’ outreach overseas, Dorn said. Weingarten “wasn’t really steeped in that tradition” to the extent of her predecessors, he added, and many organizational leaders are now more focused on sustaining their membership at home.

“Going to conferences or making statements is one thing, but I don’t see many unions using their own resources and grants” to effect change abroad, Dorn said. “It’s too bad, but life goes on, and the Cold War is over.” 

While acknowledging that the AFT has been “more limited” in the range of its international involvement over the last few years, Weingarten said the union still played a robust role promoting issues of democracy and self-determination on the world stage. After Weingarten made a 2022 visit to Ukraine, for example, the Federation and partnered with a Polish teachers’ union to deliver them to schools affected by Russia’s attacks on the country’s power grid.

“Other unions have really ratcheted down, but we’ve always had an international department,” Weingarten said.

Post-Janus realignment

What the spate of ceasefire resolutions will accomplish — and what they signify for a labor movement that has attained more prominence in recent years even as it has — remains to be seen.

Some have , at a time when schools are faced with expiring COVID relief funds and students experience profound learning challenges, their designated bargaining representatives are staking their credibility on a conflict unfolding thousands of miles away. Others are distressed that their organizations haven’t gone farther to demonstrate opposition to Israel’s actions.

William Galston, a veteran scholar at the Brookings Institution who has previously advised Democratic presidential candidates, observed that unions weren’t the only political players to comment outside of their traditional areas of interest. With the members of America’s ideological camps increasingly converging toward shared preferences — such that the AFT, the Sierra Club, and Planned Parenthood share many of the same donors and preferred candidates on the left, while NRA and Americans for Prosperity do so on the right — groups that previously organized around a relatively narrow slate of issues are under more pressure to demonstrate their adherence to a party line.

“They used to be more narrowly focused on occupational issues, but for purposes of coalition maintenance, unions and other activist organizations are called upon to take positions on a very wide range of issues,” Galston said.

The Hoover Institution’s Hartney offered an additional theory. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME, the case that forbade public sector unions from extracting fees from non-members, those organizations were left with a choice: quiet their political activities to attract more potential members, or tie themselves closer to Democratic politics to further engage their most enthusiastic organizers. While potentially polarizing, he said, the second course might be more workable in the short run.

“It’s possible that they’re doubling down on appealing to their true believers by making them feel extra valued,” Hartney said. “Maybe they can get double the PAC donations from true believers to offset the fact that they’ll get zero support from the marginal person who can leave post-Janus.”

Even so, there is a risk of significant downside in any position that leaves daylight between national entities like AFT and the Biden White House, especially in an election year in which all segments of the Democratic coalition will be called on to help reelect the president. Polling continues to suggest that Biden’s stance on the war is , and a union-led opposition to Israel’s operations in Gaza could highlight that faultline.

Weingarten said she was unconcerned about the possibility of a split between her union and the president, pointing to Biden’s and Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s furious efforts to contingent on hostage releases. Notwithstanding the substantive differences between that policy and activists’ hope of a more lasting peace, she added, key officials are “very much involved in attempting to get to a ceasefire.”

“There’s a big difference between what the president of the United States can say publicly and what the president of the United States operationalizes privately.”

Members of the House’s GOP majority and their witnesses used the education subcommittee gathering to lay blame on the teachers unions for delays in reopening during the 2020-21 school year.

“This whole thing was like a jagged little pill,” said Florida Republican Aaron Bean, using a ‘90s music reference to describe the slow return to in-person learning. 

Democrats, meanwhile, argued that extreme caution was needed to protect both teachers and students. 

“I appreciate all the Monday morning quarterbacking here today, but we don’t need 
 data to tell us that if kids are not in school they won’t learn,” said Connecticut Democrat Jahana Hayes, the 2016 National Teacher of the Year. “We also know if kids are dead, they don’t learn.”

Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, countered by offering up data showing that schools overall proved and that rates of death among children were . 

While it all sounds familiar, the debate offers a likely preview of the coming standoff over federal funding for 2024 — and a glimpse into the contentious role the education system’s response to the pandemic will play in the election season ahead.

The House has proposed a to the education budget, noting that some districts still have unspent relief money and that parents would be better off using the funds for school choice. But Democrats, including Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon, ranking member on the subcommittee, said Republicans are obsessed with “extremist” culture wars and can’t be serious about learning loss if they’re willing to cut Title I funds for high-poverty schools and eliminate funding for teacher training.

Injecting her own Alanis Morissette title into the record, Mary-Patricia Wray, a Louisiana parent and witness for the Democrats, asked: “Isn’t it ironic that this Congress allocated funding for those programs, recognizing that they were needed, and is now about to take them away at a time when they’re also screaming loudly about learning loss?”

The founder of Top Drawer Strategies, a government relations and political consulting firm, Wray, who previously worked for the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, said it was “intellectually dishonest” for Republicans not to acknowledge achievement gaps that existed before the pandemic. 

Score gaps between Black and white students and Hispanic and white students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress were before the pandemic, data shows. Malkus stressed that closures stretching into the spring of 2021 only made those gaps worse and caused the “largest negative shock to student learning ever in the U.S.”

‘An eye-opener’

While union leaders weren’t called as witnesses Wednesday, the hearing came less than a week after American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten spelled out for pandemic recovery, offering talking points and a roadmap for next year’s elections. 

“Ninety percent of parents send their children to public schools,” she said. “Most parents trust teachers, and they want public schools strengthened, not privatized.”

She announced partnerships with literacy organizations to focus on reading and a campaign to promote community schools, mental health services and other efforts to support students. She blamed social media and “culture warriors who censor honest history” for holding students back.

The AFT, she said, offered a in April 2020, but some critics still point to the slow pace of reopening in cities with , like Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington.

“The unions are surely hurting from being blamed — with some justice — for learning loss,” said Chester Finn, senior fellow and president emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank. “Randi is very smart.” 

The hearing was a departure from issues Republicans have focused on since taking the majority in the House. In April, they passed to bar transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports, and in March, they passed a bill that seeks to increase transparency into books and curriculum in schools. 

The [Republicans] are all over the woke stuff, of course.” said Sandy Kress, a Texas attorney and education consultant who served in the second Bush administration. But he added, “the studies that showed we lost more ground after that unprecedented slug of money — they’re an eye-opener.”

North Carolina state Superintendent Catherine Truitt, who took office in 2021, joined the witness panel to describe her state’s efforts to help educators use the money wisely, especially those in small and rural districts. 

She opened an to track student data and advise districts on how to spend relief funds. Leaders, she said, have spent some on summer “bridge” programs to prepare students for the next grade, math boot camps for middle school students and training on phonics-based instruction. 

“That’s what we sent that money to you in order to do,” Hayes said, “for you to make decisions on the ground that would best support your students and your community,” 

But questions over whether districts have used the money effectively are likely to continue, said Liz Cohen, policy director at FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University.

“If I’m in a district, and I have something that I think is working for kids,” she said, “I would be smart to get as much data as I can for the next six months.”

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.

The court will hear two cases that say the administration exceeded its authority when it offered borrowers up to $20,000 in debt relief last August. One is from six GOP-led states; the second is from a conservative organization that sued on behalf of two borrowers who argue the administration’s plan leaves them out. 

Given the 6-3 conservative majority on the court, experts say it will be tough for Biden to win. Just last year, that the administration’s plan to set limits on carbon emissions crossed “constitutional lines” and exemplified government overreach.

The states — Nebraska, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and South Carolina — and the plaintiffs who filed the second lawsuit will first have to convince the court that Biden’s plan would cause them financial harm and that they had legal “standing” to sue in the first place. 

“It seems likely that if there is standing, that the loan forgiveness will be overturned,” said Michelle Dimino, deputy director of education at Third Way, a center-left think tank. “Can the department do something with that level of political and economic significance without an act of Congress?”

After the administration paused repayment multiple times, Biden’s decision to go forward with the loan forgiveness plan was viewed as a politically popular move ahead of the recent midterm elections. Supporters hailed it as compassionate toward borrowers, including the who took out loans to afford college. American Federation of Teachers President said many were “eagerly awaiting the breathing room 
 student debt relief would bring.” But Republicans argue it’s not only illegal, but favors one group of borrowers at the expense of others. 

“Where is the forgiveness for the guy who didn’t go to college but is working to pay off the loan on his work truck?” Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, ranking member of the education committee, asked earlier this month during the first meeting of the new Congress.

Others say the plan increases inflation and could leave today’s K-12 students with the impression their college debt might be slashed as well. 

“If [politicians] have the authority to give away money if they declare an emergency, there’s a lot of incentive to declare emergencies — or give it away after they’ve declared one,” said Rick Hess, a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

But Kim Cook, CEO of the National College Attainment Network, said Biden presented the plan as “one-time debt relief” and that “future students shouldn’t depend on it.” Her organization, and many others, advocate for to $13,000 so low-income students won’t have to borrow so much to go to college.

‘Continued recovery’

During this month’s State of the Union address, Biden efforts to reduce student debt, but didn’t directly reference the cases before the court. 

The administration’s argument rests on a 2003 law called — for Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students. The law gives the education secretary the flexibility to make temporary changes to the federal student loan system in the case of a national emergency, including war.

“Student loan borrowers from all walks of life suffered profound financial harms during the pandemic,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said last month when filed briefs in support of the plan. “Their continued recovery and successful repayment hinges on the Biden administration’s student debt relief plan.”

One “wild card issue,” Dimino added, is that Biden plans to end the on May 11, which could make it harder for the administration to prove its case before the court.

In addition, former Republican education secretaries wrote in that the link between HEROES and Biden’s plan is weak.

“Such a pause only ensured that affected individuals were not placed in a worse position financially,” they wrote. “It did not authorize the executive branch to cancel $400 billion in student debt and leave borrowers in a better position than they would have been in if the COVID-19 pandemic had never occurred.”

In Biden v. Nebraska, the states argue that their tax revenues would drop if students don’t pay back their loans. The Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, for example, is a nonprofit that services student loans and contributes to the state’s higher education system. Biden’s plan, the states say, could cost the Missouri organization nearly $44 million a year and reduce what it pays the state.

Job Creators Network Foundation, an advocacy group, filed the second case, U.S. Department of Education v. Brown, on behalf of of Texas. Brown, a business owner from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, received loans from commercial lenders, making her ineligible for the Biden program. 

Taylor, a graduate of the University of Dallas, argues that limiting the maximum amount of relief — $20,000 — to Pell Grant recipients is unfair because borrowers earning far more than him will have more debt erased. He earns less than $25,000 a year, but qualified for $10,000 in loan forgiveness because he was not a Pell Grant recipient. Brown and Taylor argue that the administration didn’t give the public a chance to comment on the plan.

In the meantime, borrowers who took advantage of the Biden plan remain in limbo. 

In October, people were automatically eligible or applied for the relief. The department approved over applications before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit blocked the plan.

If the program is overruled, it’s unclear how soon borrowers would have to begin repayment, Dimino said.

“Borrowers are still totally in the dark,” she said. “These are really difficult circumstances for those making immediate financial decisions.”

When Education Secretary Miguel Cardona toured South Bend, Indiana’s Madison STEAM Academy in September, he made a quick impression on the district’s superintendent, C. Todd Cummings. 

Cummings remembers the secretary’s interest in COVID protocols, the facility’s STEM makerspace, and that he spoke Spanish to students at the bilingual school. By the time the visit ended, he came away feeling like he could pick up the phone and call Cardona if needed. 

“He’s done a lot to make the department more approachable,” Cummings said. “He understands running a district, but he also understands teachers in the classroom.”

Having one of their own helming the U.S. Department of Education has gone a long way toward mending the fractured relationship between district leaders and the agency that existed under Cardona’s predecessor. Betsy DeVos was the consummate outsider. She warred with unions, made comments that many teachers found , and attempted to direct relief funds meant for the public system to private schools. In contrast, when the former Connecticut state chief meets with superintendents and school leaders, “he’s talking shop” on everything from bell schedules to graduation rates, said Ronn Nozoe, head of the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

But almost a year into Cardona’s tenure, and with the pandemic showing no signs of abating, his department has sometimes struggled to keep up. COVID-19 has thrust the agency into the public eye almost as much as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and, like the CDC, it has often come under fire for being slow to respond to a fast-changing virus. To some, Cardona’s camaraderie with educators helps explain why he has sometimes appeared reluctant to embrace another constituency, whose power and visibility has grown with the pandemic: parents. 

Sarah Carpenter, executive director of The Memphis Lift, a nonprofit that trains parents to advocate for their children’s educational needs, said she hasn’t forgotten that parent leaders weren’t asked to speak at Cardona’s first virtual summit on reopening almost a year ago. 

“They know we’re here, and we’re just not accounted for,” she said, adding that parents “in those communities where this pandemic hit the hardest” should have had a voice. A June event focusing on equity didn’t feature parents either.

Cardona hasn’t ignored parents, and often reminds the public that his two teenage children, still attending public school in Meriden, Connecticut, have endured their own disruptions in learning. His first act as secretary was to write to parents and students acknowledging the hardships caused by the pandemic, and he has urged schools to rebuild trust with families.

More recently, when schools began to shift to remote learning because of the Omicron variant, Cardona told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, “Our parents have done enough.” That same week, the announcement of another round of grants to state came with Cardona’s statement that, “Meaningful parent engagement 
 has never been more important.”

But observers say his messages tend to emphasize over student recovery. When the department last month to use federal relief funds for teacher pay raises and hiring bonuses, Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, said “the balance feels a little off.”

The pandemic has mobilized many parents to take a more central role in their children’s education, and their frustration over extended school closures likely tipped the Virginia governor’s race in favor of Republican Glenn Youngkin. 

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, has tried to drive that point home. She regularly participates in “stakeholder” meetings with the department, and shares monthly parent survey data with Christian Rhodes, chief of staff for the department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. But she described the department’s parent engagement efforts as a “box-checking exercise.”

“That’s not what this moment calls for. It calls for listening to people’s pain,” she said. “Parents expect to be engaged on a whole new level because we had to hold it down for [schools] while they weren’t there.”

‘Not a slow-moving moment’

Leaders in education said Cardona has shown skill in managing the mountain of challenges he faced when he entered the job: more than half of schools still not fully open, expectations that he quickly reverse the previous administration’s stance on students’ civil rights, and low morale among what Nozoe called the department’s “beat-down career staff.” Cardona, he added, is trying to rebuild an agency that DeVos shouldn’t even exist.

Cardona said his top priority has been helping schools reopen and stay that way. Others credit him with steering billions in federal aid to states and districts on a short timeline.

“They’ve made a huge amount of progress in a very, very difficult time,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the California State Board of Education and president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute, a think tank. She led President Joe Biden’s transition team for education and as the nominee.

She specifically noted his team’s work to get the American Rescue Plan funding for schools “out the door with guidance and support for how to spend it” and early efforts to make the CDC’s “wonky and mysterious” school reopening guidelines more accessible to educators. Recent confusion over whether the agency’s updated quarantine guidance applied to schools, however, drew fresh .

Some noted that communication from the department often hasn’t matched the urgency state and district leaders have experienced during the pandemic. 

In November, the department said it was OK to use relief funds to pay for alternate forms of for students in the face of a bus driver shortage. But that was a month after New York , a Democrat, asked for the guidance, and two months after Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker called in the to drive students to school. 

In mid-December, the department issued a on jumpstarting school accountability systems, but state officials started calling for that in September. 

“They are slow moving,” said Roza, “and it’s not a slow-moving moment in public education.”

In an interview with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, Cardona said the department responds with guidance when “we hear from the field.” He noted the staff’s efforts to host multiple webinars and respond to questions from educators, but acknowledged that guidance from the department has sometimes lagged. He vowed to do better. “We have to stay ahead of things, and we’re going to continue to improve communications.”

‘More influence’

As he nears his first year as a cabinet member, Cardona reflected on what the department has accomplished under his leadership. 

While Omicron has led to short-term closures of as many as 5,400 schools, according to a frequently updated , Cardona noted that in-person learning had hit of schools by early December. And he takes pride that the department is addressing problems with Public Service Loan Forgiveness — a federal program meant to encourage students to go into nonprofit and public sector jobs, like teaching, in exchange for debt relief. Under DeVos, the department denied most requests for relief, and borrowers complained that loan servicers gave on how to meet the program’s strict criteria. The department’s management of the program prompted the American Federation of Teachers . Since Cardona started, the department has wiped out roughly $12.7 billion in college debt, including almost $2 billion for the public service program.

“Not only are we providing some loan forgiveness, but we’re fixing the systems that led to the problems that we have now,” he said, adding that he wants to continue to “make higher education more accessible to more students without having to be tethered in debt for the rest of their lives.”

Before Cardona was confirmed, there was speculation he’d be overshadowed by Biden’s White House advisers, who included two former high-level education officials from the Obama administration. More recently, Rodrigues quipped that , president of the National Education Association, likely has more pull with the administration than Cardona.

Conservative pundits have sized him up as Rick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, described him as “under-the-radar, except when he’s been waving the flag for partisan administration objectives.”

But those who support those objectives say Cardona has clout with the president. 

“I think with every passing day, he has more and more influence with the White House,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who first met Cardona when he was a teacher and now has a friendly competition with him over who has visited more states and schools over the past year. By late December, she’d hit 28 states; he’d made it to 25.

She said he advocated with the White House for changes to the loan forgiveness program and for putting teachers second in line to receive the first wave of COVID-19 vaccines, after health care workers.

Interestingly, given the coziness many of his critics assume Cardona enjoys with the unions, he has had trouble with the one representing employees in his own department. 

‘The huge political divide’

In early December, the Federal Labor Relations Authority found the department guilty of 14 violations of labor law — actions that date back to 2018 when the employee union’s collective bargaining rights. A of federal employees showed that morale within the department had declined far more than in any other agency. Those grievances have continued under Cardona, according to Cathie McQuiston, deputy general counsel with the American Federation of Government Employees.

The complaints involve inconsistent policies for working remotely, employee evaluation procedures and denying staff union representation when they have a dispute.

Under DeVos, the department was “paraded out as an example to other agencies of the kinds of things they should be doing in the Trump administration,” McQuiston said. “There has to be a political will to come in and say, ‘We’re not doing that anymore.’ At education, we struggle to get that commitment.”

According to a department spokesperson, efforts to resolve the complaints are ongoing and the agency is “committed to making sure it is a great place to work.” Both sides are scheduled to meet Thursday.

While addressing internal issues, Cardona was hit with a summer storm of public controversy over mask mandates and school equity initiatives. Superintendents were targeted with death threats, brawls broke out at school board meetings and school leaders tried to make sense of contradictory court rulings and mandates over masks.

“I wonder whether he anticipated the huge political divide over masks or no masks,” said Deborah Delisle, who served as assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education in the Obama administration and is now president and CEO of ALL4Ed, a nonprofit education policy organization. 

In August, Cardona departed from his usual cordial tone to take a against states banning local districts from mandating masks. 

“Don’t be the reason why schools are interrupted,” he said at a , indirectly challenging the governors of Florida and Texas.

But unless Republicans pressed him during Congressional hearings, he avoided the fray over critical race theory — a legal argument that racism lies at the core of U.S. institutions to intentionally advantage white people — and even to the controversial 1619 Project and the work of author Ibram X. Kendi from a civics grant program.

“We don’t get involved in curriculum issues,” he said during a June budget hearing, but stressed his support for culturally relevant teaching. “When students see themselves in the curriculum, they are more likely to be engaged.”

Some observers suggest he could have done more. 

Hess, at the American Enterprise Institute, said Cardona could “perhaps carve out room for the serious center” by defending “a progressive vision” but denouncing some of the examples that critics have found so , such as asking students to label themselves as “oppressed” or “oppressor.”

But Julia Martin, legislative director at Brustein and Manasevit, a law firm specializing in education, said there was no political upside for Cardona to wade any deeper into those waters.

“These issues, by their nature, are local issues,” she said. “There’s no way in many of these instances to come out and make a principled statement that doesn’t bother some people.”

The typically controversy-averse Cardona is a departure from the activist chiefs who have occupied the department since the No Child Left Behind era. Unlike many of his predecessors, Cardona doesn’t have a presidential mandate to implement bold reforms. 

“We’re still in a crisis, versus coming out of a crisis back in 2009,” said John Bailey, a senior fellow at AEI. That’s when Arne Duncan became secretary under President Obama, with a far-reaching mission to incentivize states to embrace controversial reforms such as overhauling teacher evaluations and adopting Common Core standards.

Even if Cardona had such a mandate, Bailey said, the pandemic leaves him in the position of trying to provide a “rapid response during an unfolding crisis that continues to play out.”

If the pandemic doesn’t continue to steal most of Cardona’s focus, he said he hopes to shift attention in 2022 toward issues a little closer to his heart: “teaching and learning.”

As someone who attended a technical high school in his hometown of Meriden, Cardona wants to see “better pathways” for students to two- and four-year schools and the workforce, especially with the jobs that will be created as a result of the $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure bill passed in November.

“There’s funding 
 unlike we’ve seen in the 20 years that I’ve been in education,” he said. “We have an opportunity here to really lift our field 
 and to give our students opportunities that they’ve never had.”

Lead Image: Education Secretary Miguel Cardona testified during a Sept. 30 Senate education committee hearing on school reopening. (Greg Nash / Getty Images)

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.

The Biden administration Thursday stepped up efforts to get more students vaccinated as the school year begins, with the National PTA, pediatricians and sports organizations to reach reluctant families.

The effort includes incorporating vaccines into physical exams for school athletes, featuring pediatricians at back-to-school events and supplying schools with resources to host pop-up vaccine clinics, including sample text messages and letters. Saturday will kick off a “week of action” devoted to promoting the vaccine, with Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona visiting a vaccine clinic in Topeka, Kansas, along with training sessions for parents, teachers and student organizations on how to promote vaccines.

“I remember last year. We were reopening schools and we didn’t have the science. We didn’t have the experience. We didn’t have the lessons learned,” Cardona said Wednesday in remarks after visiting a summer enrichment program at Graceland Park-O’Donnell Heights Elementary Middle School in Baltimore. “If you haven’t gotten vaccinated yet, do it now. This is our number one line of defense.”

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On Thursday, Cardona  that he’ll also be monitoring how “politics are getting in the way” and whether some families aren’t sending their children to school because they feel it’s not safe without mask requirements.  “To me those are adult actions preventing students to their right of public education.”

That message comes as less than 40 percent of the nation’s 12- to 15-year-olds have been vaccinated, . And the rate among 16- and 17-year-olds is less than half. Vaccination rates are higher among white children than Black children. The administration, however, is not only facing resistance from some parents toward the vaccine, but is also seeing growing backlash against mask mandates, with some districts at odds with governors over the issue.

The dissent was clear last week during a virtual town hall for parents where Aaliyah Samuel, a deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education and experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attempted to answer parents’ questions about the vaccine.

Participants began flooding the chat field with critical comments about the vaccine, remote learning and masks. Others shot back with links to studies on vaccine and mask effectiveness.

In all caps, one person wrote: “Hesitancy comes from the lies and lack of information. Those that have been vaccinated are the ones that are getting infected yet again, creating new variants such as Delta strain.”

Another responded: “Trump paid for the vaccine and took it.”

Samuel eventually jumped in and shut down the chat function.

“This is not a place for negative comments to attack individuals. It is a place to share information,” she said. “And if you don’t believe in the information, that’s your choice, but we’re sharing the best of the information that we have.”

Thursday’s White House announcement didn’t mention the role of the teachers unions in getting more students vaccinated. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten has been on her own this week to encourage parents to send their children to school this fall, while also advocating for a universal mask mandate.

In comments on SiriusXM POTUS’s “Laura Coates Show” this week, Weingarten called vaccines “the big game changer.” While restating her position that vaccine issues should be negotiated with local affiliates, she said on  that she is now more open to mandates for teachers.

“We want to persuade the holdouts,” she said. “But we’re looking at all the alternatives.”

Vaccinated students and school staff don’t have to wear masks and schools shouldn’t maintain hybrid attendance plans just to implement social distancing, according to from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Friday.

While the update recommends schools maintain 3 feet of distance between students, that strategy shouldn’t come at the expense of fully reopening, the CDC said. The agency is recommending that schools continue to enforce masks indoors for unvaccinated students and adults, and to continue implementing other practices including COVID-19 testing, handwashing and proper ventilation.

“Promoting vaccination can help schools safely return to in-person learning as well as extracurricular activities and sports,” according to the guidance.

With some schools opening in early August, the guidance provides districts time to plan reopening procedures, communicate policies regarding masks and encourage more families to vaccinate their children. Meanwhile, some districts, such as the Chicago Public Schools, are facing demands from their unions to hit of at least 80 percent of students over 12. And between the Los Angeles district and its union includes mask requirements for all students and staff, regardless of vaccination status. Each school would also have a COVID-19 compliance task force.

In a statement, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the new CDC guidance is “grounded in both science and common sense.”

“The guidance confirms two truths: that students learn better in the classroom, and that vaccines remain our best bet to stop the spread of this virus and get our kids and educators fully back to those classrooms for in-person learning,” according to the statement.

But she said the union remains concerned about the Delta variant of the disease. Cities such as Los Angeles are beginning to see in cases due to the strain, and Pfizer and BioNTech have announced they are developing a specifically for that variant. At this time, the CDC and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are a booster for those who are fully vaccinated.

Weingarten added that AFT affiliates are holding vaccination clinics in their communities to get more adults and children vaccinated before the return of school. President Joe Biden and first lady have also been visiting communities to promote vaccination. The president has called for a to encourage those who are hesitant to get shots, but conservatives about government intrusion.

The new CDC guidance recommends district leaders monitor local transmission rates when deciding whether to relax any prevention strategies.

Read the full guidance document .

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 .