Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has been attacked by the far right as “the most dangerous person in the world,” and is the author of Why Fascists Fear Teachers.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Randi Weingarten discuss why education is needed for a free society, the impact of social media on learning, and the school closures during COVID.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I was thinking, as I was preparing for this conversation, about some of the statements that the framers of the Constitution made about the importance of the “diffusion of knowledge,” and the role that public institutions should play in that. Going back to the founding of the United States, what is the role that public education was supposed to play in educating citizens?
Randi Weingarten: It is interesting. There is not a direct absolute right to public education in the United States Constitution. In fact, what has happened is that every single state does actually create that right. That right was recognized by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education as well, but every single state created a public education system and created universal public education over the course of decades and generations.
In listening to the framers and the Founders, or in reading their writings, you see how important education was to them as a bulwark against tyranny and dictatorship. They understood that without education, the ability to repeat tyranny, to repeat having a tyrant again, was too great. They pushed—whether it was Franklin, Washington, Madison, or Jefferson—in their writings for education, for critical thinking, and for an understanding of its role.
They would not have used the word “fascist” at that point. They would have used the word “tyrant,” “king,” or “dictator.” There was a real understanding that knowledge and critical thinking were the antidotes to tyranny.
Mounk: It is interesting to think about the role that they believed well-educated citizens would play in the defense of the political system. I do not want to understate the extent of political division and polarization in the early American Republic, not just between the white majority and black Americans who were completely excluded from the political system, but also between the Founders, who quickly wearied of each other, formed factions, and began political battles with each other.
At the time, it would not have been controversial to say that part of the purpose of the forms of public education that were slowly spreading through the late 18th and 19th centuries was to give citizens civic virtues and an appreciation of the Constitution, as well as an appreciation of the fundamental values of that young state.
Today, it is interesting because that is historically one of the roles that schools were supposed to play. We are now so divided about many basic political values that any teaching about politics and civics can feel divisive. What do you think the role of public schools should be today in that respect? Is it just to give citizens the basics of reading and writing and so on, so that they can go on to have affluent lives, and hopefully sustain the American Republic? What role should civics and an induction into those civic values play in public education?
Weingarten: Let me see if I can unpack what is basically the question that those of us involved in education, particularly civics education, ask ourselves every single day. I started as a lawyer, but then I became an AP—an Advanced Placement government teacher—as well as a teacher of 11th- and 12th-grade Regents in New York State, which was basically American history. That is my academic area, separate and apart from law.
The first purpose of education was civic engagement, because if you do not have an educated electorate, how does the electorate make decisions about who to vote for? It was not cast as, I am on team A, you are on team B, and you just presumably are going to vote for team B because you are on team B and I am on team A.
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The Founders had their fair share of problems. But in the United States, until the Trump era or the MAGA era, over the course of modernity—from World War II to MAGA—the arc of the moral universe did actually bend toward justice. We saw growing freedom and a growing sense that more freedom and more opportunity, and thinking about all, not some, was a good civic virtue.
You saw that in the civil rights laws. You saw that in suffragists getting the vote. It was not without struggle, but that was the story of democracy and patriotism in America. That has changed with some people in America saying they would like to go back to a different time, a different era—an era that seemed more golden, even though it was far less embracing and inclusive.
That is the civic value that, until the MAGA era, Republicans and Democrats all agreed to. There was a sense of America. Whether you looked at George W. Bush, the Bushes, Reagan, or Johnson, in modernity until Project 2025 you saw both political parties there. They may have disagreed about what freedom was, but they believed that there should be greater and greater freedom.
We are in a different situation now because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. We are in a different situation because of the challenge to marriage equality. We are in a different situation because of the erasure of human rights. It is going to be hard to answer that question today about what we should or should not be doing. That is part of why I wrote this book. I wanted to expose this fracture, and in my judgment, the fascistic elements in it.
To answer your question directly: if you looked at the American curriculum throughout the country still today—in the 50 states and territories, because curriculum in the United States is not set by the national government but by state governments and local school boards—you would still see tremendous applause for what the Founders and framers did in the Constitution, and tremendous applause for the rule of law, the separation of powers, the three branches of government, and federalism. The problem is that it is so thin that people do not really understand what it means.
That is, in some ways, part of the fight right now in the federal system. What is Congress’s role? What is the president’s role? What is the judiciary’s role? If you ask a schoolteacher, a schoolteacher is going to say: yes, we have to teach civics. Yes, it does not matter if there is divisiveness here. Civics education and critical thinking will actually help us deal with this divisiveness, if we can create a safe and welcoming environment where people feel they can ask questions and where there can be context. We should be doing this.
The real dividing line is fascistic behavior. I do not call anybody a fascist in the book, for what I hope are obvious reasons. I did not want to get into no he is not, yes he is, no he is not. That was not my purpose in writing the book. My purpose was for people to see what fascistic behavior is. Fascistic behavior is an us versus them. Fascistic behavior is saying: Do not teach anything but math and science. Do not teach anything but English.
We have to be broader in education so that kids have engagement, have agency, and can critically think. That means not only do you teach the basics—the three branches of government—but you teach the context of it. You teach the struggle around it. You teach what it means.
Mounk: I agree with much of what you said. Let us focus on civics first and then move to a slightly broader question. On civics, it seems to me that at the high school level, but also at the university level, there are three challenges to teaching civics well.
The first comes from the right and has to do with not wanting to confront some of the injustices in American history and some of the imperfections of America today in an honest and straightforward way. That is certainly one part of it.
The second comes from competition from other things, from, we should all just be focusing on allowing people to make good money. You have that at the university level as well. At Johns Hopkins University, my university president wants all undergraduates to complete a democracy requirement, where they take some course during their undergraduate years that deals with major questions of a democratic system. Many faculty members oppose that because they do not see the importance of it and they feel like, for whatever other reasons, it is unnecessary.
The third concern I have is that often civics is taught in a predominantly negative way from the left. What you primarily learn about the Founding Fathers is that they were flawed people who were slaveholders and who did not live up to the moral imperatives of the time. You do not learn about the ways in which democracies like the United States, despite being imperfect, are in many ways superior to countries that lack the liberties that we take for granted.
You learn how to go and protest against things that you dislike, which is obviously an important part of our political system, and which is one of the things you should learn about. But if you skip the part where you learn about the logic of our political system and what democracy actually means, and what it historically achieved, and you go straight to, this is all unjust and here is how to protest, that feels like a significant mistake as well.
I sometimes feel that either there is no real civics, or there is civics that has a predominantly negative frame. This is true at the university level. For example, until very recently Harvard University did not have any course on the American Revolution, because nobody seemed to think that was something to celebrate and teach about.
I should also say, as a preamble to the whole conversation, that I went to public school in Germany rather than the United States, so it is hard for me to gauge exactly how something is taught. Obviously there are huge differences in how things are going to be taught in Oakland, California, or in the Upper West Side of Manhattan versus Topeka, Kansas. But I have to say that there is that concern about how civics is taught in schools as well. I wonder what you make of that.
Weingarten: I think all three of your analyses are right. I think all three are problematic. I will often get criticized by the left, but I get even more criticism from the right, as the right attempts to completely undermine and eviscerate public education.
I do think that the way in which the left too easily criticizes our institutions has created distrust in those institutions. Every institution we have in the United States, and frankly in the world, is flawed. Every institution can be better. But when you spend the time being so critical of it, and hoping that your impatience for making it better is heard more than the value of the institution, that is a problem.
I think all three things happen in terms of education in America. Let me just say that on the second issue—in K–12—what we saw from the year 2000 onward was what was called No Child Left Behind. The issues that mattered were English and math, and then science, which squeezed out civics.
Mounk: Help give me some context, both as somebody who myself arrived in the United States around 2007 and for some of the international listeners of the podcast, about this debate on No Child Left Behind. It was a policy introduced by the George W. Bush administration.
As far as I can tell, its purpose was laudable. It said that in many schools, there is a significant share of children who do not learn to read and write very well, who are failing at basic math. We want to make sure that we are not leaving those children behind, that we are not giving up on them, and that we create mechanisms of testing and accountability to ensure we prioritize those skills.
As somebody who, as the beginning of this conversation attests, deeply believes in the importance of civics, I also believe that if you cannot read and write, and you cannot do math, it is going to be hard to be actively involved in politics and to be a good citizen. So it seems logical to say that is the first thing. Explain what you thought was right in that policy, where it fell short, and why you see it critically.
Weingarten: What you need to take—and that is why I talk about Johnson in my book—is a step back to the 1950s, which is when America, through Brown v. Board of Education and several other Supreme Court decisions, really created the right to an equal and adequate education for all children in the United States.
The way in which Johnson did it through the civil rights laws was to match a civil right to equal educational opportunity with resources. What you saw in America at that point was a huge increase in test scores and an increase in the number of kids actually getting more education. All of a sudden, kids were out of the shadows—kids with disabilities, black and brown kids. Johnson talked about this, and I use the story in the book about how he taught in Texas, where kids would walk into schools without shoes. Like so many other teachers in K–12, he took money out of his own pocket to feed kids and help kids.
You started seeing a plateau in the 1990s. Clinton had some very good ideas in terms of Title I, which was the poverty program. But what then happened was impatience that there was still a gap between white kids and black and brown kids. It was not just a standards movement about what kids should know and be able to do to be on a trajectory toward college; there was also a sense that we had to create accountability. That sense was shared.
The issue became not so much No Child Left Behind itself, but the way in which it was implemented. There was a sense—and this gets to your question—that we had to have accountability for English and math. But we moved from the federal government thinking about civil rights writ large and looking at all the societal issues, including resources for schools, to simply looking at math and English, as if teachers alone could overcome all societal issues to make sure every single child did well on math and English tests.
What ended up happening in so many schools over so many years was that everything else got dispensed with. You would have double and triple periods of English. You would have tutorials. You would have all of that, as opposed to understanding how kids really learn and what they need around them to do that.
Mounk: What would the right mechanism for accountability look like? I am a university professor. I think that the majority of tenured colleagues I have work very hard, but there are some who do not. That is a problem, but it is not the end of the world, because if people publish a few fewer articles in political science, frankly, the world will go on.
In the case of teachers, it is a bigger problem. Even if most teachers who have tenure and the security of a job are working very hard for the kids and doing a very good job, if some teachers do not and those teachers teach a good number of kids, then those kids are being failed in a way that is really problematic. So I am not jumping to questions about job protection, but I am trying to understand what it is that this legislation was trying to do.
What do you think is the right way of approaching it? How can we make sure that kids are served, but also that teachers have some element of evaluation on job performance, so they have the incentive to keep going? Undoubtedly, humans are humans. Many are driven by duty and by the reasons that brought them into the profession. They are going to do a good job regardless. But there will always be a subsection of humans who are very responsive to those kinds of incentives.
How do we make sure that if a teacher is not living up to the job, and kids are doing much less well than other students at the same school in reading, writing, and math, we address that problem?
Weingarten: Okay, but those are two separate issues. What you are essentially saying is that the test scores of children are a really good indication of a teacher’s performance. That is completely not true. What we have seen is that it is completely not true.
That is different from asking, what is the right way to figure this out? So let me unpack that. Number one, teachers should be evaluated, and if somebody cannot teach, they should not be in teaching. What tenure should be in K–12 is really different from what tenure is in higher education. We represent more higher education personnel in America than any other union, and three quarters of higher education is taught by adjunct and contingent workers, not by tenured professors.
The issue of tenure is due process. We should make sure that people can teach. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about the fact that what would happen in a school district is that district A would be in the middle of the pack on state scores. A district like Scarsdale, which has fairly affluent parents, would be at the head of the pack. A district like New York City, which does not have affluent parents, or has them only in pockets, would be in the middle or below the pack.
What would end up happening is they would say, look at the test scores. The city schools are not doing well. Then New York City would respond, okay, we will have two or three periods a day of English for kids who are not doing very well, as opposed to asking, what do these kids need to know and be able to do? What engages them? How do we make sure kids have glasses so they can see the board? How do we make sure they are fed so they feel okay? How do you wrap services around them?
What ended up happening is that we were being measured by the same set of exams for every kid regardless of economic status because the test scores became the be-all and end-all, while extracurricular activities that kids come to school for were squeezed out. Social studies was squeezed out because it was not on the test.
Really good teachers would not go to low-income schools, because they did not want to be assessed on those results. It became the opposite of what you wanted. You want really good people to go to schools with the hardest-to-serve kids, but if you are being evaluated on test scores, you ask yourself, what am I doing? How am I doing that?
So all I am saying is that the incentives did not match what we were trying to do for kids. That is part of the reason everybody started hating testing—because the test score became more important than the learning, and the incentives were really off. We have to recognize that. All I was trying to do was answer your question of why civics was squeezed out of the curriculum: it was not tested.
Mounk: Right, and that is because of all of the testing. To me it seems absurd that a teacher in a low-income community, who is an incredible teacher and manages to pull students up—whose students are much better than those in the next classroom from a very similar background, but who happen to have a less effective teacher—somehow ends up evaluated as less good than a mediocre teacher in a very good school with very affluent parents.
Weingarten: What ended up happening was that between the algorithms and the way things were, this became part of No Child Left Behind 2.0, which was Race to the Top, Obama’s program. To his credit, President Obama’s policies turned test scores into the measure for rating teachers.
Everybody in communities hated it, particularly parents of special needs kids. At one point during his presidency, the president rolled a lot of it back and admitted they had been wrong. They had tried to reduce what is a really important human endeavor—you have written about this many times—to an algorithm and to a test score. None of that worked.
In some ways, that was the issue. To answer your question, we have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Yes, of course we have to evaluate teachers. And if somebody cannot do their job, they should not be there. My job is to help them.
Mounk: So how should they be evaluated? In what way do you think they should be evaluated? I take your point as a broader theoretical point that any metric is going to start misshaping an activity. Whenever you try to measure the success of an activity, it is in some way going to make people maximize the metric rather than the thing the metric is trying to measure. There will always be some distance between those two things.
You have to have multiple measures, and you have to have smart measures. But none of that is a reason not to have measures.
Weingarten: I’m not saying we shouldn’t have measures. I’m saying that high stakes testing as the be all and the end all, and reducing kids and teachers to an algorithm, didn’t work.
Mounk: I buy that. So what measures should we be applying? In schools where many kids are not reading and writing well and are struggling with math, what kind of metrics should we use to make sure that the best teachers are recognized?
Weingarten: One of the things we should be doing is taking smartphones out of the classroom. There are a number of measures in today’s evaluation systems. They include supervisor assessments and some proxies for how kids are doing.
The irony in the American teacher workforce is that we have a huge teacher shortage because we do not have the conditions in which teachers can operate successfully. There is a teacher shortage across the United States. The issue of teacher evaluation is no longer dominant because people have learned how to use multiple measures that seem fair and reasonable in determining whether a teacher is doing the job they should be doing, and whether a teacher is getting the conditions and support they need.
So this is not today’s question. Today’s questions about teachers are: do we have enough teachers? Are we paying them well enough? Do we have the conditions they need to thrive, including enough autonomy—and I am not talking about higher education right now—in the classroom to meet the needs of kids?
Mounk: Well, there is also the question of school performance. I teach at Johns Hopkins. In much of the public school system of Baltimore, very few students are reading at grade level, doing math at grade level, and a large portion of students are graduating functionally illiterate.
I have friends in New York, in Chicago, and other cities who have very strong political commitment to the idea of sending their kids to public schools and really wanted to do so from a middle-class background. But they looked into their local schools, and in one case less than 10% of the kids in a school in New York were reading at grade level and doing math at grade level. They decided, we can’t send our kids to a school where the vast majority of students are so far behind. That is not fair to our kids.
Weingarten: I run the most effective charter school in the city of New York. I ran the New York City union for years. This year, student test scores went up eight or nine points in English language literacy. In New York City, you have some fantastic schools.
Most of the schools are good to fantastic, and some schools are not so good. What we are seeing in New York City is that you need the resources for lowering class size. You need to wrap services around schools. In those schools that do that, many people send their kids to public schools. There are also many people who want to send their kids to private schools, and whatever they want to do, that is all right with them or with me.
The point is that when you do not have the resources in a school to meet the needs of all kids, you cannot expect teachers to be the ones who do everything. In New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and in Miami-Dade, if you look at these big systems, you see continuous improvement. You saw it before COVID, and you are seeing it again. Does it mean that there are no problems? Of course there are problems. These are big cities with many different problems. But in the school environment in many of these places, parents are saying their kids are in an environment where they can thrive. It is the teachers who are trying to do this all the time.
What I have seen in the last two or three years is that extremists from the right wing are constantly throwing obstacles at schools—book banning and other actions—instead of providing the resources that kids need for continuous improvement. I would also say that in the last two or three years we have been missing the role of social media, the role of attention, and the role of cell phones and devices.
At the end of the day, schools should not be focused on test scores. The first question is whether a school is a safe and welcoming environment for children and families. The second is whether we are creating an engaging and relevant curriculum so that kids feel agency. We should be measuring things differently. We should be doing much more project-based instruction and performance-based instruction. The real key for kids across America, regardless of socioeconomic status, is whether they are involved and engaged in their education or checked out.
In a post-COVID era, that is much more important for what we need to do for kids. The test score issue has been overrated and oversold in many ways. For example, a school in Baltimore that has wraparound services has seen test scores go up significantly because it is meeting the needs of all those kids.
Mounk: Well, what certainly seems true is that test scores are probably a very good indicator of whether things are roughly going right or roughly going wrong. Unless they’re terribly designed, if simple tests indicate that people are doing very well, then something must be going right at the school. If these tests show that kids are really falling behind, clearly something is going wrong.
Where I agree with you is that if the response from a superintendent is, let’s do test runs of these tests, let’s do practice exams all of the time, that is not going to fix the underlying problem. That may be the kind of behavior incentivized. I fully agree with that.
Since you mentioned smartphones, I’d be intrigued to hear what your experience and the experience of the many teachers you represent has been with smartphones in schools and in the classroom. Jonathan Haidt, friend of the podcast, has suggested that schools should ban those phones on campus. Do you favor that solution? Do you think that would make a big difference?
Weingarten: I favor both of his major solutions: the issue around play and the one around devices. The point he has made recently, which is not in Anxious Generation but in his more recent writings, is that Instagram, TikTok, and other social media platforms have created problems. I focused a lot on the bullying, the dystopian behavior, and the way Instagram made girls feel bad for so long. But what Jonathan has focused on, and I think is right, is the lack of attention.
What has happened is that kids opt out of being with each other, of seeing each other, of having conversations. We do not know each other. We have had an intense conversation for maybe an hour already, but we are talking based on facts we know and attitudes we know. We are applying facts. We are doing something that it would be my goal as a schoolteacher to create in an environment where every kid in my classroom could do the same thing. It requires attention to reading. It requires attention to detail. It requires critical thinking and problem solving.
That lack of attention—TikTok in 30 seconds, the fact that kids are reading less, the fact that America is reading less—all of this is a problem. His theory, which he explained in a book club for the AFT a couple of weeks ago, is that if you look at all the test scores that have recently come out, the top quarter are still doing well and everybody else has slid back. He said that since 2010, when touch phones became common, we started seeing the slide back in test scores. I find this both fascinating and terrifying, because how do you engage kids in relationships, in work, in being with each other as human beings? How do you engage kids in critical thinking and problem solving?
How do you do this? What is the engagement philosophy? What is the theory? How can we use classrooms to do that? I come up with two things. Number one, we have to do much more project-based instruction, like we do in CareerTechEd. Number two, we have to find a way to separate kids from their cell phones during school so they can spend more time in human endeavor as opposed to on their phones. That is why I agree with distraction-free schools—not just distraction-free classrooms, but distraction-free schools.
Mounk: That makes a lot of sense to me. I think it is sometimes overly tempting to explain everything by the rise of technology and by the rise of the Internet and social media. I found Jonathan’s arguments very persuasive, and he made them here on the podcast, but I was still holding judgment in reserve a little bit. I was struck by new data that came out about a month ago, according to which the personalities of young people had changed across America.
According to the data, young people are less extroverted and less conscientious than older Americans, but also less than younger Americans were 20 years ago. That is really striking—if young Americans are rating themselves as less capable of withstanding distraction, as less capable of carrying through on a plan, as less capable of being punctual. Those are very basic life skills that are needed to succeed in the workplace or to have functional human relationships.
Weingarten: But that’s why, Yascha, I’ve become a really big believer in project-based instruction, as opposed to a lecture-based environment where you’re following every single bit of a curriculum.
Mounk: CareerTech coursework is, for example, learning to be a welder or learning to be a car mechanic. Is it, broadly speaking, this kind of thing? It is a technical phrase that I have not come across that much.
Weingarten: It is working with both your hands and your head, but it is also the culinary trades. It is also the hospitality trades. It is also the healthcare trades. I want to make it broader than what you think of as your grandfather’s vocation.
What I have seen is that my teaching started at Clara Barton High School for Health Professions. It was a traditional vocational school, even though I taught AP Gov and I taught debate. This is the difference. This is what I have seen. This is why I have become a big believer in project-based instruction and experiential learning. I think that becomes the antidote for what we need to do in this whole discussion we have had.
When you ask, how do you evaluate? How do you teach? What do you do? What we are seeing is that in these CareerTechEd programs, 95% of kids graduate, 90 to 95% graduate on time, and 70% go to college. They become a promising pathway and create far more choices for kids. We have to get rid of the stigma. If you put passion and purpose together, kids start thinking about their own possibilities.
If you marry that with the study you just saw and a new Wall Street Journal poll that says kids no longer think they will do better than their parents, you see they are very pessimistic about the economy. Part of this is about what we do to break this logjam. Instead of having a trajectory that is dystopian and divisive—that guy is doing better than me, so I am going to pull that guy down instead of pull me up—what if we could create a whole set of choices within public schooling, different pathways within public schooling, and partnerships with industry within public schooling so that kids have internships everywhere along with AP Government debate, projects, and programs? High school could become a real incubator of fun, ideas, and critical thinking that leads to many avocations and occupations. The German and Swiss models do this better than the American model, because without tracking they give kids more opportunities. We need to give kids more agency from a younger level. That would change the trajectory of what we are talking about.
Mounk: Attention is a battle. You want to take away the devices that distract them during the course of a school day, but you also need to give them something that is able to hold their attention. When they feel like they are engaged in a meaningful project, that might be it.
Weingarten: Exactly right. In many meaningful projects you have to use devices, but it is not your personal device that you are addicted to—talking on TikTok or Instagram or texting with your friends.
Mounk: That’s a good point, but it does not have to be against digital devices. If you are learning skills and crafts, whether traditional manufacturing or hospitality, you are going to be using electric devices in those contexts too. But it is not scrolling TikTok under the desk while your teacher is trying to teach math.
One of the key arguments of your book is about the terms "fascist" and "fascistic," but that is not worth going into in detail for this conversation. The argument is that people who have demagogic or authoritarian ambitions fear schoolteachers and want to undermine public schools for that reason. I find that argument very plausible. It is plausible in general that the Trump administration chose to take the battle to institutions they considered hostile to their ideological views or simply to their electoral interests, whether universities, public health authorities, or many other institutions. So I am on your side on that point.
I also worry that many of us are tempted to dig in our heels and simply say, these are outrageous attacks, and therefore we will not look at our own flaws. Higher education has serious problems in the United States, both in what is taught and how it is taught, but also in tuition fees being incredibly high. Students, certainly at the more elite institutions, are forced to book a four-year holiday in a White Lotus resort in order to get access to a good education.
I do not think you need to pay for the most lavish gym in the world and an all-you-can-eat meal plan with three free meals a day in order to attend history lectures or your biology lab. Higher education is not serious enough about looking at some of those flaws. You could make similar arguments about public health and other areas.
When it comes to schools, what is the right balance between resisting attacks on the value of public education and also looking in the mirror to understand why trust in those institutions has eroded over time? There is, not just in MAGA land but more broadly, a share of Americans who have become deeply disenchanted with key institutions in society, including public high, middle, and elementary schools.
Weingarten: We should always be looking to strengthen ourselves. We should not be willing to settle for the cruelty of Trump or a broken status quo. I completely agree with you there. We should always be looking to do something where people believe a future is possible.
It is hard to break out of the status quo. But breaking out of the status quo is no longer given much credit in America. For example, years ago, to your point that you made at the beginning of the podcast, as the UFT we worked with our then-chancellor, and we turned around low-performing schools. We did a new contract for those schools. We turned around all the elementary schools that we worked on. Middle schools were harder, but we turned around the elementary schools.
Instead of giving credit for this, the new administration, the Bloomberg administration under Joel Klein, threw out the whole experiment instead of building on it, because it was not their experiment. Politically, we have to look at how to take things. I am not complaining about it, I am saying that you often see people basically saying, in with the new, out with the old, even if the old worked, because they want their own thing.
Part of democracy, or part of what we need to do to create trust in institutions, is that when something is working, you lift it up and it becomes a societal piece to lift it up, not just say, it is old. On CareerTechEd, there were years when it took three or four years to overcome a stigma that said, you are talking about stigmatizing kids again. No, I am not. I am talking about giving kids lots of opportunity. You have to constantly look at what is working, what is not working, and what you need to create possibility. That is what unions do—at least our union. We just started a national AI institute with our biggest union, the UFT, and with big tech companies. We are careful about who we are working with. Microsoft is our lead partner. But there are many who question it and wonder why we are doing this, since we do not yet have the AI regulation we need in this country. I kept saying, we have to meet the challenge. Teachers need to know. We cannot repeat what happened with social media. Teachers need to know what to do and have digital literacy.
We have to think about the possibilities. But the far right-wing is different from the left. They hate unions and they hate public education. They will always find something to demonize, because the point of my book is that we have to create power for regular folks. Public education does that. Instead of saying, this is how we improve it—George W. Bush, I may have disagreed with his way of doing it, but No Child Left Behind was his way of trying to improve things. Vouchers, which is what Betsy DeVos and others want to do, are not about improving public education, they are about dismantling it.
The key is how you work to recreate trust in society. You need a continuous improvement loop, so that when things do not work, you jettison them, but when things work, you find a way for society to lift them up. That was our first conversation about the Founders. They were flawed, but they created the United States of America. Pretty remarkable.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Randi discuss the impact of school closures during COVID, lessons learned, and why extracurricular activities in U.S. public schools are more ambitious than in Europe. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
