The day after President Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the presidential race, Randi Weingarten, the longtime president of the 1.8-million-member American Federation of Teachers, rallied teachers around his handpicked successor: Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Vice President Harris has fought alongside Joe Biden to deliver historic accomplishments and create a better life for all Americans,” Weingarten said during her speech to AFT delegates in Houston, where the union is gathering for its biennial convention. “She has a record of fighting for us—fighting to lower the costs we pay, for reproductive rights, for worker empowerment, and to keep communities safe from gun violence.”
And she made her policy priorities for a potential Harris administration crystal clear—including a big shakeup to federal standardized testing requirements.
Weingarten’s remarks come on the heels of the AFT’s executive council’s Sunday decision to endorse Harris, which union delegates ratified shortly after the union president’s speech.
The National Education Association, the nation’s largest union, backed Biden but has yet to shift its endorsement to Harris in part because its staff is on strike.
The support from AFT leaders is one more indication that core bastions of Democratic Party support are coalescing behind the vice president. Others rumored to be leading contenders for the nomination, including Govs. Gavin Newsom of California, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, as well as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, quickly moved to back her following Biden’s endorsement. Whitmer announced she’s co-chairing Harris’ campaign.
Weingarten’s backing of the vice president shows how quickly the political landscape has shifted since Biden’s surprise Sunday announcement.
Up until now, Weingarten stood staunchly behind the president’s decision to remain in the race, despite a debate performance in June that called his mental acuity into question and prompted a wave of calls from within his own party for Biden to step aside.
Weingarten even went as far as to cheekily suggest on Facebook earlier this month that maybe “The New York Times should step aside for a younger, fitter, more coherent newspaper,” an apparent reference to the paper’s coverage of the party’s foundering faith in Biden’s ability to win.
In fact, Biden was scheduled to address the AFT this week, which Weingarten said may still happen. She also hinted at a potential “special guest,” which could indicate Harris may appear as well, either by video or in person.
It remains to be seen if rank-and-file union members will be able to make the pivot to Harris along with Weingarten. In her speech, the leader of the second-largest K-12 teachers’ union previewed what’s certain to be a top argument of the Harris campaign: that a second Trump term could be disastrous, including for K-12.
“Much is changing, but we know one thing already: Donald Trump is still Donald Trump,” Weingarten said. She specifically referenced the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which was written by Trump allies.
“Their plans for public education [are] draconian. Title I would go—swelling class sizes and eliminating paraprofessionals.” And she said Republicans would push for “limitless funding for private and religious schools, leading to the end of the separation of church and state and of public education as we know it. It’s a path to autocracy.”
To be sure, AFT and others sounded similarly dire predictions when former President Donald Trump took office in 2017. But Democrats and Republicans in Congress staved off his attempts to significantly slash Title I funding for schools with large populations of disadvantaged children and other key K-12 programs.
And the Trump administration’s biggest accomplishment on school choice was relatively modest: allowing families to use money saved in 529 accounts for K-12 private school tuition, not just college.
Weingarten also made it clear that she wants to see a potential Harris administration work to reimagine annual federal standardized testing requirements. That policy push could pit the union against its allies in the civil rights community.
“Experiential learning is a sea change in public education—and the federal accountability system needs to change with it,” Weingarten said. “No single test can measure what kids need to learn and be able to do to succeed in life. Projects, portfolios, and presentations tell us so much more. And they resonate with students. So it is well past time to end high-stakes testing as the basis of federal education law.”
Getting rid of those tests—or at least relaxing the annual requirements—is a perennial union priority that might finally gain steam, given Democrats’ embrace of teachers’ unions and Republicans’ calls for dramatically scaling back the federal government’s role in education.
The Every Student Succeeds Act, which passed in 2015, sought to rein in the federal role on just about every aspect of K-12 policy—from academic standards to fixing low-performing schools.
But, at the insistence of civil rights organizations and their champions in Congress, including ESSA architects Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., it kept in place the annual math and reading tests in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school that were at the heart of the federal accountability system created by the No Child Left Behind Act.
Weingarten spoke not just as a union leader, but as a key Democratic surrogate and consigliere. She was rumored as a potential education secretary for both Biden and the party’s 2016 nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, before she lost to Trump.
For years, she’s been a fixture in Republican stump speeches, particularly when she opposed requiring teachers to return to in-person classrooms at the height of the pandemic.
In fact, she referenced in her speech that Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, called her “‘the most dangerous person in the world.’”
“Why?” Weingarten asked. “Because I am your elected leader.”
Weingarten argued that unions, including AFT, are continuing to gather political strength, despite developments like the 2018 Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. AFSCME that unions could no longer collect so-called “agency” fees from employees who chose not to join the union but were still represented in collective bargaining.
In fact, she said, AFT has added 400,000 members since she took office as president in 2008, including 80,000 over the last two years alone. She specifically name-checked unionizing Fairfax County, Va. teachers, as well as airport grounds crew workers and health care workers.
“We’re still here,” she said. “In fact, we’re thriving. I guess that old saying is true—what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And, in our case, bigger.”
