Vice President Kamala Harris focused her first campaign speech to educators on lifting up the teaching profession and attacking “extremist” conservative efforts to cut education funding and restrict teachers’ instruction in schools.
Harris was the keynote speaker at the American Federation of Teacher’s national convention here on July 25, just days after President Joe Biden announced he was abandoning his reelection bid and the vice president appeared to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination.
She waded into some of the culture war debates that have dominated education policymaking in many Republican-led states in recent years, but she mostly used the speech to rally a supportive audience rather than to introduce any new education policy proposals.
“While you teach students about our nation’s past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history, including book bans,” she said. “Book bans in this year of our Lord 2024. Just think about it. So we want to ban assault weapons and they want to ban books. Can you imagine?”
Harris described teachers as “visionaries” who “all do God’s work.”
“You see the potential of every child,” Harris said. “You foster it, you encourage it, and in so doing you shape the future of our nation, which is why I say we need you so desperately right now.”
She alluded to state laws that restrict teaching on sexual orientation and have “some young teachers in their 20s who are afraid to put up a photograph of themselves and their partner for fear they could lose their job.
“And what is their job? The most noble work of teaching other people’s children, and God knows we don’t pay you enough as it is,” she said.
The AFT, which is the second largest teachers’ union in the country, was the first union to endorse Harris for president, which the vice president noted Thursday. The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, announced its endorsement of Harris on July 24.
That one of Harris’ earliest speeches as a presidential candidate was to the AFT shows the potential political role teachers’ unions could play in rallying support for the Democrat’s campaign and getting out the vote.
She focused her address on Trump and “those who are really trying to take us backwards.”
She called Project 2025 “a plan to return America to a dark past.”
The Heritage Foundation-led conservative policy agenda, assembled by a number of Trump allies and former Trump administration officials but from which the former president has sought to distance himself, proposes eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and cutting federal funding for low-income schools and the Office of Head Start.
“Ours is a fight for the future, and ours is a fight for freedom,” Harris said.
“While you teach students about democracy and representative government, extremists attack the sacred freedom to vote,” she said. “While you try to create safe and welcoming places where our children can learn, extremists attack our freedom to live safe from gun violence. They have the nerve to tell teachers to strap on a gun in the classroom while they refuse to pass common-sense gun safety laws.”
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Harris’ address to the AFT. But it blasted an email immediately after the speech saying, “President Trump previously announced his plan to save American education. His vision will take back control from the Radical Left maniacs indoctrinating our children, and give our kids the high quality, pro-American education they deserve.”
In the days leading up to Harris’s speech at the AFT convention, speakers including Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and AFT President Randi Weingarten drummed up support for Harris and warned that a potential second term for Trump would be disastrous for education. Their warm-ups made for a raucous crowd of 3,500 union members, who cheered and chanted “Kamala” and “bring it on” throughout Harris’ speech.
In addition to touching on education policies, Harris called for protections for union members.
“When unions are strong America is strong,” she said.
Teachers at AFT convention want a public education defender
Throughout the AFT convention, teachers told Education Week they were excited about Harris and their union’s early endorsement of the vice president.
“What stood out to me the most was that she stood by workers like me as a teacher and that she was in support of passing legislation to make it easier for workers to unionize,” Otto Zequeira, a high school journalism teacher from Miami, said after Harris’ speech.
Other teachers said they were excited to hear a presidential candidate promote the value of the teaching profession.
“We are the blueprint for society,” said Teiyonike Irvin, a 4th-grade reading teacher from Houston. “If you don’t have educators, then how do you get the rest of the people in our communities, globally, rurally? You need educators, and the fact that [Harris] understands the power of AFT’s 1.8 million members speaks volumes.”
Teachers also said they would like to see Harris go further to fight school choice policies. Project 2025, for example, calls for federal support for such programs.
“She’s very pro-public education and pro-labor,” said Daniel Reinhart, a 7th and 8th grade science teacher from Toledo, Ohio. “I was enamored with her when she was running in the primary in 2020 so I’m over the moon to be able to see her.”
Other teachers said they would like to see Harris lift up the teaching profession, increase education funding, and scale back the role of standardized testing in school accountability, which is something Weingarten called for in her opening speech at the convention.
