Randi Weingarten on the State of America’s Public Schools

We have to be broader in education so that kids have engagement, have agency, can critically think, which means not only do you teach the basics, there are three branches of government, but you teach the context of it, you teach the struggle around it, you teach what it means. And now the good fight. with Yasha Monk. What is the role of public schools of public education in a functional democracy? Why are public schools under attack from parts of a political spectrum at the moment?

And are schools actually doing a good job? of educating young Americans? Are public school unions perhaps in part to blame for why many schools in the United States remained closed at the end of the Covid pandemic for far longer than schools in other countries around the world? Well, it would be hard to speak to somebody more interesting on these topics than Randy Weingarten. Randy has, for 17 years, been and remains the president of the American Federation of Teachers, AFT, one of the biggest unions of

public school teachers and other educational professionals in the United States. And she has a new book out called Why Fascists Fear Teachers, Public Education and the Future of Democracy. We talked about the purpose of public education. We also talked about why it is that many schools in big cities around the United States are not managing to get the students to great level in reading and writing and math and what can be done about that.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (58 minutes, 9,070 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.