Top News Stories
Weingarten boosts Obama at DNC
Sep 12, 2008 12:22 PM
Randi Weingarten, president of the UFT and AFT, has the attention of delegates at the Democratic National Convention.
Addressing the Democratic National Convention in Denver on Aug. 25, AFT/UFT President Randi Weingarten offered an education agenda she said could be secured with an Obama presidency.
Facing some 10,000 fired-up delegates and observers at Denver’s Pepsi Center, Weingarten affirmed that “access to an excellent education is a basic civil right,” but that “for the children who are denied the education they need to fulfill their God-given potential, it is a personal tragedy, and an inexcusable injustice.” She called denying children a quality education “an affront to American values and a threat to America’s role as an incubator of innovation. This must change.”
Weingarten, one of the few labor leaders and New York City delegates invited to speak at the convention, pledged that the AFT, the UFT’s national affiliate, was ready to work cooperatively for change. “Our No. 1 priority is, as it has always been, strengthening our public schools to better serve our students,” she said. “Let’s do what we do in our best schools in all of our schools. Barack Obama knows that teachers must be partners, not pawns in federal education policy. And federal education policy must be about a lot more than testing.”
Weingarten added that Obama and running mate Sen. Joe Biden “will champion and challenge the people entrusted with our children’s well-being. And we welcome it.”
Weingarten also took on Sen. John McCain in a Daily News op-ed column (Aug. 15), chastising him for “demonizing” teachers and for portraying unions as an obstruction to education reform. To close the achievement gap, she argued, administrators and policy makers need to work together with teachers and their unions.
In New York City, she wrote, the mayor and the chancellor, McCain’s “new best friends,” in fact worked with the UFT to make teacher pay more competitive, to create a peer assistance and review program to ensure that only well-qualified teachers stay in the classroom and to create a voluntary schoolwide bonus plan that fosters teacher empowerment and collaboration. The union also opened two charter schools of its own.
“So much for teachers and their unions being ‘obstacles,’” she wrote.
On The Huffington Post (July 16), Weingarten made the case for the need for a robust labor movement. She noted how “those who care about our economy, our disappearing middle class, the growing divide between rich and poor, and the conditions under which many children are being raised in our country today need to be reminded that when unions are strong, the country thrives. Barack Obama understands this. … (H)e understands that stability and opportunity for working families lie at the heart of what makes America great. But he also knows that we all need to be willing to innovate to meet the needs of a rapidly changing world.”
Obama, in accepting the party presidential nomination, recognized the need to work together, because “we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate and so many veterans to care for. Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend.”
Video and text of Weingarten’s remarks, her op-ed column and her blog posting, and much more election information and analysis are available online at the members-only “Election ’08” section of the UFT Web site, www.uft.org. Click on “Election ’08” on the home page and enter the information required.
