Last week’s American Federation of Teachers (AFT) convention was, effectively, a campaign rally for Vice President Kamala Harris. The labor union formally endorsed Harris last Tuesday, and it spent much of the week heaping praise on her while demonizing school choice and its champions.
The union did not spend the week talking about how to solve the devastating learning loss caused by the school closures it intentionally prolonged. It also did not meaningfully address fixing the chronic absenteeism crisis or the total breakdown of discipline that has led to many of its members being unsafe at work. Neither did Harris, who focused on student debt cancellation, gun control, and repeating a false narrative about Florida’s parental rights law.
If students were doing well, the AFT and Harris would want to shout it from the rooftops. But there is painfully little to brag about for government-run schooling. Four years since the Covid-19 lockdowns, and after $189.5 billion in federal relief funding for K-12 schools, students are still struggling.
The Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies exposed several big-city districts that wasted money on things like beach trips and DEI “reparations” while student learning suffered. A new study from the NWEA found that 8th graders are a full academic year behind in reading and math.
The union would rather push extremist politics than try to fix a problem it helped create. For a union that claims to care about #RealSolutions, it doesn’t seem to offer any — besides, of course, voting for Kamala Harris.
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