Pres. of the American Federation of Teachers: Not Everyone Needs College

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, HOST: Now, as President Trump dismantles the Department of Education with billions of dollars in proposed cuts, our next guest says the struggling public school system could be pushed to the breaking point. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers wants to offer an alternative future for U.S. education, one that could prepare students for pathways besides college. She joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss her vision and the obstacles standing in the way.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Bianna, thanks. Randi Weingarten, thanks so much for joining us. Last week you wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, the title was, “Stop Trying to Make Everyone Go To College.” Why did you write this piece? Why are you proposing this now?

RANDI WEINGARTEN, PRESIDENT, AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS: What we’ve been seeing a lot of late, meaning for the last like five years, is that 40 percent of kids who graduate from high school don’t go to college. Now, there’s lots of reasons for it, but that’s a lot of kids, and that only 60 percent of those who go to college actually graduate within eight years. So, we’re doing a lot of things to make sure that college is a real pathway, but what we are saying is let’s open up the aperture and let’s have other pathways as well. Let’s have career pathways. That can lead to pre-apprenticeship programs, can lead to trade programs, cyber programs, healthcare programs. There’s 4 million healthcare jobs or will be in the next 10 years. And let’s start that in high school, not after high school. When kids have guidance counselors, when they have people that could actually help them. And what we’ve seen is that in the career tech ed programs that I’ve taught and others have taught, there’s a 95 percent graduation rate and a 70 percent rate of kids going to college. So, what we are saying, it’s let’s really make high school the gateway to college and career, to both and instead of just to college.

SREENIVASAN: So, why do you think it is that we have the type of matriculation rates and the type of college entrance that you’re talking about?

WEINGARTEN: Well, I think there’s a lot of reasons, and I think it’s part of the really false narrative that is going on right now that’s assaulting, you know, the — all this assault on universities, the assault on knowledge. I think what you’re seeing is that people don’t see the pathways. When you see a level that great, 40 percent, it means it’s not just about college being not affordable, it’s that they don’t see it, they don’t feel it, they don’t believe it, they don’t feel empowered, and we’re seeing this with boys — you know, significantly with boys right now, the disaffection, the disorientation, we’re seeing it in rural areas as well. But for me, seeing that data, we have to find a way to make sure we meet kids’ needs. And the last thing I’ll say is this. COVID really broke us all. And I think we have to find ways to make schools, K-12, engaging and relevant to kids. Since basically the late ’90s early 2000s, we’ve had an accountability system that’s been very focused on testing, not on experiential learning or — you know, or critical thinking or things like that. And I think what’s happened is during COVID, kids felt like, OK, we don’t have to go to school. And it is incumbent on us to make schools safe and welcoming and engaging and relevant to young people. And I think that what I’ve seen with the career tech ed programs that we have helped foster plus that others have done, is that it gets kids engaged. It creates critical thinking, problem solving, skills of resilience, practical skills. But most importantly, kids have fun and they feel confident and they feel agency.

SREENIVASAN: What kind of systemic changes would we need to try to scale that so it’s a standard path?

WEINGARTEN: I think one of the things we need is to change the accountability system so that performance-based assessments are going to be very valid, because the way you’re talking — when you’re talking about career tech ed, when you’re talking about pre-apprenticeship programs, when you’re talking about alignment to industry, performance-based, stackable credentials, micro credentials are really those that can show accountability very easily and very quickly. You know, when you know it, you do it in terms of hands-on learning. So, that’s one. But the second is, and you know this frankly as well as I do, schools and school districts have a hard time changing unless they get the permission structure to change. So, we also have to deal with the stigma that — you know, that this kind of work is really valid and important work. And if a kid chooses to go in the direction of, you know, a career path, you know, community college, doing an LPN program to a nurse program, for example, or advanced manufacturing, we have to, as American society think about that as just as important as a first step to other kinds of career paths. And so, I think that there’s an issue about stigma. There’s an issue about expense in terms of making sure that districts really align with colleges as well as with businesses, and then there’s an issue of accountability. I think it’s those three things.

SREENIVASAN: You know, I wonder, when you start looking at trying to totally change the infrastructure of American higher education, or not even higher education, just high school and middle school, what do the teachers have to be doing differently? How do they have to be thinking differently to try to create this kind of change where we have legitimate pathways, whether you want go into banking or whether you want to go into a trade?

WEINGARTEN: Teachers want this. They want to meet children’s needs. And what you see is you have a guidance infrastructure in a high school, not – we don’t have enough guidance counselors, we don’t have enough social workers – but at least you have an infrastructure there for kids who graduate from high school and have opted not to go to college. They have nowhere to turn. If we start this work, and, and we do dual enrollment with college all the time. We could do stackable credentials, we could do pre-apprentice programs in, in, in high school. Yeah. But this is what I’ve seen, this is the last point I’ll make. The same skills that you need for college are the skills that make you really effective in virtually any of these career paths. Obviously, literacy and numeracy, that’s obvious. But then critical thinking, problem solving, resilience, communication, collaboration. These are critical skills for any pathway.

SREENIVASAN: I wonder right now there is fairly reasonable bipartisan support for, you know, apprenticeships and implementing career and technical education and I’m thinking of Secretary of Educational Linda McMahon. She tweeted, apprenticeship programs are a pathway to successful career. So, if Republicans and Democrats can kind of agree on this, what’s slowing it down?

WEINGARTEN: Well, first off you can’t cut $330 billion from the student loan system and from the Pell Grant system, which could actually pave for some post-secondary opportunities. So, the administration has to decide that they actually want this more than a rhetorical tweet or statement. They have to invest in it. And so, we have to invest in the kind of career paths and the kind of laboratories and things like that, as well as giving students the opportunities so that they can go to a post-secondary, you know, apprenticeship program or even a post-secondary community college. We have to work with industry to actually have the jobs and the pre- apprenticeship programs and the internship programs, we have to do all of that.

SREENIVASAN: Since the president has taken office again, the administration’s taken several steps to dismantle the Department of Education, as you pointed out. And you know, we literally have an executive order to the secretary of education trying to tell her to prepare for the department’s closure. Can you help explain to our audience members what are some of the trickle-down effects if there is no Department of Education?

WEINGARTEN: So, there’s very practical effects, but let me first talk about the symbolic effects. We started — Johnson did, post-Brown versus Board of Education, the focus on opportunity through the Elementary and Secondary School Acts 60 years ago, the education function in the United States government was a way of saying post-World War II. This is about opportunity. This is about helping all our kids succeed. So, this is the first President who’s basically said, no, not, no, we’re not going to do it anymore. That’s crazy. In a world of that’s constantly changing, that’s constantly innovating, for us to out-compete China, we have to out-educate China. And so, that’s what the — that’s what the federal role in education does. So, the knock-on effects, the — if you get rid of the Department of Education, I mean, you and I could probably find a whole bunch of efficiencies that the department should do — could do and should do. But the evisceration is not efficiencies. And what I’m most concerned about, just like I’ve seen in this, you know, push on reconciliation to get rid of essentially every single bit of how we help young people finance going to college. That’s what they’re getting rid of. Every single bit of it. How — what happens when they get rid of $100 billion of education funding that goes to the states and local communities, like all of the Title One money. What happens if they block grant? Which is what their proposal is? What happens to the kids that get reading specialists right now because of Title One money? Twenty percent of the funding that goes to Mississippi comes from Title One. One out of every $7 that districts spend around America comes from the federal Department of Education. So, what I’m worried about is I’m worried about the withdrawal of a focus on opportunity for all. And the second thing I’m worried about is themoney. When you take one out of every $7 away from young people, who’s going to make it up? Tax increases in local communities, or if you don’t make it up, who are the kids that really get hurt? The same kids we’ve been talking about all day, the kids who are poor, kids who are disabled, kids who are trying to learn English. Kids are going to college, who — whose parents can’t afford it, kids who are getting this Perkins money, this career tech-ed money. That’s who’s hurt.

SREENIVASAN: Look, the supporters of the President might use your very statistics against you and say, look, if this system was not broken, why aren’t we graduating 100 percent of the kids from high school? Why aren’t they going on to college or whatever it is? Right, so —

WEINGARTEN: Well, that’s why — that’s why I’m focused on career tech-ed, because I see the statistics, and I see that 95 percent of the kids who are going to these career tech-ed programs are graduating from high school, graduating from high school on time, and 70 percent are going to college. So, what we’re trying to do is look at the things that work and actually say, why do they work? What’s going on? And once we see that they work, let’s do more of it. Not as an either or, but a both/and. And that requires resources.

SREENIVASAN: What’s wrong with the idea that the administration has to push these education dollars back out to the states, and considering the curriculum and so forth, is usually decided by the state and local communities on what kinds of curriculum a child reads or studies and how they do. Why not push the money closer to where the student is versus a centralized system?

WEINGARTEN: Ninety percent of the money in America that goes to education comes from state and local dollars. The issue here is that we want that money going to kids, not going to voucher systems and not going to other places.

SREENIVASAN: Why do you think the voucher system — I’m thinking specifically in Texas right now, Governor Abbott signed a significant new piece of legislation that is going to change Texas education for quite some time. Why do you think its picking up traction in places like Texas and Florida?

WEINGARTEN: Well, when you go to the voters, the voters reject it. The Texas legislature rejected it five times two years ago. And then, people, billionaires like Jeffrey Yass actually spent a lot of money to oust those legislators. And in fact, what is happening right now is rural legislators are really opposed to this. If you look at the statistic — if you look at polling results in Texas and other places, people do not want to defund their public schools. And in fact, if you look at the NAEP scores in places like Florida, the NAEP scores have tumbled in the aftermath of what we’ve seen as an increase in these voucher programs. I — you know, I am married to a rabbi. People want to go to religious schools. They have the right to do that. That is their right. That’s their American right. That’s their right personally and socially. I want the kids who go to public schools to have the resources that they need to have the opportunity to which they are entitled. And every time this question goes to voters, it’s voted down.

SREENIVASAN: Finally, a kind of a bigger idea, maybe a question is, in this era where artificial intelligence seems to be more readily available by the day, by the week to both students and teachers. How do you prepare teachers for this change that is inevitable, as inevitable as, I’d say calculators and the internet were?

WEINGARTEN: Well, you notice that with calculators and the internet, you still had teachers in classrooms. So we, my union, we’ve been working with Microsoft and others, Open AI, to actually help develop efficacy for teachers, to actually help develop fluency for teachers, both in terms of the use of AI as a tool, as well as the guardrails. We need to do so much more in terms of digital literacy, but at the end of the day it’s going to be teachers in classrooms ensuring that we’re meeting the needs of kids. We need to use these tools better. It’s a whole new generation of tools. Hopefully big tech will work with us on it. Some of them are, some of them are not. But at the end of the day, the key is how we help each and every youngster develop the confidence, the skills, the knowledge, so that she or he pursues their version of their American dream.

SREENIVASAN: Randi Weingarten; President of the American Federation of Teachers, thanks so much for your time.

WEINGARTEN: Thank you.