Why Fascists Fear Teachers

For a book ostensibly about fascists, Randi Weingarten’s work is missing a good definition of fascism. The author speaks, for example, about “anti-government fascists” (pp. 3, 14). She says fascism includes people who “want to shrink government as much as possible” (p. 17). But Weingarten can’t be correct on this. Fascism is a big-government philosophy. The Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini famously said in 1928: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” 

You can’t be an “anti-government extremist” (p. 14) and be a fascist. 

Churches, religion, and religious schools are institutions and beliefs that Weingarten argues that fascists want to support (pp. 23, 109–110). But fascism is a totalitarian political approach. Fascists distrust religious people because such people view their loyalty to God as higher than loyalty to the government and the national leader. Fascists also dislike churches because they are not part of the state. Fascists want any churches that exist to be puppets that are subordinate to the state. 

Fascist theoretician Giovani Gentile, for example, pointed out in 1929 (in Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, trans. and ed. A. James Gregor [Transaction Publishers, 2003]: 31) that according to fascist doctrine the state must not “divide its terrain” with “religious principles” that could interfere with the state’s “unconditional” authority in people’s minds. 

By quoting others, Weingarten suggests that you can’t really define fascism because it is in essence an irrational determination to do things Weingarten doesn’t like (p. 13). A full page (p. 18) in Weingarten’s book is devoted to quotations of people who call President Donald Trump a fascist. Yet she has the temerity to claim more than once that she is “not” engaging in “name-calling or labeling” (pp. 18–19). 

A definition of fascism, Weingarten says, will only be clear in the “rear-view mirror” (p. 14). National syndicalism (fascism before fascists adopted the name “fascism”) came into existence at the beginning of the twentieth century. How long does Weingarten want to look in the rear-view mirror? Weingarten is national president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). She is really saying: Don’t ask for a clear explanation; just accept that labelling critics of teachers unions as fascists is politically correct.

Weingarten claims that education is a “public good” (p. 10). But as Corey DeAngelis, John Pisciotta, Geoffrey Hodgson, Joseph Stiglitz, and others have pointed out, education is not a public good. DeAngelis writes (“Public Schooling Is Not a Public Good,” San Antonio Express News, May 19, 2018) that public goods are “those that cannot avoid the economic free-rider problem,” in which it is “impossible to exclude those who have not paid for a service.” Schools are able to exclude people from their campuses or websites when they want to. This, DeAngelis points out, is “precisely why” private schools can exist and do operate. 

As Stiglitz wrote in Economics of the Public Sector (1986, p. 308), education is not “a pure public good.” There is “no difficulty,” Stiglitz adds, in charging someone for schooling. He points out as well that literacy has “a large private return,” and even if government did not subsidize schooling, “almost all individuals” would learn basic skills such as reading. 

Government-run schools, Weinstein states, are a foundational part of the social contract (p. 10). She is wrong. The “social contract” is instead a way of looking at the origins and authority claims of government. According to this political concept, people who were living before the existence of governments turned over law enforcement to trustees (the government) to protect their rights. It doesn’t clarify anything for Weingarten to use the term “social contract” to mean expectations that many people have about government activity.

Throughout Weinstein’s book there are vignettes of labor union organizers who are as militant as Joe Hill but as compassionate as Mother Teresa. Yet it is well known that groups like labor unions are subject to sociologist Robert Michels’s “iron law of oligarchy.” Most unions are dictatorships, often with a semblance of democratic formalities. Weingarten, however, claims that teachers unions are “democratic” (pp. 21, 141). But labor reporter Mike Antonucci says (in “At Its Annual Convention, NEA Didn’t Practice What It Preaches about Democracy,” The 74, July 13, 2023) that, on the contrary, at a recent teachers union national convention, union officials “stage-managed every aspect of the proceedings.” 

The National Education Association describes its convention as “the world’s largest democratic, deliberative body.” But delegates are not allowed to amend the proposed budget. Members of the NEA who are not at the convention are not allowed to see which measures are accepted or rejected. At AFT conventions (as reported by Antonucci, “AFT Convention Seemed More Transparent Than NEA’s. But Looks Can Be Deceiving,” The 74, July 19, 2022), resolutions are tightly controlled and debate is pro forma.

Classical liberals do not say that private organizations have to be democratic and deliberative. But anyone—classical liberal or not—should frown on dissembling by Weingarten or others about what is actually going on.

Another misrepresentation concerns critical race theory (CRT). Weingarten correctly describes indoctrination of youth as trying to “compel” them to “embrace only certain ideas and certain people” (p. 32). Many conservatives and classical liberals contend that K–12 teaching all too often indoctrinates a captive audience of students in CRT. Weingarten contends conservatives have lied about the large-scale presence of CRT ideology in American schools (p. 7). But contrary to Weingarten, Zach Goldberg and Eric Kaufmann have shown (in School Choice Is Not Enough: The Impact of Critical Social Justice Ideology in American Education, Manhattan Institute, February 2023, p. 40) that “applied versions of CRT and radical gender theory” are “endemic” in American schools.

During the Covid-19 lockdowns, teachers unions in general and Weingarten in particular argued against reopening schools, even though it was safe to do so. Now she tells an entirely different story (p. 11). In reality, the teachers unions directly got the Biden administration to change the language of federal policy on reopening. The unions demanded expensive and unneeded physical and procedural changes in schools and tacked on a political wish list that had nothing to do with public health. When parents organized and asked for reopening, Weingarten calls this “the far-right’s ‘blame teachers’ strategy” (p. 22). To my mind, she is engaging in “labeling and name-calling,” not the reliance on “facts and critical thinking” (pp. 13, 18–19) she claims to stand for. 

Two of the most important issues in education policy are accountability and parental choice. Weingarten claims to support accountability (pp. 126–127). But the most effective accountability comes from tests that measure whether students have learned the material. So, what is Weingarten’s stance? She is utterly opposed to “high-stakes testing” and “data collection” on student achievement (pp. 11, 60, 135, 138). She applauds union locals that attack the use of testing and describes it as “cheapening” the efforts of school districts (p. 136). She heralds the teachers unions’ defeat of testing in Massachusetts (pp. 26–27). 

When it comes to student’s accountability for classroom misbehavior, Weingarten favors “restorative justice” (p. 136). But as critics Max Eden and Adam Andrzejewski put it (in “Make Department of Defense Schools Great Again,” Washington Examiner, July 19, 2024): Although “about half” of school districts in the United States have adopted this “lenient and critical race theory-derived” approach, in practice it “engenders disorder and violence.” 

As for school shootings, Weingarten favors citizen disarmament (pp. 85–88) rather than excluding extremely disruptive students, hardening schools, posting guards, or arming teachers. Gun-free schools, in truth, are not a place of safety but instead a magnet for murderous shooters. 

Parental choice comes basically in two forms: (1) opportunity scholarships and tax credits, and (2) charter schools. 

Weingarten endeavors to attack opportunity scholarships by using guilt by association. Such scholarships as a concept date to Thomas Paine in the 1700s and John Stuart Mill in the 1800s. As a practical approach they have been found in Vermont since the mid-1800s.

But Weingarten wants to connect such scholarships to the Massive Resistance to racial desegregation of schools in Virginia in the late 1950s (p. 107). She says that Virginia created these scholarships so that white students “could attend private segregation academies.” 

According to Weingarten, only segregationists in Virgina supported opportunity scholarships and that such support was part of the Massive Resistance movement. In fact, the scholarships were supported by moderates and business leaders who opposed Massive Resistance and accepted that integration was the law after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). 

Phillip W. Magness writes (in “Buchanan and the MacLean Controversy in Retrospect: 1.5 Years Later”) that the scholarship program was actually devised as “a flanking maneuver to finally break the hardline segregationist Massive Resisters’ school closure policy.” In fact, the leader of the Massive Resistance movement in the Virginia state government tried in vain to stop the scholarship system from coming to a vote “because he knew its adoption would make it impossible to hold the line any longer on the school closure policy.” 

The “most die-hard segregationists” came to oppose scholarships because they believed scholarships would diminish the popularity of the “elaborate system of enrollment caps and zoning regulations” engineered to block African American students from attending primarily white public schools.

Turning to charter schools, we find that Weinstein has strong misgivings. These are public schools with major exemptions from bureaucratic requirements. Weingarten contends that such schools “push a privatization mindset” and often don’t produce improved student achievement (p. 126). She attacks the changeover to charter schools in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (pp. 128–129). But test scores went up dramatically in all-charter New Orleans. In New York City, for example, charter schools have substantially higher test scores, on average, as Thomas Sowell notes in Charter Schools and Their Enemies (Basic Books, 2020, p. 113; see also Marcus A. Winters, New York City’s Charter Schools: What the Research Shows, Manhattan Institute, February 28, 2018), than do the city’s regular public schools.

Rather than Weingarten’s hymn of praise to teachers unions, I recommend Terry Moe’s Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools (2011). Elsewhere (in “Chicago Teachers’ Strike Hurts Our Kids,” CNN, September 11, 2012), Moe sums up the effect of teachers unions: Teachers unions have used their political power “to block or seriously weaken” school reform efforts: by “preventing the spread” of charter schools, “undermining true accountability” for schools and teachers, “resisting” performance pay, “protecting teacher tenure,” and “in countless ways” shoring up “a poorly performing status quo.” Moe’s Special Interest is an honest and accurate account, Weinstein’s is not. 

Americans “can’t prevent fascism,” Weinstein says, “if they don’t understand” fascism. She is right, but reading her book won’t help us.