Good morning, peeps, and welcome to wok F Daily with Meet your Girl Daniel Moody. Pre recording from the Home Long Island Bunker. Folks, I'm very excited for you to get into this latest episode of wok F with returning guests President of the American Federation of Teachers, Randy Weingarten.
And what Randy lays out in this episode is the reality of what took place in the elections earlier this month in November, where we saw tens of millions of dollars that Moms for Liberty and other right wing organizations put into school board races, city council, state legislatures all
to put up their right wing candidates. And what we saw from places like Kansas and Kentucky and Pennsylvania and Virginia, Wisconsin and others is that the voters when very clear about what it is that Republicans are trying to do, and when they pay attention, they don't win. Right Like this is the clear message is that it is not
that the Democrats and Progressives have a bad agenda. It's that the messaging needs to be very clear and very real, not only about what they are against, like you know, teaching history that is actually devoid of facts in truth banning books that are made for critical thought and empathy and compassion, but that it is incredibly important to actually talk about what you were for and what people need on top of what it is that extremists are trying
to rob them of their autonomy around. And so I think I think that this conversation with Randy provides a very clear pathway and framework for Democrats Big D to be able to ride into twenty twenty four with Look, folks, I can't say this enough, and I will continue to reiterate it through the next eleven and a half months, is that this is the last democratic election if Donald Trump becomes president of the United States, and it is not the opportunity to have a protest vote right because
I frankly understand that Joe Biden is a flawed candidate. I frankly understand that he is not everyone's first choice. But what you have to understand is that we are not voting for a person in this next election. We are voting for democracy, our liberty, and our freedom to be able to push back against a president, to push back against an administration, to push them to be better, and to actualize the dreams of our founding fathers.
Right.
And I say that with those flawed, enslaved holding motherfuckers, right. But you don't get the opportunity for pushback when you're living inside of an authoritarian dictatorship. Talk to people in China, right, they are thrown in jail with the quickness. They don't even learn about the uprising that happened in Tienemin Square. We know that, but that's not what is taught in
their curriculums. So understand that while our democracy is incredibly flawed and imperfect, that what we are voting for is the opportunity to still have a role in shaping this country to be the best that it can be. You don't get that opportunity if you decide to sit this one out or say well, I'm not going to support Jennis, because what you are going to support is your own enslavement.
So this conversation coming up next with Randy Winegarten lays out the blueprint of what parents, caregivers, teachers and administrators had happened in this last election and what it is that we need to be thinking about as we enter
into twenty twenty four. Folks, I am always grateful for the opportunity to be in conversation with the president of AFT, the American Federation of Teachers, Randy Winingarten, to talk about what I believe to be one of the most important professions on one that I had the opportunity to be
a part of for many years. Randy, we just finished closed out an important election cycle earlier this month where we saw many folks at for instance, Moms for Liberty and other Republican right wing groups had put up school board candidates, local state legislatures full of right wing extremists, ideology and an agenda. Talk to us about the wins that we have seen and what you think it's a bell weather for as we look to twenty twenty four.
Well, first, Danielle, thank you very much, and this is the you know, this is a week of showing gratitude and having thanks and frankly, I'm very thankful for the elections just happened at the beginning of November, because they do provide a data point that we had been seeing since frankly, the beginning of the school year twenty twenty two, twenty twenty one to twenty twenty two, actually twenty twenty two to twenty twenty three, and we saw some of
this in the November twenty twenty two elections, but we really saw it now in twenty twenty three, which was which is the parents want their kids to be okay. Yes, there's been a lot of anxiety because of the after effects of COVID, and frankly, during COVID went There's never been a time when schools were closed. I don't care if you're talking about you know, Florida schools closed for three months or six months, or you know a school in Chicago closed for more than that, or people being
there halftime or not having sports. There's never been this kind of disruptive influence in our society in any time that we know of, So of course kids are going to be affected by this. Parents want their kids to be okay, and parents want kids to have opportunity and like school and feel like school is safe and welcoming
and well rounded. That's what parents want. What has happened in the aftermath of COVID was the same forces who have always been against public schooling, who thought we should divert money to vouchers who don't like what's taught in public schools, who want a different kind of country than
a pluralistic, multicultural country that comes together. What they saw is they saw that that the anxiety around COVID, the anxiety around George Floyd's murder, all of that became a fertile ground for them to create division and hate and consternation in chaos. So you saw whether it was vaccines or mass or critical race theory, that noe knew what the word meant unless you went to law school or
book banning, or you know, the division about teachers. What you saw was what actually one of them told us, which was to get to universal vouchers, you had to create public school universal public school distrust. And they were doing it on a platform of huge anxiety. And that's what we had to actually understand that it was not about any of these particular issues. It was about how do we really get to what I said at first, make sure the kids are okay, safe, welcoming, well rounded curriculum.
So over the course of the last many months, there have been many of us we've been saying, don't ban books, give them out. Now, We're going to teach honest history, the good and the bad, And we have to really help our kids, be connected, be resilient, we relate to each other, and have schools that are fun and interesting
and safe and welcoming. And there are a lot of school board candidates that ran on a pro public education platform and on platforms like I just talked about, and they won by eighty to ninety percent of the time because people want kids to be okay. So it's not just the fight back, but it was also a sense of what should we be doing for the kids, the
ninety percent of kids who go to public schools. And I think what you saw is when local folk, because school boards are basically local terrain, when you had moms and dads running for election on a pro public education basis, even with all the money that Moms for Liberty as and even with all the hate that they spewed. The end of the day, look at Central Books, look at Loudon, look at Kansas, look at Cincinnati, look at Minnesota. And that's why we we were seeing this. But we said,
let's track it all. We track two hundred and fifty races, and eighty percent of the time the pro public education candidate one.
Do you think, Randy that then what we understand as Democrats is going to be something that is sustainable, which is that these local elections, your school board, your city council, your state legislatures. These are things that you have to be paying attention to because the radical right sees it as fertile ground for division.
Yes, I mean, I think it's I think that the you know, part of the dilemma for Democrats in the country is that people that that hope sells by trust in and with each other. That requires and you and I have had these conversations. It requires you talking to people. It requires activism on the ground, It requires building communities. That's not easy when somebody is yelling and screaming at you.
Yep.
But once you have that, it doesn't matter how much money you have. You can actually win these elections because hope beats fear if you have a message that's backed by real stuff. And I think that that and I think what so you had groups like Moms Rising and Red Wine and Blue and parents together and campaign for a shared future. Lots of new groups that were not around a few years ago either. But what happened was normally parents connect to schools through PTA or parent teachers
Associated parents associations. They felt very constrained because of how overtly political the right wing extremists had gotten with this. So these new groups started popping up and working together in a very loose coalition so that people saw they
weren't alone. So for democrats, democrats should pay attention to what just happened, because underlying what just happened is also what has happened in terms of reproductive rights, which is people are really gnawed at upset about somebody taking away their rights. Right. So a parent, I've heard moms say this to me often, I may decide, you know, I'm a grandma. I may decide this is not a book I'm comfortable with my grandkids reading. But I don't want
somebody else deciding that for my grandkids. And so what happened is when you ban hundreds of books, then what's happening is that somebody else is making that decision. I mean, frankly, the parents might you know, my grandkid's parents should make that decision. But what's happening is when you ban all these books, when you censor all this curriculum, then you are actually taking rights away from most parents. And that's
what people had seen. If you you know, there are processes in schools now, some you know, we need to strengthen school Some of the processes are too bureaucratic. Sometimes
people feel totally alienated from schools. I'm not saying that schools are a panacea right now, but there are processes that if you really don't want your kid to read XO, Y or Z, then they're not going to ultimately read at Y or Z. But you have to go through it, and you can't ban it for an entire school, or entire class, or entire district by pulling the book out
of the library. Yeah, so I do think. I do think you're right that dem should pay attention because it is a freedom to learn and a freedom to teach issue, just like reproductive freedom is a freedom issue, you know.
And I think too what you have done with AFT I think as well, is not just talk about the things that we need to be against. Right, we need to be against the book bands and against the attacks on LGBTQ kids and students and teachers trying to create safe space, but you're also developing a reimagining and a vision of what kids actually need. So I want to give you the opportunity to talk about that because I
think that that too. Talking about what kids need as opposed to what they're being robbed from is going to be a essential for us as Democrats being able to win in twenty twenty four.
Absolutely, and I think often so thank you for that. Just also say I think we whether we're teachers, I mean, journalists know this better than teachers do, or lawyers do or doctors do. We also have to talk in plain English. We have to talk in a way that people can understand. We have to remember what we learned as school teachers, which is it's not what said, it's what's heard. And you meet people where they are. So if the issues right now are look at you know, the New York
Times editorial last week. Learning loss is a thing. Loneliness is a thing, and we have to deal with it. It doesn't COVID was a thing. It's not, you know. And and what happens is that people feel like, oh my god, even though it's a thing. You know, somebody's gonna like the right wing often does, but it doesn't matter. Okay, let them smear. Let's deal with loneliness, Let's deal with learning loss. Let's deal with how we lure kids back to schools. Let's deal with things that help kids learn
critical thinking and application in an age of AI. Let's make sure kids really master literacy, you know by the time they're in third grade. Let's really rebuild the relationships and deal with mental health issues and as I said, loneliness and looking at each other as opposed to looking at our devices. So what we've done is we've said, these are real solutions. There are real solutions to these problems. And there's ways of creating strategically real programs across the country,
seating them, scaling them, sustaining them. And so I'll throw them out. We should be giving books out of lots of different titles instead of banning them. And we've given out nine million books in the last few years. We're on our tenth million, and we're on our last million. We want to get to ten million by July twenty twenty four. You can just come with me to any of these book fairs. We do the level of joy that you see with parents and kids about having a book.
Plus we also are helping teachers learn more have videos available to them just in time for the issues they may not understand about how to teach their kids reading like, if a kid in your class is dyslexic and you don't know how to deal with a dyslexic kid. We now have through something called Reading Universe, which is free to teachers how to work on that. But so I'm saying we're dealing with literacy, have community schools wrap services around.
Let's make sure we deal in just in time basis with issues around mental health, loneliness and things like that. And at the same time, we're working with parents to take on the social media company so profit does not replace student need as the mainstay of what they are doing. Take on the algorithms. And the last and the one that I'm most excited about is experiential learning. Most of us, we need kids to want to come to school and to get the opportunities of today and tomorrow, which means
the skills for today and tomorrow. That means learning by doing. That means experiential learning. That means what happens in career tech ED. And let me give you one stat which blows my mind. Kids in career tech ED programs, they graduate, ninety four percent of them graduate on time, seventy percent of them go to college. Think about advanced manufacturing culinary, health care, the jobs of today and tomorrow. This provides kids more opportunity, not less, and it builds that kind
of practical skill set. So let's start that in high school. So instead of testing, testing, testing, let's do performance bace work like that. And so we're not doing a whole laundry list of five thousand things. We're saying, we know, community schools, experiential learning, and really focusing on literacy. This will really help kids and families have the opportunities of today and tomorrow and address loneliness and learning loss.
I want to tap into loneliness for a minute, because you've brought it up, and we've seen headlines about loneliness in both adults and in students, and I want to give you an opportunity to talk about that as a serious emotional and mental health issue that we should be talking about on a regular basis, and parents and caregivers should be talking about on a regular basis with young people.
Right. Well, look, how how many more statistics do we need to show yes that kids are more likely to think about suicide today than they were twenty thirty, forty years ago. How many more Surgeon General reports do we need to say that mental health issues are real issues. How much more do we need? I mean, you know, if we know what can solve this, what are we waiting for? And so what you know? And these problems started before COVID, but COVID exacerbated them by kids not
being together as kids and not having again. It's you know, I'm always shocked when people don't think that there was going to be an effect of COVID by you know, the by people basically not relating to each other in person for whether it was months or a year or two, it was going to have an effect. And so if we know that, if we rebuild relationships and rebuild community and then also have a systemic approach so that we don't stigmatize help that's what community schools can do, then
we can address a bunch of loneliness issues proactively. But then at the same time, if we take on the social media companies, like you know several of the of the bills in Congress are trying to do, but have a campaign on a local level so parents don't feel alone, teachers don't feel alone. I often walk into a school and ask teachers and I would have my device with me and I would. I would look them in the eye and I would use my two fingers and I say,
are they looking at you? Are they at the device? Yes? And that would be a conversation. That's always a conversation starter, because what happens, Danielle, is the algorithm runs a kid's life, and these social media companies say, oh, no, you know there should be parental controls. Well, what happens at eleven o'clock at night when a parent may be sleeping. At one o'clock in the morning, when a parent is sleeping and a kid gets their device, like, what are you
going to do? You can't. So there are things that these companies can do. They can stop automatic scroll, they can stop notifications at a particular piece at point in time. I was in a classroom a few days ago where the teacher had a place for all the devices, you know, a very nice little storage place right at the entrance
of the classroom. There's a time out that way. But there are things we have to do to try to displace the algorithm from running a kid's life instead of the relational work of maturation, which is what kids need. And so that's a fight that we're having with the social media companies. And you know Europe has done this. California tried to do a new law and immediately the social media companies went in to stop that law. So we need federal intervention to make sure that they have
accountability and transparency. There should be I'll give you one more example. There should be like a hotline and from a social media company to a school. So if you see cyber bullying, it's going to eat up so many person hours in a school to figure out what it is. If you add a hotline to TikTok or to Meta and so one could track down the IP address from where the bullying.
Happened originated, yeah, y to stop it.
Quickly instead of taking the hours and hours of investigation that us mere mortals would have to do to deal with the algorithm. So these are the kinds of things that working together, we should be able to thwart because kids mental health should be more important than the profits that metigates or that TikTok gets.
I mean, I couldn't agree more. And I just think that the way in which your organization has been able to frame these issues is things that we need to fight against, but also things that we need to fight for is going to be the blueprint for how we move into this incredibly. I think consequential as not even the word of the upcoming election cycle. And so Randy, I'll lastly tell me give you one more Yeah, please.
Get me one more example before the moment we give kids agency and engagement in these kind of things where they see a future and they have those skills and they feel agency about it and engagement about it. It's a moment and we turn around America on democracy and pluralism too. So instead of kids feeling checked out or oh, there's nothing I can do about it, nobody's going to listen to me. These are the things like experiential learning,
like joining the fight on against social media companies. You know, these are the things that help give kids agency when they feel like in a community they can beat back loneliness because of the recommitting to a circle of friends or community circle whatnot. So that's that agency piece in terms of learning and life skills is so important, but it also will be important and foundational to democracy and to pluralism and their civic engagement.
One hundred percent. Please tell people how they can connect with AFT, how they can continue to get information joined campaigns, what can they do?
Great? So number one. If you're on threads, follow me at Ronda Winegarden. If you're on Twitter, follow me at our Winegarden. I haven't been able to figure out how to use my nickname as my real name on threads, but maybe one day I'll figure it out and or
follow us at AFT dot org. We have lots of our campaigns up there, and we are really trying to teachers and parents are the best allies kids have in terms of opportunity for the future, and we're trying to do more and more campaigns on the ground strengthening schools so every single public school is a place that parents want to send their kids, educators want to work. Most importantly, kids thrive, and so all of it is on AFT dot org.
Amazing Randy As always, thank you so much for the work that you do and for making the time for WOKF Always appreciate you.
Thank you m H.
That is it for me today, dear friends on woke a f as always power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.