American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said Thursday on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time” that her union is going to court to stop the state laws banning teaching critical race theory.
Weingarten said, “When it comes to issues of American history, we teach about the founding and how great it was to actually break from Great Britain and have a democracy and how important the Constitution was, one of the first constitutional democracies. But it wasn’t a multiethnic democracy. The Founders basically were very focused on making sure that white men of certain ways had a vote. But this is what’s great about America and what we teach in history, that the arc of the moral universe has actually bent toward justice.”
She continued, “What I don’t get is that that’s a great story for Fox TV. That’s a great story for all Americans. And what’s happening now is that in this push to try to erase what has happened in our history, it is chilling teachers from teaching the fact that we did have slavery. It was uncomfortable. We need to get through it.”
Cuomo said, “So you see these bills, five states. Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas have bans on critical race theory, related topics as well. That’s the dangerous part because critical race theory as is is not really taught at the primary and secondary level. What is your fear of what these laws will do, and what is your remedy?”
Weingarten said, “It’s like a modern-day Scopes trial. It’s like the modern-day version of stopping us from teaching biology and evolution.”
She added, “The remedy is that number one, as a union, we have a legal defense fund that we’ve now put some more money in, and we’re going to fight to defend every one of our members who teach honest history. But the other remedy is this. We’re going to the courts. Like take the Texas law, it basically says —I don’t have the exact language — but it basically says that you can only teach slavery as if it was a deviation from the Founders. No, that’s completely the opposite of our professional responsibility and our standards that says we have to teach honest history. So in Texas, we’re going to go to the courts and say, well, can we or can’t we teach the Civil War? Can we or can’t we teach the Dred Scott decision, the 13th Amendment, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, Juneteenth, the new national holiday? So we’re going to do those things.”
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