#RedforEd Arizona Teachers to Protest Trump Adminstration Education Policy at ALEC Meeting

PHOENIX, AZ - APRIL 26: Arizona teachers march toward the State Capitol as part of a rally
Ralph Freso/Getty Images
Michael Patrick Leahy

#RedforEd teachers plan to hold a protest against state legislators who are members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) at the organization’s annual States and Nation Policy Summit meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona, on Wednesday.

The focus of the protest will be the educational policies of the Trump administration as implemented by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the Charles Koch Foundation, and members of ALEC who support vouchers.

Though DeVos is not on the list of scheduled speakers for this week’s event, she was a featured speaker at ALEC’s 2017 annual meeting. #RedforEd organizers anticipate she will be in attendance on Wednesday and are referring to their demonstration there as the “ALEC/DeVos” protest.

In a tweet, Arizona Educators United (AEU), the local arm of the #RedforEd movement, outlined a plan of action leading up to Wednesday’s protest:

Breitbart News has not confirmed with the Department of Education or ALEC whether Secretary DeVos will be in attendance.

The protest marks yet another instance of the politicization of public school teachers by union leaders and organizers of the #RedforEd movement.

As Breitbart News reported in February:

A well-funded and subversive leftist movement of teachers in the United States threatens to tilt the political balance nationwide in the direction of Democrats across the country as Republicans barely hang on in key states that they need to hold for President Donald Trump to win re-election and for Republicans to have a shot at retaking the House and holding onto their Senate majority.

This teachers union effort, called #RedforEd, has its roots in the very same socialism that President Trump vowed in his 2019 State of the Union address to stop, and it began in its current form in early 2018 in a far-flung corner of the country before spreading nationally. Its stated goals–higher teacher pay and better education conditions–are overshadowed by a more malevolent political agenda: a leftist Democrat uprising designed to flip purple or red states to blue, using the might of a significant part of the education system as its lever.

The #RedforEd organizers at AEU are keen on ensuring that all the protesters are on the same page, so they conveniently emailed this set of talking points to help, a copy of which was obtained by Breitbart News:

More messaging for Wednesday’s #ALECisBehindIt Protest:

Vouchers subsidize private schools for the rich and others

Vouchers are an effort to privatize public schools

Vouchers = using taxpayer dollars to pay private school tuition

Tax credits leave public schools “educationally bankrupt”

Vouchers crumble the foundation of public schools

ALEC uses privatization as a way to reinforce class structure

ALEC uses privatization as a way to continually marginalize specific groups (people of color, LGBTQ+)

ALEC supports tax cuts that harm public school funding

ALEC reinforces the school to prison pipeline by underfunding public schools

ALEC reinforces fear of public schools by deeming them “unsafe” and offering vouchers

Last month, Marisol Garcia, the vice president of the Arizona Education Association, the statewide teachers’ union that has encouraged the #RedforEd movement in the state, made the organization’s partisan bias in the 2020 election apparent in this tweet:

Secretary DeVos argues that the attacks on her policies from the left are driven by “the education establishment and status quo.”

“I think it comes back to the fact that I’m challenging the education establishment and status quo and, you know, I know that the heads of the two main teachers’ unions, they know that I was effective … and they don’t like that,” DeVos said when asked why she draws such attention from left-wing protesters in an interview with The Washington Examiner published on Monday:

It’s certainly true that the Democratic Party is motivated by teachers’ unions and their political and financial clout. Teachers’ unions give more than $32 million in political donations, and the money almost exclusively goes to Democrats. Their lobbying is, in part, intended to keep the party opposed to the kind of school choice programs DeVos champions — which would be good for students but bad for unions — even though many Democratic voters actually support such reforms.

“I represent a threat,” DeVos said.

She continued: “I continue to call them out on dismal results, poor performance for kids, and — and really, you know, selling a lot of kids short, and protecting the system that actually facilitates that, is really not a happy thing for them.”

A left-wing group known as UnKoch My Campus is working with #RedforEd activists to coordinate Wednesday’s protest.

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.