During the Trump era, they launched a successful and widely admired national protest movement, RedforEd, to demand higher salaries and public school funding. A wave of teacher strikes in 2018 and 2019 drew widespread public support, including from parents whose lives were affected by strikes.
When the coronavirus swept the nation last year, teachers knew its power.
“You can’t say, ‘Well, half a bread in a pandemic is going to be good enough,'” Weingarten said. “Half bread is what teachers have been dealing with for most of their lives.”
Beginning in the fall, politics became an important indicator of the opening of schools in a county. Even today, support for Mr. Trump is associated with the on-site school. In democratic America, where unions are powerful, classrooms are often empty.
An international body of research now suggests that school transmission from Covid-19 can be mitigated effectively with precautions such as masks and social distance, especially where local virus rates are controlled. But with the emergence of dangerous new variants and a slow release of vaccines, teachers remain skeptical.
Mrs. Weingarten, 63, can you reassure them?
AFT represents some of the largest districts in cities that dominate educational policy, such as New York, Chicago and Washington. Another AFT site in San Francisco also reached an interim agreement on Sunday to establish health and safety guidelines for the reopening of schools.
Mrs. Weingarten was inspired to get involved in union activism when she was a teenager, when she saw her mother, a teacher, go on strike in Rockland County, a suburb north of New York City.
Her first job in organized work was as a lawyer for the New York AFT, the United Federation of Teachers. She led this union from 1998 to 2009, during a period of extraordinary conflict with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his difficult school principal, Joel Klein. The two men sought to expand the city’s autonomous schools, largely non-unionized, and use standardized student tests to assess teachers.