Vice President Kamala Harris is only days into her race as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president and is already stumping for teachers union support by backing their far-left political priorities.
In one of her first addresses after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race on Sunday, Harris spoke to the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union, to push gender ideology and critical race theory, back public-sector unions, and expand abortion access.
Harris’s speech came just days after the AFT and the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, threw their support behind the vice president. Both unions are powerful in Democratic politics, with both organizations spending millions of dollars backing far-left causes and candidates.
In her speech, the California Democrat claimed there are “extremists attack[ing] the sacred freedom to vote” while those same “extremists” are attempting to deny “freedom to live safe from gun violence.”
While not calling out any politician or party by name, the vice president erroneously claimed that the “extremists” are passing “don’t say gay laws,” which was the name given by left-wing activists to Florida’s education reforms that blocked discussion of gender transitions and other sexually explicit content for young children though allowed it later on in K-12 schooling.
Harris also praised AFT president Randi Weingarten, the controversial political power player who was behind many of the pandemic school lockdown policies and who agitated to continue them well after medical science showed there was no benefit to keeping kids out of the classroom.
“While kids were sitting at home for two years, losing out on their education and jeopardizing their future, Randi Weingarten was behind the scenes pushing to keep schools shut down. She is the antithesis of progress in education, instead working to destroy merit, dumb down standards, and hold children back from reaching their full potential,” Michele Exner, senior adviser for education advocacy group Parents Defending Education, said in a statement following Harris’s address. “It is an insult to parents to hear Vice President Kamala Harris praise someone who has built her career on working against parents and students. It was a gross display of politics taking precedence over the educational needs of students.”
Neither Harris nor Weingarten mentioned the controversial pandemic protocols that left many students far behind in their education.
However, Harris’s praise of Weingarten comes after years of activism on behalf of teachers unions and backing similar far-left proposals. In her speech, Harris noted her leadership of a White House task force aimed at helping unions.
In 2019, then-Sen. Harris broke with other Democrats in her state and backed a teachers union strike that opposed a Democratic-led effort to expand school choice in Los Angeles. Shortly thereafter, Harris jumped into the 2020 presidential primary, where part of her education plan was to increase teacher pay dramatically (to the tune of $13,500 on average), a major concession to the unions. The plan was advertised as the “largest federal investment in teacher pay in U.S. history.” The proposal would have cost an estimated $315 billion over 10 years and exponentially increased federal power over education.
In line with diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology, Harris also backed a $2.5 billion proposal to fund teaching preparation programs at historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, in order to make teachers more racially diverse.
Perhaps the most memorable moment from Harris during that primary regarding education was when she called then-candidate Joe Biden racist on the debate stage in 2019 for opposing school busing programs in the 1970s and 1980s.
While the Biden administration finalized Title IX rules earlier this year that changed the definition of sex to include claimed gender identities of students and staff, Harris promised in 2020 that, if elected president then, she would have expanded civil rights law in a similar way. Now, with a more likely shot at the presidency, Harris would be charged with defending Title IX in court. The rewrite from the Department of Education has already been blocked in at least 15 states and is expected to continue to be blocked by federal judges where challenges have been brought.
Harris has also backed proposals to make all two-year college programs “free,” and make any four-year program “free” for middle- and lower-income people, a plan that would cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. Similar to student loan transfer schemes from the Biden administration, making these programs free would effectively force taxpayers to foot the bill for those who attend college.
The student loan transfer schemes from the Biden administration have been blocked by courts. The first, a $400 billion plan to transfer debt to taxpayers, was struck down by the Supreme Court, while the second, a $156 billion scheme was recently blocked by a federal appeals court.
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Harris also backs universal pre-K schooling and a dramatic increase to the Head Start program. The Biden administration has already attempted to pass budgets that more than double Head Start funding, but the proposals were blocked by congressional Republicans.
Further back in her career, as district attorney in San Francisco, Harris focused on student truancy as she backed a policy allowing her to arrest parents whose children missed 10% of the school year without a valid excuse. Harris was widely criticized for backing the bill and exercising the power it granted, as mostly minority parents were being arrested. During her run for California attorney general, she backed the policy becoming state law, which it did.
