Union leaders and Democratic officials attacked school choice at a recent AFT conference, even as many public districts post troubling test results and critics point out that those opposing vouchers often have personal ties to private education.
The American Federation of Teachers conference turned into a fresh round of criticism aimed at school choice and voucher plans. Randi Weingarten closed her remarks by yelling about the ‘trajectory of this nation,’ language critics say masks a push for more leftist indoctrination in government-run schools.
Speakers at the event doubled down on opposing programs that let parents pick alternatives to neighborhood schools. That opposition often comes from people who sent their own children to private schools or who attended private schools themselves.
Maryland Governor Wes Moore weighed in, calling President Trump’s nationwide school choice proposal a bad deal for public education. He framed the plan as a covert transfer of taxpayer dollars into private classrooms, arguing it undermines public schools.
“Buried inside that bill is a tax scheme that makes public funding … that takes public funding and steers it toward private schools,” Moore said. Both he and his children attended private schools. Moore even filmed an ad praising Maryland government-run schools from the campus of the elite private school his children attended.
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Meanwhile, city-level results tell a stark story about the condition of many government schools. In Baltimore, just 12.6 percent of students are proficient in math, and only 16 percent of eighth graders score proficient in reading, placing the district at the bottom nationally on standardized assessments.
Chicago’s union leadership echoed that resistance to parental choice, with CTU president Stacy Davis Gates voicing strong opposition to vouchers and similar measures. “And vouchers will destroy any mention of public schools,” Davis said, a declaration that came as Chicago grapples with low achievement rates.
Only 41 percent of Chicago Public School students are proficient in reading, and just 26 percent are proficient in math, according to recent measures. Those numbers underline why many parents are demanding more options, not less.
There was blunt language at the conference about what union leaders see as the threat of vouchers; elsewhere critics warn that vouchers threaten union power and centralized control. Opponents often acknowledge, if indirectly, that government-run systems have faltered in many places.
Private schools, advocates note, frequently produce better outcomes and do so at lower per-student costs in numerous studies and real-world comparisons. When families can choose, they tend to pick schools that deliver results, and that mobility can shrink the opportunity gap that entrenched systems often widen.
From a Republican perspective, expanding school choice is about returning authority to families and creating real accountability for results. Critics in the Democratic coalition resist that shift because it chips away at a base built around government-dominated education, and because better-performing schools reduce dependency on political promises tied to control of public schooling.
