The panel discusses the DeVos threat to public education and the #PublicSchoolProud campaign to counter the lies.
AFT President Randi Weingarten and Texas American Federation of Teachers President Louis Malfaro brought a national perspective to the threats facing public education and the labor movement at the conference’s morning town hall.
Malfaro, who has launched a #PublicSchoolProud campaign in his state, detailed the struggles facing educators and workers in anti-union “right to work” states like his own. He warned UFT members: “I want you to understand how what you have in New York is what people fought for and went to jail for — and it can be taken away.”
Malfaro said educators are the best emissaries of the #PublicSchoolProud message. “No one comes face to face with families as we do,” he said.
Weingarten said the expansion of the #PublicSchoolProud campaign nationwide was essential to get the facts out everywhere, even in parts of the country where Trump has strong support.
“What #PublicSchoolProud does is give people ammunition on the hope side,” she said. “It controverts the DeVos narrative that public schools are failing.”
UFT President Michael Mulgrew stressed that New York’s future is tied to that of the rest of the nation. “New York cannot be an island in this fight,” he said, “because soon they will amass so much around us that we will fail.”
Also joining the discussion was Trisha Arnold, the chapter leader at PS 204 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Arnold has made videos capturing what she called the “everyday miracles of public school classrooms” for an audience of “people who don’t get a chance to see” those miracles.
Staten Island Technical HS technology teacher Michael Van Buren brought his student, senior Lucy Primiano, who created a video in which her teachers speak about why they are proud of Staten Island Tech. “I was eager to share my love for my high school with everyone,” she said. The video she produced went viral on social media.
Weingarten said she has shown Primiano’s video to members in other AFT locals across the country. She described it as a “video of hope and passion and joy — the joy of teaching and of learning.”