Keynote: The State of Public Education 2025

Join AFT President Randi Weingarten and Share My Lesson for an important update on the state of public education in this special keynote session for the 2025 Virtual Conference! This is proving to be a challenging year, to say the least, for early childhood educators, preK-12 teachers, paraprofessionals and school-related personnel, specialized instructional support personnel, and higher education faculty and staff. 

Hear directly from President Weingarten on the issues that matter most and our work to support students, educators, families and communities. This year’s session will include a focus on the AFT's Protect Our Kids campaign to fight for public education and what our students of all ages need. She will also share updates on the AFT’s Real Solutions for Kids and Communities campaign and the expanding Reading Opens the World initiative. Weingarten will also delve into critical topics like creating safe, welcoming spaces that focus on healing from trauma and restoring well-being, the role of artificial intelligence in education, addressing teacher burnout, and bridging divides to create community. Don’t miss this important keynote session.

This webinar is part of Share My Lesson's 2025 Virtual Conference! View all sessions here.

Full Transcript

Hi everyone. Welcome. Welcome to day two of our Share My Lesson virtual conference. My name is Kelly Booz, and I'm the proud director of our AFT's Share My Lesson website. I get the distinct honor of kicking off our keynote tonight to speak with our President, AFT President Randi Weingarten, on the state of public education. We've got a lot to talk about.

Before I turn this over to her, I want to say thank you to Equip HQ, our sponsor for today's virtual conference. And I'm going to show a quick video from our sponsor.

(Video Start)Today's webinars are brought to you by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the creators of the EQUIP HQ online platform. Equip HQ is a free online resource that fosters intellectual property understanding and age-appropriate levels. Included are activities supporting invention education, project-based learning, and cross-curricular standards-aligned content shared through stories of inventors. That's Equip HQ. With EQUIP HQ from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, students learn that ideas don't have to be world-changing to be useful.(Video End)

OK. Thank you again to Equip HQ. I don't want to take any time because I want to say we've got Randi Weingarten, and there's nothing happening in the state of public education these days. I also want to say that she has a hard stop tonight at 6:45 PM. So we'll be ending a little bit early, but I've gotten plenty of other resources to share towards the end. Don't worry, if you're here, you will get that professional development credit.

So Randi, I can't believe we're here for yet another virtual conference on the state of public education. I feel like every year we have this conversation, and there's just a lot more and more to talk about, particularly this year. So I'm going to turn it over to you.

Randi Weingarten:Well, thank you, Kelly. And as all of you... Can you hear me now? Andy, can you hear me? I just want to make sure that everybody hears. OK, fantastic. Thank you all of you.

I look forward to, in these really dog days of March, doing these kind of conversations with this week that we have, which is Share My Lesson. This is one of our weeks of professional development. Another of our weeks is in July. I think we gave people a lot of hope by saying, no, we're going to keep our big conference in July, the TEACH conference, because people are scared. Good. I'm glad. Look at that TEACH Conference poster is right up there as I'm talking.

Thank you, Kelly. But this year is a little different. Normally, I'd start by shining a light on what you're all doing and where we are going, musing about some possibilities, and trying to really lift up what you do every single day, which is making your classrooms safe and welcoming places and preparing students to succeed and to thrive. If I started like that, you'd all think I was crazy because all of this has gotten harder and harder and more uncertain and more chaotic.

So I have to address what would normally be a political piece of work. But I gotta address the elephant in the room. I say that because we all try, in terms of the work we do on Share My Lesson, to be as apolitical as we possibly can be in moments that have been very political, but we really try. But I got to address the elephant in the room because the attempt to eliminate the federal role in education and either eliminate everything the Department of Education does, or block grant major pieces of education funding, or parcel it off to the other agencies and use the remainder to pay for tax cuts for the rich, or frankly, all of the above—I'm not sure that any of us know exactly which way Linda McMahon and Donald Trump are going with any of this, or Elon Musk—but this attempt of eliminating this federal role is just wrong.

As you can imagine, we're fighting it. Not because the Department of Education is a perfect agency. It isn't. (I'm just waiting for the ambulance to go by.) The testing that we all have succumbed under should be deemphasized. Paperwork should be eliminated. I'm sure like any other entity, it could be a whole lot more efficient, as anyone who's waited hours to get a student loan phone call answered knows.

But this administration, it's not trying to be more efficient. It's trying to eviscerate the federal role in education. Eviscerating that role means getting rid of opportunity for all in America because equalizing opportunity was the purpose of the Department of Education and the purpose of every piece of education statute—Sorry, I'm so mad about this—every piece of education statute that we've had since Lyndon Johnson was president of the United States, frankly, I would argue since the GI Bill after World War 2.

So the AFT, our members, we're fighting back. You'll hear me say a lot of C words today: in the courts, the court of public opinion, and of course, the Congress.

So first things first.Number one, I am a social studies teacher. First, President Trump can't close the Department of Education. Only Congress can do that. But his administration can create this death by 1,000 cuts. They can create chaos. They can sow confusion. They can sow distrust. They can create conditions across states that are fundamentally unequal. That is the point. That's what they're doing. Think of the irony of signing an illegal executive order to get rid of the federal role in education while surrounded by kids.

Second, the president says he wants to send education, and I quote, "back to the states." But states and local governments already have full control over curriculum and standards and teacher certification and licensure and graduation requirements and most other decisions affecting public schools. Think about all the stuff that happened regarding curriculum and book banning, and all the things that we have to go to local school boards and local state education departments for.

Third, the Education Department, the federal one, enforces civil rights laws that protect students from discrimination based on sex, race, disability, religion, and national origin. That's part of their job.

Fourth, and to me, frankly, the most important, is the potential loss of $100 billion in direct services to young people. Funds that support 7.5 million students with disabilities, roughly 15% of the students in America, students with special education services and specialized teachers and therapists.

Two, Title 1, which benefits 26 million kids living in poverty in 63% of America's public schools through the supports that you all know: lower class size, additional instruction in reading and math, summer school, after school, preschool, mental health programs.

Third, the department invests in career and technical education programs—the things that I've been talking about for a long time—for 12 million students across 50 states to help them master the skills and knowledge needed in this rapidly changing economy.

Federal support puts higher education in reach for 10 million students from working-class families through the need-based Pell Grants or subsidized loans. While talking about subsidized loans, we're talking about the student loan system. We're in court on that right now. No one can get information on the status of their student loans right now. That's hurting 45 million people.

So all you math teachers, start adding up all the kids and all the people that this is hurting. Seven and a half million kids with disabilities, 26 million kids in poverty, 12 million kids who will get CTE, 10 million kids who get Pell grants, 45 million kids or young adults or maybe not so young adults who have student loans.

And get this: President Trump has declared English the official language of the United States, but the administration has fired all but one staffer in the Education Department's Office of English Language Acquisition, which supports schools to help more than 5 million students learning English.

When you add all that up—and then there's all the grants for rural schools, the grants for Community Schools, the grants for charters, the grants for teacher programs, teacher diversity programs, all sorts of other programs—when you add all of that up, one out of every $9 that is spent on education in America comes from this federal funding.

This loss of this funding will be felt by kids in every zip code in America, and especially in the states that rely most heavily on federal K-12 aid. Take Mississippi. It gets 23.3% of its funding for local K-12 schools from federal sources. Then there's South Dakota and Montana and Arkansas and North Carolina and Kentucky and Arizona, Oklahoma and Tennessee, all of which get about 20% of their school funding from the federal government.

My state, New York, in contrast, gets just about 7.2% of school funding from the federal government. Let me be clear: we don't want one cent of that cut, that direct funding that goes to kids. But you get my point. Frankly, I've never met a teacher, a parent, or a student that's thought that public schools should have fewer resources. But this is what is happening. This is why I'm trying to, and I've been trying to, and our union has been trying to put a face on all of this.

Struggling readers will lose reading specialists and tutors. Students will lose counselors and social workers and behavioral specialists. Occupational therapy for students whose families can't otherwise afford it. Class sizes will skyrocket. Teacher and school staff layoffs and heavier workloads for those who remain. What's the result? Kids shortchanged. It feels to me if these cuts go through, every single support staff personnel in America will be fired.

Now, you may have heard the new secretary, Linda McMahon, say that they want to shift federal funding into a no-strings-attached block grant that would no longer target the services students needed—sorry, the students who need them most. What do I mean by that? Even though she said, "Oh no, no, no, they don't mean it for IDEA"—she said that on CNN. "They mean it for Title 1"—I think she also said that on CNN.

But this is what it means: You take funds that are directed to children in schools right now, and you say, "No, we're giving them to Ron DeSantis. We're giving them to Kathy Hochul. We're giving them to the state." And the state decides where it goes. What do we think is going to happen? We know already from DeSantis and from other governors who have said it: they're going to give it to vouchers for private schools. The kids in need are not going to get it.

So what is going to happen? There's an irony because you hear this all the time: using NAEP scores as a pretext to abolish the Department of Education. NAEP scores... This funding helps get kids across the finish line. There's so much more I can say, but you get my point.

So much about efficiency, so much about trying to make things better. Block grants—I'm sorry, I'm so upset about this—block grants that go to voucher schools that would be taken from the 90% of kids that go to public schools right now to go to kids whose parents already send them to private schools. Tax cuts for Elon Musk, taking all this money away from kids to give it to wealthy Americans. Then on top of it, to get rid of the food supports and the Medicaid supports and all of the other supports that we have for kids, to basically erase the 21st century and get rid of everything that we've done to try to make things fairer.

That's what's going on, my friends. When somebody says, as Linda McMahon did, that I'm off the rails, I'm crying out as far and as hard and as loud as I can. Because if we lose this, what happens? What happens to our kids? We don't get enough funding. You don't get enough funding. That's why we're making this fight. We need you in that fight because Americans need to know the impact of this attack on our students, education, their services, and their rights. You're the most amazing messengers because you see the importance of your work on young people and their families.

As I said, we're fighting in the courts and the courts of public opinion. That's why on March 4th we had a Protect Our Kids Day of Action across the country, before all of this was seen in full relief. In 2,000 places, people acted on the same day. Educators, parents, students, AFT members, community partners all across the country highlighting the impact of the cuts and talking about what we need to have the great public schools our students need and deserve.

Then we're fighting in the courts. Just this week, we won a preliminary injunction preventing federal agencies from handing private data to Elon Musk's DOGE. We're challenging the Trump administration's improper cancellation of $400 million in research grants to Columbia University, forcing it to surrender its independence—that we just did today or yesterday, I think. We also filed a lawsuit against this whole dismantling of the Department of Education. Yes, that was just this week. Those three things happened.

The issue around privacy—this is an issue around IRS data, around Social Security data, around data for student loans, and around data for financial aid. Any of us who have filed any of this, we filed them for very specific purposes. But what has happened is that Elon Musk's DOGE has come into these departments and has taken this data, basically, and feeding it into AI. We basically ran into court to say, "No, you can't do that. That's not... we didn't give the federal government permission to invade privacy." We've gotten that preliminary injunction at the Education Department, and we've also gotten a preliminary injunction for Social Security as well.

We've been busy, but we need your help. We need to be at school board meetings. We need to contact members of Congress. We need to ask the question: What's going to happen if students lose Title 1 and IDEA or other vital supports? Will our kids lose the services they're benefiting from now, or will the community have to raise their own personal property taxes to continue them? We need you.

The people who are with us are the people in the United States of America. Polling is showing—I love the polling from Fox. They're like, "Well, the thing that people really hate is abolishing the Department of Education." Polling is showing that a majority of voters, regardless of party, support public education. They don't want the US Department of Education abolished. They want to increase federal funding for public schools. Even the reddest of red states opposed school vouchers in the last election.

We have to mobilize across party lines. We have to mobilize the pro-public school majority to show up for our kids and the great public schools they deserve. That's what, frankly, we've been fighting. And frankly, even if we got a win here, it would just be to keep what we have.

None of us went into teaching and to learning and schooling and doing this work just for the status quo. We want to strengthen public schools. We need to have more resources. You need to have more autonomy. I want to take the remaining few minutes just to talk about and throw out some ideas. I want to throw out four words about... these words I've been thinking about a lot. I've been thinking a lot about how we strengthen our schools, how we don't just protect our kids, but help them thrive. These are the words I want to throw out and have you consider: safe and welcoming, relevant and engaging.

How do we ensure that every school is safe and welcoming and every student sees schooling as relevant and engaging? Why am I thinking about this? Look, I've been involved in this for a long time—40 years as a teacher, a Union Leader. Many of you kind of ask the same questions. How many crises? How many metal chip bullets? How many new technologies have we seen come and go? How many education renaissances have been promised? They say if only we work harder. If only we had that magic curriculum, that magic technology. People would come in for two hours, give us a whole spiel, and then they'd be gone.

When there's no miracle, then the blame and shame. Enough of the reform du jour. Enough of the fads and the finger-pointing. That's why I'm thinking about these four words. There are a few fundamentals necessary to truly strengthen and transform schooling. The first is schools must be safe and welcoming environments where kids feel secure, supported, and accepted. I know we have a lot of work to do here. Loneliness, anxiety, and depression affect our kids. So does gun violence that has shattered the sense of security our students and staff should have in school.

Then there's all the issues that ICE has brought up and raised: students' immigration status, also how our kids identify, and any other numbers of factors. Then there's increasing concerns about boys. Boys overall get disciplined more. They're less likely to graduate school on time. By the time boys are 15, they're more than twice as likely than girls to express sentiments that school's a waste of time. Of course, we're still dealing with the long tail of COVID. School staff, many of you, you do everything you empower to address all of this, too often with too few resources and too little support.

That's why we have tried to be intentional about how we help create this. What are the policies, the practices that are needed? Intentional about wrapping services around schools and intentional about fighting distractions like cell phones. Why are wrap-around services so important to schools? There are 74 million children in the United States; 11 million of them live in poverty. Children in low-income families will be disproportionately hurt by the cuts being made to education and by the other cuts that I talked about: cuts to housing, healthcare, and access to food. How do we deal with all this?

Even if we didn't have cuts, how do we help create opportunity? How do we help level the playing field? Wrap-around services like those offered in Community Schools mitigate the effects of poverty that can have such a devastating effect on kids' education and well-being. We also see an impact in greater school and family engagement, in increased attendance, and improved graduation rates when we wrap services around schools and when schools become centers of community.

Let me give you two quick examples. Northeast High School in Austin faced closure due to low enrollment, and they had about a 50% graduation rate. After turning their school into a Community School where they added a more challenging curriculum, a mobile health clinic, parenting classes, and a deep alignment to the local Community College, a dramatic turnaround started. NE is now graduating 85% of its students, and enrollment has more than doubled.

I can't do a speech without talking about my hometown. In my hometown in New York City, there are more than 400 Community Schools. A Rand Corporation study found higher attendance and increased graduation rates compared to other New York City schools. At middle and elementary schools, discipline incidents are down, and elementary and middle school math achievement went up. For any of you considering calling on policymakers, talk about Community Schools in your district. Talk about the kind of things that we can do instead of the cuts that they are making. These are really smart investments. Research shows that they produce an average—get this—of $7 to $15 return on investment for every $1 spent. Seven to $15 return on investment for every $1 spent. That's number one. I could go on and on in terms of cell phones and so many other things.

But the second fundamental is that we have to make sure kids want to go to school, that schools are relevant and engaging schools. Look, we all want school to be interesting. Shouldn't there be play and fun in school every day as opposed to testing, testing, testing, testing? That's why I have been on and on and on and on and on and over and over again—if this is the first time you've heard me talk about it, I would be really surprised—experiential learning. It's so important. Learning by doing, like the third graders in Washington, DC who role-play that they are officials addressing real issues affecting their city, or chemistry students in Cincinnati.

Yeah, there's a lot of support for this stuff. Chemistry students in Cincinnati who get out of an escape room—their classroom—by solving puzzles that embed the content they just learned. How many of us want to teach like this? Career and Tech Ed is experiential learning at its best. It prepares students not only for traditional trades but also for careers in healthcare, in info technology, and skilled manufacturing, advanced manufacturing, and other in-demand, well-paying jobs in the future, including culinary, including so many other things, cyber. It's a way of aligning the workforce, good jobs, and schooling together, and it makes schooling relevant to kids.

Let me tell you about this great district in Ohio: New Lexington, OH. It's a small district in Ohio. The school system partners with a local healthcare system to work with high school phlebotomy students. After students study anatomy and practice on a phlebotomy training arm at school, they work side-by-side with the hospital and with the phlebotomist in the hospital to complete the required number of—get this—successful sticks on live people for their certification.

The district also has a 120-acre school farm. Students breed and take care of pigs and sheep and goats and turkeys and chickens. Students enter a lottery to take one of the farm animals to the County Fair. Students commit to taking care of the animal, its stall, and its training while it resides on the farm. Then they're able to show it off at the fair, where they sell their animals and they can keep their proceeds. Since the district added these career pathways, the graduation rate in New Lex has gone from 78% in 2018 to 92% in 2023. When you go to New Lex, the kids will just... they don't want to stop talking about what these programs are and what they've learned. It's not just the high school kids.

As early as third grade, kids in New Lex are learning to weld. Yes, they're learning how to use heat to join pieces of metal together, but what else are they learning? Safety, responsibility, troubleshooting, how to communicate, plus math and science. These kinds of things—project-based learning and experiential learning—create agency. It develops problem-solving and critical thinking skills that young people need whether or not they go to college. It's relevant. It's grounded in the real world, and it gets kids excited about being in school, particularly boys.

Let me change the topic to AI. The world is changing really quickly, and we have to teach our students for a world we may not know. That's pretty freaking scary. But part of that is keeping pace. Now with AI—you're seeing a pamphlet, guardrails that an amazing group of our members put together. Our members, about 170 of them, have put together two versions of these kind of guardrails so that we can stay at the forefront of education innovation while upholding values of safety, privacy, equity, and excellence.

Yeah, it's the wild, Wild West for teachers when it comes to AI. Frankly, unlike what's happening in Europe, because the United States is not regulating this sector in any way, it puts an inordinate amount of pressure on teachers. This is what the AFT is trying to do. We're trying to offer educators tools to adapt to these changes, to even understand what's going on. Because the tools are being done by a bunch of technological giants, we are partnering with some of them that will engage with the labor movement and will engage with our values. One of those is Microsoft. The second is OpenAI.

We've just developed ways where they can help us help you. We also have tools for media literacy and how to discern fact from fiction. Disinformation and misinformation is getting to be a bigger and bigger problem. We'll have sessions on all of this at the AFT Teach conference in July. I heard many of you were on yesterday's amazing program on all of this stuff with Kelly and Sari Beth Rosenberg.

Last, I want to talk about accountability in our fast-changing world. We know that our young people, indeed all people, need critical thinking over memorization, adaptability over rote response, and the skills to find answers and to learn lifelong. Drill and kill and filling in bubbles on a standardized test doesn't cut it. I mean, I'm thinking about our accountability and testing systems. It's like the Model T in an era where we're now looking beyond Tesla. Everything has changed this century except testing, which seems to be so 1999. The kids most in need of engaged learning and authentic assessments are the ones most locked into a test-and-punish accountability system that narrows instruction, takes up too much teacher time, and doesn't meet student, teacher, or family needs.

A neighbor in my building recently told me that she had decided to transfer her daughter, who is in sixth grade, to a private school. "Everything in her public school is online," she told me. "Everything is driven by standardized testing, smart board drills, assignments, test prep, tests—all of them on screens. It just feels like educational malpractice to me."

We got to prepare kids for life, career, and college. Memorization and screen time and testing mandates just don't cut it. It is about relationships and resiliency and problem-solving and critical thinking and the other life skills. Even in this Trump administration, we are trying to take this on. A wonderful task force, a second task force that I'm talking about here today of our amazing members, produced this guide called "Real Solutions for Improving Assessments." It shows ways that we're making large and small changes—from project-based end-of-course assessments to district testing audits, to state legislative advocacy—that we can change these things. We know the federal ESSA law has to change. Frankly, it'd be a more worthwhile exercise to change ESSA and to change testing than to try to shutter the Department of Education.

I want to just end where I started, which is with you. Educators wear a lot of hats: teacher, counselor, mediator, mentor, grandma, grandpa—the list goes on and on. Your work is never done. But now we have this job to defend and protect public schools and the strong public schools our kids need and deserve. Our kids' education is under attack, both in terms of pre-K, kindergarten, all of K-12, and higher education, which is why I was with our higher education folks today fighting those attacks.

Think about what they call us. Smear. The smear tactics that we're woke, that we're Marxists, that we're pedophiles, that we're a lunatic left wing, and on and on and on. I'm sure there'll be some choice words on Twitter tonight about me. Think about who we are. How do you call us this when all we want is to meet our kids' needs? For them to be seen for whoever they are, for them to master their skills, to be able to conquer the world, to learn honest history. We want them to be problem solvers and confident independent thinkers.

What is wrong with that? Why do we have to fight for that? It's the same thing parents want for their kids. It's a teachable moment, my friends, about what's at risk if Trump and Musk succeed. You are trusted messengers. You help create opportunity for our country's youth. You know what's working in our schools. You know what should be supported, and you know what's failing, and you know what needs to be changed. Your voice matters. You have this unique perspective and a powerful message that we should be investing in our kids and strengthening our public schools, not taking a hatchet to them.

I'm asking you—we're doing everything we can, but we need you. I know you're working all the time in terms of teaching, but we need you. Here's what you can do:

This, my friends, is about our kids' futures. We do that every day in our classrooms. This time we have to do that in the streets and the courts and the court of public opinion and in Congress. It's about whether we as a country believe in the promise of public education and the promise of the American dream and the promise of American democracy.

I feel confident that we can protect our kids' futures. We can build support and respect for our profession. We can do what's right if we seize this moment and build this movement, because together we can achieve things that would be impossible alone. Thank you.

Kelly Booz:Randi, thank you so much. I know you have maybe like two minutes, if that...

Randi Weingarten:Five. I'm sorry, five. OK, 555.

Kelly Booz:Alright, so I'm going to show one quick slide. I feel like we get to meet online a lot for these webinars. We kicked off a brand new series yesterday on these health chats with Doctor Vin Gupta. Can you share your thoughts on why you've brought on somebody like Doctor Vin Gupta to be part of our AFT community beyond just our teacher and educator group?

Randi Weingarten:So, we started with a measles town hall this week. Look, anyone who has watched the... sorry, my computer is about to die, so I'm just going to plug it in. OK, that'll be the... how many of us multitask all the time. Any of us who have been watching—I'm not again, I'm not saying that the CDC or any of our public health systems are the best. They're not. How many times that people couldn't give us, "This is what you do and this is what you don't do" during COVID? How many times was it, "We didn't know"?

But you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. What's happening is... look at what's happening in Texas right now. Some people are getting the advice to use cod liver oil. There are parents whose kids have ended up in the hospital because they're not vaccinated and they get measles. If you're a very, very young baby and you get measles, it's a really terrible disease, and it's highly contagious.

I'm not a doctor; I'm not a nurse. I don't even play one on TV. We need people who really know what they're talking about to help advise us. It's not just you and me, Kelly, that should be advised. We need to use this technology to actually make sure that members who are interested or concerned or want to have answers to their questions [can get them].

That's what Vin Gupta and others are going to do. This last one, we had Vin Gupta and the former president of the Pediatric society. We had a pulmonologist and a pediatrician really answering questions. We're going to do this every month and have these kind of outward-facing webinars. Dr. Gupta is also going to help us try to navigate all the healthcare questions that so many of our members have and so many of us have.

Kelly Booz:Yeah, no, thank you. I mean, I think he's one of the greatest ads that we're adding to the AFT as we go. I know we have to cut off with you. Andy is dropping links into the chat. We just opened up a new community on Share My Lesson. In between those monthly webinars, we're going to have health chats with Doctor Vin Gupta.

One of the things you said at the beginning about Share My Lesson—thank you for entrusting me with running Share My Lesson—is that we try to be as balanced as possible. But I also want to say we are owned by the AFT, and we are a union. I'm reading through our mission, part of our mission statement that champions fairness, democracy, economic opportunity, and high-quality public education, healthcare, and public services for our students and families and communities. So much of that is under attack right now. That means that we have to lean in on a lot of these issues and say, "Guess what, there is not a both-sides of this discussion. There is only 'this is not OK' on this."

Randi, I reflect sometimes when you say, "When they ban books, we're going to give those books away." I feel like, at least in the digital way on Share My Lesson, it's like our more digital side. When they are taking down websites that are talking about veterans or the Arlington National Cemetery, we need to lean in and say, "OK, we're not deleting this. We're not deleting this history. We're leaning into it, and it's important."

Randi Weingarten:Look, we have two questions in the chat, so why don't I just answer both of them? There may be more, but let me answer both of them. One was from Catherine, who asked about the idea of career tech ed, "What can we as teachers do to implement this, not just have the college readiness classes?"

So what we're pushing and proposing is that we should open the aperture for high school. Yes, college prep is very important, but 40% of kids who graduate from high school don't go to college. We really need to open the aperture to have career readiness pathway programs available, not just for some kids, but for all kids. That is what we are trying to design, and that's what we are trying to push. We pushed the Biden administration very hard on it. There were some people who agreed with us and believed us in the White House, but there were many who did not. We will push this administration very hard too. But we're also really trying to work with states right now. We have a couple of things that we'll roll out over the course of the next few months. Thank you for that question because we need teachers in classrooms who agree with us to say this is really important for our kids. Thank you.

Then Sandra said, "Look, we've come such a long way for our students and for teachers, and now we're going to hurt all that progress." And her word is "heartbreaking." You're absolutely right, Sandra. Look, I'm not giving up, and we're not giving in. We are fighting this, but we have to sound the alarm because without the alarm, when things go bye-bye, we never get them back. We are really fighting, and we really need you in this fight. There are some things that we can fight as leaders of the AFT. This is something where we need to be all in.

Kelly Booz:Yeah, thank you. I'm going to say thank you, Randi, so much for being here. I know you have another commitment to get to. She is the busiest person I know in this entire world. I say that as somebody who's a mother and doing this and on a school board and all that stuff. It doesn't even compare. I've talked to her doing these webinars from Israel to Iceland to New York to California, you name it. We do it, and she shows up.

Randi Weingarten:But the California one is the best because then I get to see my grandkids.

Kelly Booz:Exactly, exactly. And at least you're done at an early hour, not like 2:00 AM. OK, so more to it. I'm going to say thank you to Randi, let her go, and share a couple of quick videos about some of the work that we're doing at the AFT. Thank you, Randi. We appreciate you as always.

Alright, thank you for everybody for being here. We still have a couple more webinars that are going on for night two of our Share My Lesson virtual conference. Again, if you are not able to go to all of them because we have a lot over the course of three days, you can see all of them on demand. You can get a downloaded certificate of participation for participating within those webinars. We've got four different states now that actually accept this credit—not actually, but it's very exciting because we're trying to expand—accept this credit for your state standards. That is New York, Texas, Illinois—I feel like Natalie's listening in, and she's going to correct me in a second—and Indiana, which is really exciting. Our team has been working really hard on this part.

I just want to share, especially since January 20th, the inauguration, the AFT has been working so hard to do all we can to protect public education. We had a session on March 4th to protect our kids, and we're continuing that campaign. I'm Pennsylvania—thanks, Natalie. I knew you were listening. So maybe it was five. I'm going to show a quick couple of videos for that. You should be able to download that certificate.

If you want to stay on and watch these videos, I encourage you to do so or take a quick break and head over to our next webinars. Tomorrow night, we've got another series of webinars for our final day of this Share My Lesson Virtual conference. We've got a keynote with Mary Pope Osborne, who is a youth author from the Magic Treehouse series. My kids love that series, and it really will touch on some of the literacy stuff that we're doing. Thank you all. I'm going to play a couple of videos, and I appreciate you. We will see you soon.

(Video 1 Start)If President Yuan gets his way and closes the Department of Education, we'll have cuts in every school district in America. Bake sales won't just be for school sports. You'll also need a bake sale for a reading specialist, school counselors, math teachers, kids with disabilities, career training programs, pre-K programs, and more. Why billionaire tax cuts? So Elon wants to raise your taxes and cut your schools? How about if billionaires want a tax cut, they hold a bake sale? On March 4th, join school communities across the country to protect our kids.

There are over 2,000 actions like this around the country to protect our kids and protect our public schools. Federal education cuts would devastate students like me. They would cut special education programs, slash funding for low-income schools, take away resources from English learners, and make college even more unaffordable for working-class families such as mine. They want us to sit back and accept these cuts, but I am here to fight. When our democracy is under attack, we...

Our members are doing walk-outs and walk-ins on this National Day of Action. Teachers are buying their own pens, their own notebooks, their own boxes of tissues for the children. It makes no sense to me that we're going to trade the future of our children to fund tax cuts for billionaires. Last night, the Senate approved someone as Secretary of Education in this country who comes from Worldwide Wrestling. It will be up to communities across this country to protect our trans children, to protect our diverse learners, to protect our Black students, to protect our Black teachers, to protect our immigrant students, and to protect bilingual education to make sure that we can teach the truth.

We should be adding counselors. We should be adding early childhood interventions. We should be adding teachers to deal with this teacher shortage that we have here in Florida and throughout the nation. Today especially... Are all the children in our schools from the United States? We're talking about cross prayer. That's just the way to remembinate program. There has been plenty of illegal executive orders, from gutting birthright citizenship to ending a silent part of the United States. But we have heard absolutely nothing about raising wages, nothing about cutting prices, nothing about drug prices and healthcare costs. Nothing about student debt.

Here's what it means in real terms: 26 million kids will lose vital Title 1 services. Our education rights are consistently under attack, and it's time for students to join faculty and fight back. We will not be erased. We will not let our immigrant friends be erased. We will not let our LGBTQ+ friends be erased. We will not let the true history of this country be erased. I hope they understand that our students are serious about this, that they're not just coming here on March 4th, they'll be coming back next year. That they'll be voting in the future.

We stand here today as part of a national day of action. We are going to protect federal funding from being gutted for vouchers or for tax cuts for Elon. These cuts are not actually doing good. These cuts are to benefit the wealthiest Americans. One of my favorite classes that I'm taking right now is AP African American Studies, and it's really important to me that not only I learn my own history, but that hundreds of others do. So coming out here to fight and protest, it's like we're not scared of you. We're going to show you that this is who we are, this is what we're going to fight for, and we're not going to let you take control of us.

People right now are feeling a little overwhelmed. That's understandable. But I need you to know right now it's going to be the labor movement. It's going to be unions that stand up and actually take power and be the resounding voice for America in this moment. We need to stand up collectively to be the voice of reason. Our walk is clear. We will fight to protect our kids. We will fight to fund our schools. We must win this fight to fund our public schools and to protect our children.(Video 1 End)

(Video 2 Start)Public schools are the heart of our communities, giving every child a chance to succeed. But now they're under attack. Musk and Trump want to gut the Department of Education and take funding from the kids who need it most. Twenty-six million kids will lose critical services. Special education, career training, and student loans are all on the chopping block. On March 4th, we're taking action. Visit aft.org/ProtectOurKids to join school communities across the country holding rallies, calling lawmakers, sharing stories, and demanding that we save our public schools.(Video 2 End)

Kelly Booz:Thank you again everyone. On behalf of the AFT and Share My Lesson and our team, thank you so much. We appreciate you, and let's continue to support public education.