Randi Weingarten’s globalist gambit threatens our kids’ future freedoms

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, dropped a bombshell last week at the union’s annual convention in Washington, DC.

In a speech that could have been ripped from the pages of a dystopian novel, she announced a partnership with the globalist World Economic Forum to craft a new curriculum for America’s schools.

If you thought Common Core’s centralized, one-size-fits-all approach was a bad idea, Weingarten’s latest move is the educational equivalent of saying, “Hold my beer.”

The WEF, known for its unsettling vision of a future where “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy,” is now being invited to shape the minds of America’s children.

This is the same organization that cozies up to the Chinese Communist Party, promotes digital IDs and pushes foolish, industry-killing green energy schemes.

The AFT has been edging up to this alliance: When its members passed a resolution this spring calling for “climate-smart and sustainable schools,” they explicitly cited the WEF as part of a push to “integrate the curriculum to facilitate comprehensive energy reduction.”

Partnering with an entity that holds up authoritarian regimes as models is a five-alarm fire.

And considering the WEF’s track record of championing policies that undermine industrial competitiveness, Weingarten’s claim that the coming curriculum will lead to “good jobs and solid careers in US manufacturing” is laughable.

This move fits Weingarten’s pattern: She has a craving for centralized power, and her union’s history shows a knack for leveraging authority to bend institutions to its will.

As The New York Post revealed, it was Weingarten who strong-armed the Biden administration into keeping schools shuttered during the COVID era.

By holding children’s education hostage, the union secured billions in ransom payments from taxpayers — as closed schools became bargaining chips, used to extort more money and benefits during contract negotiations.

Students suffered historic learning losses, with reading and math scores plummeting to record lows, while teachers’ unions padded their coffers.

Weingarten’s convention speech didn’t stop at globalist curricula. She called on her members to “fight like hell” and take to the streets to unseat lawmakers who dare oppose her agenda.

Randi’s rhetoric reveals she is more concerned with politics than education.

As if the coming WEF curriculum wasn’t bad enough, Weingarten also announced the AFT’s “National Academy for AI Instruction,” with partners like the United Federation of Teachers, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Declaring that “AI should serve our values,” the partnership is a move to embed leftist ideology into the algorithms that will increasingly shape classroom instruction for the nation’s nearly 50 million public-school students.

It gives Weingarten the ability to drench educational AI with her worldview, ensuring that not just union members but machines will be indoctrinating kids.

Weingarten’s love for centralized authority drives her opposition to President Donald Trump’s plans to dismantle the Department of Education — because a single federal institution is easier for her union to influence than thousands of independent state and local school boards.

It’s why she fights against school choice, too.

A centralized system lets Weingarten impose her socialist vision on every classroom, regardless of what parents or communities want — and her WEF partnership takes this subversion of local control to the next level.

The WEF’s vision, with its emphasis on global governance and top-down solutions, is antithetical to the American tradition of local control and parental rights.

Weingarten’s WEF collaboration risks turning schools into factories for big-government ideology, churning out students programmed to accept a world where individual freedom takes a back seat to collective mandates.

When the head of a major American teachers’ union aligns with an organization that celebrates authoritarianism, it’s time to rethink who gets to decide what’s taught in our schools.

The solution is to decentralize the school system, allowing parents to direct the upbringing of their children.

School choice puts parents in the driver’s seat by allowing them to take their children’s education dollars to schools that best meet their needs and align with their values.

And abolishing the federal Education Department to return control to states and counties will break the union’s stranglehold.

The AFT’s lust for power is a wake-up call.

It’s time to dismantle Weingarten’s globalist schemes and return our schools to the hands of parents and local communities.

Corey DeAngelis is a senior fellow at the American Culture Project and a visiting fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.