The American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said that her members are indifferent to the prospect of the Department of Education being abolished.
In an interview with MSNBC on Sunday, the leader of the second-largest teachers union in the country was asked to react to President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of WWE co-founder Linda McMahon to lead the Department of Education.
“My members don’t really care about whether they have a bureaucracy at the Department of Education or not,” Weingarten said.
“In fact, Al Shanker and the AFT in the 1970s were opposed to its creation. We thought it should stay within HEW (Department of Health, Education, and Welfare) because of the whole child.”
Weingarten’s comments came after she raised concern over South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds, R., introduced legislation to eliminate the department last week..
The bill, called the Returning Education to Our States Act, seeks to redirect the department’s responsibilities to other federal agencies such as the Departments of Interior, Treasury, Health and Human Services, Labor and State.
While Weingarten was indifferent to the abolition of the ED, she stressed the necessity for schools to have federal funding.
“Look at Round’s bill. What he does is he gets rid of the money for poor kids. How do you do that? We need federal dollars to level up opportunity for children,” Weingarten said.
Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Culture Project, told Fox News Digital that Weingarten may have “misread the bill.”
“Maybe she misread the bill. It sends the money back to the states in the form of block grants to be used for education,” he said.
“Even a broken clock is right twice a day. I’m glad Randi Weingarten and I can agree on one thing: it’s time to abolish the bureaucratic mess that is the Department of Education.”
He continued, “If even Randi Weingarten is open to the idea, hopefully some Democrats in Congress will get on board with the majority Party. The Department of Education is an unconstitutional waste of time and money. Let’s get rid of the bureaucracy and send education back to the states. That will eliminate waste and allow for more local control.”
Trump signaled during the campaign that he supports abolishing the department. He said that he’ll prioritize “closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and sending all education and education work it needs back to the states.”