She did it just moments after the votes of 3,000 delegates at the American Federation of Teachers convention here were counted July 14 and it was announced that she was the union’s newly elected president.

Weingarten is currently president of New York’s United Federation of Teachers, the AFT’s largest local.

Along with Weingarten the convention elected two other women to fill the top three jobs at the AFT which, with 1.4 million members, is one of the largest and fastest growing unions in the AFL-CIO. It is now the only U.S. union whose three top officials are women.

Antonia Cortese, currently the union’s executive vice president, was elected secretary-treasurer. Loretta Johnson, who is AFT vice president, head of the Maryland AFT and president of the Baltimore Teachers’ Union’s paraprofessional chapter, was named executive vice president.

Weingarten told reporters after the convention that she and her two top officers were on their way to Washington, where they would begin meeting with people on Capitol Hill to start laying out the union’s vision as the basis for a new education law.

She said the task of developing a new education law is number one on the nation’s education agenda and goes well beyond simply scrapping the No Child Left Behind law currently in place. She left no doubt, however, that the union intends to fight NCLB, which is strongly backed by the Bush administration.

“We need to prepare our students for 21st century jobs,” she said. “Employers are looking for workers who can devise new solutions. But how will kids who have spent 12 years learning to keep their pencil marks inside the bubbles ever be able to think outside the box?”

“NCLB slams the schoolhouse door on much of what makes up modern civilization and replaces it with multiple choice questions,” she added.

Weingerten said NCLB is particularly disastrous for non-college-bound students. “Its test-driven curricula has meant a neglect of the technical and higher-order thinking skills that could prepare these students for jobs in the knowledge economy too.”

Recognizing that funding is crucial to any massive overhaul of the nation’s education system, the union added its voice again to the growing chorus in the labor movement calling for an end to the war in Iraq.

The delegates approved what is perhaps one of the strongest resolutions against the war by any U.S. union. It described the “war on terror” as an “ideological construct that obscures the real reasons for the war — control over wealth and resources.”

“The Bush administration,” the AFT resolution declared, “has used the idea of a ‘war on terror’ to justify permanent and preemptive war and to provide political cover for attacking and occupying Iraq and possibly launching future attacks against Iran.”

 1  |  2