South Carolina GOP Sen. Tim Scott, a contender in the Republican race for the White House, took aim at American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on Wednesday after she likened school choice and parental rights advocates to segregationists who opposed the integration of schools.
“There might not be anyone that’s done more damage recently than Randi Weingarten to the kids living in distressed communities, especially like the ones where I grew up, it’s so frustrating to hear these liberal lies, hearkening back to a day that no longer exists.”
Weingarten likened school choice and parental rights advocates to segregationists in the 1950s who had taken issue with the Supreme Court’s ruling on Brown v. Board of Education, which found it unconstitutional to separate children in public schools on the basis of race. Words like those, according to Weingarten, are used as an “attempt to divide parents versus teachers.”
“I’m so sick and tired of liberals – too many of them happen to be White – crying racism every single time they’re losing an argument,” Scott said. “I can’t think of anything more actually racist than trapping poor Black kids in the failing schools in these big blue cities dominated by a super-majority of radical progressives who are running the cities and destroying the schools.”
“They’re the ones, with their teachers unions, standing in the doorway of the schoolhouse, trapping poor kids in as if the house is on fire, but they won’t let a single soul out,” he went on. “It’s really frustrating, and it’s one of the reasons why I think we have no choice but to break the backs of these teachers’ unions. They’re the problem. They’re literally destroying the future of millions of kids.”
If elected, Scott said he would work to break the influence on schools from teachers’ unions and provide “choice in education” because he believes parents in America “deserve the choices that they need so that their kids have a chance to succeed.”