Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote a hyperbolic piece titled “America’s Teachers Can’t Afford to Teach,” which appeared in TIME magazine on June 11.
The excessively whiny article is filled with half-truths meant to make readers feel sorry for impoverished, underpaid teachers. Among other things, she asserts that the vast majority of American educators are living paycheck to paycheck, taking on debt to buy groceries, and facing other financial hardships.
She maintains that the pay gap between “teachers and other college-educated professionals—known as the ‘teacher pay penalty’—has grown to 27 percent. To put it plainly, people with the same level of education and experience can make far more doing almost anything other than teaching. We cannot accept this as an unfortunate reality or an accident.”
But when you look at the facts, which apparently is an alien concept to the union boss, you get a very different picture. While it is true that teacher salaries nationwide have not quite kept up with inflation, Weingarten tells only part of the story, omitting many perks afforded to educators.
Just Facts, a nonprofit dedicated to researching and publishing verifiable facts on critical public policy issues of our time, analyzes teacher salaries and reports that in the 2021–22 school year, the average U.S. teacher earned $66,397 in salary and $34,090 in benefits, including health insurance, paid leave, and pensions, for total compensation of $100,487.
Also, full-time public school teachers work an average of 1,490 hours per year, including time spent on lesson preparation, test construction, grading, providing extra help to students, coaching, and other activities, while their counterparts in private industry work an average of 2,045 hours per year, about 37 percent more than public school teachers.
Weingarten also fallaciously claims that teachers in states with union-backed collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) earn 24 percent more than those in states without such agreements.
However, those without an agenda tell a very different story, arguing that CBAs actually hurt the bottom line for all teachers. Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute writes that teachers in non-collective bargaining districts earn about 12 percent more than their unionized peers. Other research by Michael Lovenheim and Andrew Coulson produced similar findings. In 2018, University of California, San Diego professor Augustina Pagalayan reported that CBAs do not improve teacher pay.
It’s worth noting that union dues for teachers are quite high these days. In Los Angeles, for example, full-time educators pay about $1,500 in dues annually.
Weingarten also never explains where the bulk of union dues are spent. According to a Pew Research poll, about 58 percent of public K-12 teachers lean Democratic and 35 percent lean Republican. But OpenSecrets reports that in 2024, the American Federation of Teachers gave $3,069,063 (99.89 percent) to Democrats and a scant $3,323 (0.11 percent) to Republicans.
Additionally, while she bemoans low teacher pay, the money she collects from them goes to pay her a hefty salary. As the Illinois Policy Institute reveals, Weingarten’s current yearly income is $514,488, making her a one-percenter.
Another fraud perpetrated by Weingarten concerns a book she wrote last year, Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy, which she claims will “empower us and give us hope.” The problem is that every word from the union boss is nonfactual claptrap.
As Aaron Withe, Freedom Foundation CEO, writes, the book opens by comparing the Nazi occupation of Norway to the current state of American education and “argues that anyone who disagrees with the author’s vision for public schools is, in some meaningful sense, a fascist.”
Perhaps the biggest deception in Weingarten’s book is its portrayal of her role during the pandemic. “I led the AFT in developing a concrete plan to reopen schools as quickly and safely as possible,” she claims.
Bald-faced lie.
In reality, she repeatedly argued for keeping schools shuttered throughout the spring and summer of 2020, while her union aggressively lobbied the CDC to revise its school-reopening guidance. Two of her language recommendations were adopted verbatim.
Weingarten also outrageously used members’ dues to pay for her fiction-laden book.
Researcher Maxford Nelsen combed through the AFT’s most recent LM-2—the annual financial disclosure unions file with the U.S. Department of Labor—and unearthed a detailed accounting of how member dues were used to produce Weingarten’s book.
The AFT paid nearly $1 million to a New York law firm, and its attorney is likewise thanked in the book’s acknowledgments for reviewing the manuscript. When the New York Post asked about it, an AFT spokesperson claimed the review was done pro bono, but the union LM-2 says otherwise.
There was also $6,000 for fact-checking, $5,212 for a single-author photograph by a Washington-based photographer, and $64,090 to a literary agency that lists AFT, not Weingarten, as its client.
Nearly 30 AFT staff members are thanked in the acknowledgments, prompting questions about their role in the book’s creation. Meanwhile, travel costs for Weingarten’s nationwide promotional tour are not itemized separately but were almost certainly substantial.
In other words, teachers paid for nearly everything. Weingarten may not have contributed a single dollar to the enterprise.
Weingarten was also one of the more strident leaders in 2025’s anti-Trump “No Kings” movement. She wrote, “At every turn, this president has undermined the rule of law, weaponized the federal government against the people it should serve, and divide and silence us. And now, the same far-right groups that cheered his chaos are smearing those of us who are organizing peacefully for justice.”
The hypocrisy here is glaring. This is a woman who has served as AFT president since 2008 and, before that, led the UFT, AFT’s New York City branch, for 11 years. Additionally, teachers do not vote for her directly; only delegates do.
At the end of the day, Randi Weingarten is a dishonest, left-wing, hypocritical bloviator who always points the finger at others for various problems.
Other than offending the dishonorable queen, teachers have nothing to lose by saying goodbye to their union and can save a lot of cash in the process.
Larry Sand is former president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network.
