She’s at it again. Randi Weingarten is good at everything but doing her actual job, and America’s teachers are terrific followers of their leader. Our kids can’t read, they can’t write, they can’t do math, our city schools aren’t safe, the teachers themselves are more schooled in Marxist ideology than in grammar or real science—and now we are boycotting Target. And why are we boycotting Target? We are boycotting Target because it refuses to condemn ICE and demand that federal immigration agents leave Minnesota. In other words, Target’s offense is that it has declined to enlist in Weingarten’s political campaign against federal immigration enforcement.
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Sounds confusing? No more confusing than the leftist position on immigration. There has not been a single Democratic congressional leader who has put forward a proposal to open the borders. There is no current debate in Congress—put forward by the Left—about opening the borders. That’s not what the Left does. They are an inherently undemocratic bunch who prefer simply to avoid democratic concepts like debate, voting, or other inconvenient practices that stand in the way of their agenda. Their view is simply to abolish the agency that is legally entrusted with enforcing the current law. Or better still, as we saw in the previous administration, to open the borders and then lie about it.
Target’s sin—apart from the possibility that Weingarten has a personal axe to grind with someone over there who told her to go pound sand—is that the company does not want to be conscripted into her political campaign against ICE. Target’s CEO joined other Minnesota business leaders in calling for an immediate de-escalation of tensions, and the company has said that it has no relationship or cooperative agreement with ICE.
But that was not enough for Weingarten. She demanded that Target publicly condemn ICE and call for federal immigration agents to leave Minnesota. Target declined. After all, it might actually have employees working there who support immigration enforcement or simply do not want their employer speaking for them. Weingarten’s position is that Target should treat its truly democratic and/or conservative employees in the same manner as she treats the dwindling number of conservatives in her radical teachers’ union: by simply ignoring them. If you disagree with Weingarten’s kooky political theories—which we will come to shortly—then you’re out of luck. You pay your dues the same as everyone else.
Because for the Left, personal life is never off limits; let’s take a look at Randi’s. She is married to a woman—Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum—who is divorced from her former female partner, Rabbi Margaret Wenig, who was once married to a man. If you are keeping score, Margaret Wenig had two daughters with her former husband before she married Sharon Kleinbaum, who later divorced her and married Weingarten. This is all refreshing, given that no one actually gets married at all these days, so it’s heartening to see all of these marriages, despite the complexity of it all.
Weingarten has been decidedly leftist from the outset. She was born in New York in 1957, raised in Rockland County, and attended Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She did teach school for a while as a social studies teacher at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn from 1991 to 1997. But it wasn’t long before she found her calling in union leadership. After working her way up the ranks, she became national president of the AFT in 2008 and was just reelected in 2026 for another two-year term—her 10th two-year term.
She was a longtime member of the DNC, which selects the candidates it wants elected and, in turn, gave Randi what she wanted. But in 2025, she had a disagreement with Ken Martin, who was the chair of the DNC, and Randi stormed out. It was all about power. Randi had supported Martin’s opponent, Ben Wikler, and after Martin won, he pushed Weingarten off the Rules and Bylaws Committee and offered her an at-large position instead. Weingarten quit. She justified all of this by saying that Martin was not “sufficiently enlarging our tent” and was not acting aggressively enough against Trump’s agenda. Martin was not as interested in theatrics—one of the things Weingarten excels at—and actually wanted to focus on winning elections rather than getting their asses handed to them. So far, Martin’s strategy appears to be working, and Weingarten is still off the Rules Committee.
This could be part of her motivation for the boycott of Target, because frankly, it doesn’t make any damn sense other than to get her butt back in the headlines. Weingarten had been taken down a notch, and she has traditionally been far less interested in actually running a teachers’ union and having decent and safe schools than in being a political power broker. If she can show that the union can take down a retailer, maybe she can regain some of her power with the DNC.
The evidence that Weingarten doesn’t give a damn about the kids in the public schools who have been suffering through her long tenure is apparent from the test scores and the political activism that has been injected into the school system at every juncture. Although not a declared Marxist-Leninist (yet), the teachers and students she controls seem to be merely statistics—a power base for her dictatorial rule.
The data under her rule frankly stinks. Weingarten took over the AFT in 2008. In the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 33 percent of fourth-graders and 32 percent of eighth-graders were at or above proficient in reading. In mathematics, 39 percent of fourth-graders and 34 percent of eighth-graders were at or above proficient. Those numbers were hardly a golden age. But the more recent results are worse in important respects. The 2024 reading assessment showed further declines in both fourth and eighth grade, with average scores falling two points from 2022 after already having fallen three points between 2019 and 2022. At the end of the pipeline, only 35 percent of twelfth-graders were at or above proficient in reading in 2024, and the average twelfth-grade reading score was ten points below 1992. Fourth-grade mathematics recovered somewhat in 2024 but remained below its 2019 pre-pandemic level.
Her performance during the pandemic was legendary. In 2020, the AFT argued that schools should remain closed until specific health protections were in place. The union even warned that strikes might be necessary if officials tried to reopen schools without providing what the union considered safe conditions.
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But surprise. We later learned that the AFT was working unusually closely with the CDC as the agency prepared its school-reopening guidance. A 2022 report by Republican congressional staff concluded that some language suggested by the union mysteriously found its way into the CDC’s final guidance. The AFT then praised that guidance as a science-based plan for reopening and, by 2021, was calling for schools to reopen five days a week.
By then, however, enormous damage had been done. Reading scores, which were already falling before COVID, declined even further. Math scores, which were lousy already, collapsed. Chronic absenteeism, always a problem, became a national crisis.
As usual, the children mattered the least to Randi. The unions were not solely responsible for the disaster—government officials, school administrators, public health agencies, and parents all played a part—but the pandemic exposed the basic conflict at the heart of public-sector unionism. A teachers’ union exists only to protect teachers. A public school, on the other hand, exists to educate children. The Weingarten years have deepened and widened this gulf, from a potential conflict that needs to be navigated to an obvious conflict that has not been addressed since she took power in 2008.
So the question—who is the school system supposed to serve: the teachers, the unions, the bureaucracy, or the children?—seems to have been answered definitively by Weingarten. The teachers’ union and the schools are there to serve the union and the bureaucracy—and, to a certain extent, the DNC’s political positions. The fact that the kids can’t read, can’t write, can’t do math, that the schools aren’t safe, that students are alienated, that bullying is rampant, that teachers themselves lack basic skills, and that sexual predators are sitting in rubber rooms and getting paid at taxpayers’ expense because the union won’t let them be fired—only adds to the legacy of the worst teachers’ union president in the history of the country.
The worst part of all this is that the teachers have followed her lead. Our kids are not coming home with skulls full of Latin, geometry, Romance languages, knowledge of the classics, and advanced math. They come home with heads full of leftist propaganda drilled into them, selective views of history, poor grammar skills, horrific math skills, and an understanding of science as “scientism” rather than the probing nature of the discipline.
There is a silver lining when it comes to the dark reign of Randi Weingarten. The call for fundamental reform is growing louder. The call for school vouchers—even by some moderate Democrats—is a recognition that a public institution should be accountable to the public purpose for which it exists: in this case, educating children. The Target boycott brings into view the obvious point that Randi Weingarten and her group of merry men and women couldn’t give a damn about educating children. The AFT is not debating ways to make classrooms safer, teachers smarter, students perform better, or parents less worried. The AFT platform now includes issues more related to community organizing and activism for abortion, artificial intelligence, and a commitment to wide-open immigration. Weingarten not only doesn’t seem to give a damn about the pathetic performance of her teachers in the classroom; she doesn’t even give a damn about her own union employees who may not agree with her far, far-leftist views on every issue. She is uniquely unqualified for this role, and if teachers wanted to demonstrate to America that they were serious about educating our kids, they could demonstrate this by first removing Weingarten and installing a true educational professional in the role.
In the pre-Weingarten years, the argument over teachers’ unions was largely about salaries, tenure, class size, and collective bargaining. But the question today is much larger: Have the institutions that control public education become more concerned with protecting themselves and promoting their political causes than with actually educating children?
Randi Weingarten is not personally responsible for everything wrong with American education. But she sure isn’t helping. She has become the perfect symbol of a system that has accumulated enormous political power while somehow avoiding any real responsibility for its results.
If public education is going to survive, it needs to return to a brutally simple order of priorities: children first, learning second, and everything else afterward. A union has every right to represent its members. Citizens are free to organize around immigration, abortion, guns, or any other political issue. But when a teachers’ union turns itself into a permanent political organization—with education reduced to merely one cause among many—parents and taxpayers have every right to ask a simple question: Has the teachers’ union forgotten what schools are actually for?
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It seems that the Target debacle has now answered that question.
