Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, wants to ensure the union’s 1.8 million teachers, health professionals, and public service workers keep “a seat at the table” in the nation’s increasingly contentious discussions around education policy and technology in schools.
The AFT’s biennial professional development conference here July 24-27 drew more than 2,000 educators from around the country for training on teaching methods, social-emotional learning, and collective bargaining. This year, the group also dedicated a significant share of discussions to how teachers can use technology—specifically, generative artificial intelligence tools—effectively.
“Look, we have to be skeptical. When you are skeptical, you ask the right questions,” Weingarten told her members in a discussion of the future of AI and technology in education. “But I also think that we don’t create the world that we want unless we understand the world we’re in. … If we want it to be better, we have to engage.”
Weingarten sat down with Education Week to discuss how teachers can navigate challenging issues in their classrooms and with the public. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
AFT has called for “safe and welcoming schools” as a top priority this year. How can teachers keep themselves and their classrooms safe and welcoming in increasingly divisive environments?
What happens is that this divisiveness on the outside creates divisiveness on the inside. Because people don’t have the muscles about how to talk to each other when they disagree, it can become very provocative very quickly.
So I think about safety in terms of physical security and physical safety, as well as welcoming how people feel.
In recent months, you have repeatedly stressed the need to “broaden the tent” and “keep a seat at the table” with regard to education policies. How are you reaching out to teachers and education activists who don’t agree with you?
I mean, look, we are the fastest-growing union in America. … Words matter, and I want the words that I use today, by and large, to be heard, regardless of people’s ideology. And frankly, after what [President Donald] Trump has done in terms of public education, there’s a lot of teachers, conservative or liberal, that do not want Trump to undermine public education.
I’m trying to reach out to people who don’t normally want to listen, because the right wing has tried to create that divisiveness, and there are people on the left wing that try to do that as well. I want people to hear me and have a real conversation. And I cannot imagine that a strategy of [advocating for] reading, wrapping services around schools, and project-based instruction is something that all parents and all teachers and all paraprofessionals in America won’t resonate [with].
I’ve spent a lot of time in conservative schools, like in Ohio, like in Texas, and … I’m not going to stop trying to have people here and then have a real debate about things.
AFT just launched an academy to train educators about artificial intelligence. What do you think teachers need to understand most urgently about AI?
Privacy. Privacy is going to be a very urgent priority—because again, this is the stuff that should have been done in terms of federal regulation. How do we leave it up to individual teachers? It’s not fair. And they can’t; they don’t have the power to control this. So we have to have digital agreements with the companies on privacy, safety, ethics.
And first and foremost, we just have to protect people’s data—like, my new book contract [includes a clause saying] “No, you can’t take this [text] to train AI.” It was protecting me and protecting my publisher. People can’t hide their heads in the sand and say, “Oh, no, no, no, no. I don’t want to deal with [AI]. It’s scary to deal with it.”
The second issue then becomes, what are we dealing with? How are we identifying what we’re dealing with? And then, how [do we] solve it? And collective bargaining is a way to solve it.
How do teachers reduce screen time and deal with screen-related attention issues while also teaching students in nearly universal 1-to-1 device environments?
I think we are going to have to start revisiting all the reliance that we do on screens. … What has happened is that we do all of our stuff on computers now, including interim exams and things like that, and I think that there’s going to be some work about de-linking from screens. I think we’re going to have to take this one step at a time.
I think that there’s a difference between the computer that’s sitting on your desk that you do work with in the classroom, and the computer and the screen that you have in your pocket that you’re using for your friends. The big issue is the intentionally addictive components of these devices and the algorithms that people use for them; that’s different than the computing that we do in school projects and things like that.
Will we ever be perfect? No, but I think that New York [which just banned smartphone use in schools] is going to be a very big experiment for whether or not a bell-to-bell [smartphone restriction] really works.
What would be evidence of success for New York City’s school smartphone ban?
It’s going to be very bumpy for the first six months. But I think that [the ban will be successful] if we see, in the course of a year, that there’s more attention, that kids are happier, that there’s more attendance in schools, and there’s fewer disciplinary issues. There’s going to be a lot of data, but frankly, the best data is going to be if kids feel more centered.
One of the reasons that New York wanted to make [the ban] bell to bell was so that when [students] are at recess, they’re actually playing with each other as opposed to looking at their phones.
I think that the data about achievement comes later. The data about success and well-being comes first. We are competing with this [smartphone]; we’re competing with the devices. If we don’t actually engage kids so that they feel like, “I want to go to school,” we’re not going to win them back.