Reaching Out to an AFT Teacher Regarding the Dangers of AI

An article appeared in the most recent issue of American Educator that featured a discussion with three AI-trained teachers, Elisa Leonard, Cal Siebenmark, and Louis Venagro.  On April 7, I sent the following letter to one of those teachers who was on the receiving end of the AI mushroom treatment devised by the Tech Bros and promoted by AFT.

Good morning, Cal—

I read with interest, as well as a degree of alarm, your contribution to the AI promo piece in the Spring 2026 issue of AFT’s American Educator.  While your surely identifed some of your reservations and fears related to AI, I did not see anywhere in the dialogue a mention of the existential threats posed by AI development if corporations and nation states continue down the unmonitored roads they are now  toward the ultimate goal, AGI (artificial general intelligence). 

The prospect of AGI loose in the world without the benefit (to humanity) of human constraints is the principal reason dozens of AI experts signed on to a statement that  puts the risks of AI in the most unvarnished terms: 

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." 

Presently, we have no regulatory bodies patrolling for reckless AI research/development and no coordination among regulatory bodies even if we did. 

This is not my opinion but, rather, a sad fact that management at Anthropic, ChatGPT, and Microsoft are fully aware of, as witnessed by Anthropic’s most recent decision to delay the public release of their latest AI model because of its capacity to hack every computer security system in the world.  Even so, none of AI’s existential threats are discussed in the teacher training institutes that prepare smart, well-intentioned people like yourself to become promoters of unregulated technologies that have proven unsafe for children and unsafe for the security and continued existence of humankind.

The leadership of AFT is also aware of the many present and potential dangers.  I encourage you and other teachers who have been through these training institutes to come together to create AI literacy curriculums that can be used to educate children at every level about the psychological, economic, and sociocultural dangers of AI and how to avoid them. (By the way, I’m not a union basher—I was a member of AFT until my retirement in 2024.)

As a teacher voice on the front line of AI implementation, I implore you to become fully educated about the threats of AI, as I and millions of others are doing at this time.  Please visit the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) for more resources that will lead to further in-depth resources.  

I have been a blogger at Schools Matter for over 20 years, and I have recently come to the conclusion that while schools do still matter a lot, the one thing that matters the most is societally-responsible control of AI development and implementation. Without it, I believe humanity is doomed.

What altered my vision, you might ask.  I saw this documentary, for which I have no financial interest whatsoever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkPbV3IRe4Y

I am reaching out to you because of your youth and optimism about technology, which reminds me of myself when I was a young educator and the Web was just coming on in the early 1990s.  I am still an enthusiast for how technology can be beneficial to learning, but I have become very much aware of how the goals of committed educational professionals can be hijacked by tech companies and corporate ed reformers who are selling solutions in search of a problem. 

The Silicon Valley tech bros' current solution, AI, could be the final one.  

With all sincerity and respect,

James Horn, PhD

AFT Pushes Boston Public Schools to Become Part of AI Scourge in the Classroom

 

This could not have happened without a push from BTU—an AFT affiliate. Randi Weingarten, who heads the AFT, has been working overtime to promote her $$$ deal with tech bros to “train” teachers to bring this shit into the classroom: www.schoolsmatter.info/2025/07/aft-...

[image or embed]

— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) April 6, 2026 at 1:31 PM

A New Labor Day: Back to the Future for Unions

What does “back to the future” mean?

The phrase “Back to the Future (Not the Movie)” is a powerful and evocative statement that speaks to a profound human desire – the yearning to return to a perceived “better” time, but with the crucial caveat that it’s not merely a nostalgic fantasy or a superficial imitation. It represents a deeper, more nuanced longing for a return to fundamental values, principles, or ways of life that have been lost or diminished in the relentless march of progress. This concept taps into anxieties about modernity, technological advancement, and the erosion of community and connection. It suggests a desire to recapture something essential from the past, not as a literal recreation, but as a source of wisdom and guidance for navigating the complexities of the present and future.

To remind us of what that might mean for unions, check out a guest essay by Erik Loomis in the NYTimes this Labor Day. A clip:

. . . . Despite this assault on their very existence, we have barely heard a peep from unions. Where is organized labor in the public fight to maintain union jobs, stop the stripping of the safety net and lead the fight for democracy? Other than some statements and angry speeches, the movement has been muted.

If the labor movement wants to fight for its survival, it must return to mass mobilization tactics, reminding Americans that their rights come through working together — not through supporting a president who talks about helping American workers while slashing worker safety regulations, supporting tariffs that raise the cost of consumer goods and stripping workers of their legal rights to contracts. . . .

For education unions to follow this good advice, it will require the surgical removal of The Union Reform Network (TURN) cancer that was introduced into AFT by corporate titan, Eli Broad, and AFT’s own corporate collaborator, Adam Urbanski, and which has been inherited and nurtured by the current AFT President, Randi Weingarten.

For a case study of one union becoming the tool of corporate overlords, follow the links:

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2012/07/paul-toner-and-turncoats.html

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2012/12/paul-toner-from-turncoat-to-collaborator.html

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2012/06/attention-all-teachers-your-union.html

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2013/12/beginning-to-understand-how-corped-came.html

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2014/07/understanding-why-turn-cancer-has-to-be.html

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2017/11/weingarten-aft-very-much-aligned-with.html

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2017/10/ravitch-embraces-turn-agenda-openly.html

The Growing Call to Rein in AFT’s Embrace of AI

Here’s how TruthDig contributor, Nolan Higdon, summed up Weingarten’s crucial role in bringing unsafe AI technology into teacher rooms and student classrooms:

. . . .Big Tech’s push into education isn’t about learning. It’s about market capture. Schools offer a captive, young audience — ready to be mined for data, shaped into obedient users and sold to advertisers. These AI companies don’t want to “teach students about AI.” They want to define AI for them — framing it as inevitable, neutral and beneficial. They certainly won’t highlight its limitations, dangers or environmental toll.

They won’t teach that AI reflects the biases of its creators. They won’t teach that “AI” today is little more than a marketing label for probabilistic autocomplete systems. They won’t highlight examples like xAI’s Grok promoting Hitler rhetoric, or how AI routinely fails basic logical reasoning. And they won’t teach students how algorithmic systems entrench inequality or why surveillance-based models are fundamentally at odds with democratic education.

As shocking as AFT’s sellout is, it’s not the first time AFT President Randi Weingarten, who spent about three years as a full-time teacher, collectively, in her career, has cozied up to corporate power. Under her leadership, AFT has backed NewsGuard, a military-industrial-adjacent “news literacy” tool, and co-hosted an AI conference between AFT and Microsoft that turned out to be a Big Tech trade show. I was there. It wasn’t education — it was marketing.

This latest deal couldn’t have happened without her. As Bahat told Time magazine,“The critical thing here is that it was led by a worker organization. Randi and the AFT really drove this process.”

Let’s be clear: Any union that signs off on corporate control of the classroom isn’t defending education — it’s selling it off. It’s not just shortsighted. It’s reckless. It undermines labor. It undermines public education. And it hands over power to some of the most anti-worker, anti-democratic corporations in existence. If the AFT stays on this path, it won’t just become irrelevant — it will forfeit the right to call itself a labor union. We can’t build a just society by aligning with the very forces hollowing it out.

AFT, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Public School Guinea Pigs

In 2023 the AFL-CIO signed an agreement with Microsoft that both parties hoped would benefit their respective organizations. The sixty unions that comprise AFL-CIO would get a promise of neutrality from Microsoft and its suppliers in the event that workers in any of those companies wanted to join a union. Microsoft also agreed to not interfere with union efforts to organize workers.  

Microsoft and companies where Microsoft has significant stake such as OpenAI would get access to those 60 unions and their members in order to proselytize for AI, create problems for AI to solve, and to train workers to use AI tools to solve them.

The first union to cash in on Microsoft’s new marketing strategy for its chatbot product line turns out to be the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), whose president, Randi Weingarten, has previously embraced Microsoft technologies developed and marketed for schools (see here and here and here and here.  

On July 8 of this year, AFT, Microsoft, and Anthropic announced a deal that will provide AFT with $23 million to open an AI training facility in New York City that will be the hub for a joint project to train 400,000 teachers nationwide:

The $23 million in combined support is structured as follows: Microsoft is contributing $12.5 million over five years, OpenAI is providing $8 million in direct funding plus $2 million in technical resources, and Anthropic is adding $500,000 in first-year support. This collaboration represents a significant commitment from the tech industry to ensure educators are central to the development of AI in education.

Unfortunately for America’s public school students, AFT’s and Microsoft’s deal to get ChatGBT into classrooms comes with unknown costs for the developing brains of students.  The research on the effects of AI on children and adults is sparse, and the full-speed-ahead approach of AFT is not borne out by the research that doesexist. 

We know, in fact, from a recently published study, Microsoft’s own researchers found that . . . "while GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving. Higher confidence in GenAI’s ability to perform a task is related to less critical thinking effort.”

The research was conducted with 319 adult knowledge workers, who we might expect would have a greater capacity to self-regulate than developing children and adolescents. Even so “overreliance on the tool” was noted as a significant concern.

The problem of A.I. mission creep is noted, too, by Yale poet and professor, Meghan O’Rourke, in a recent New York Times guest essay: 

Students often turn to A.I. only for research, outlining and proofreading. The problem is that the moment you use it, the boundary between tool and collaborator, even author, begins to blur. First, students might ask it to summarize a PDF they didn’t read. Then — tentatively — to help them outline, say, an essay on Nietzsche. The bot does this, and asks: “If you’d like, I can help you fill this in with specific passages, transitions, or even draft the opening paragraphs?”

At that point, students or writers have to actively resist the offer of help. You can imagine how, under deadline, they accede, perhaps “just to see.” And there the model is, always ready with more: another version, another suggestion, and often a thoughtful observation about something missing.

Creepiest of all the research and reflections I have cited in this post is the recounting from Meghan O’Rourke’s guest essay for the New York Times.  After a month of experimenting and utilizing A.I. bots, she found herself under a spell cast by her new assistant, which left her soothed, yet uneasy:

A month in, I noticed a strange emotional charge from interacting daily with a system that seemed to be designed to affirm me. When I fed it a prompt in my voice and it returned a sharp version of what I was trying to say, I felt a little thrill, as if I’d been seen. Then I got confused, as if I were somehow now derivative.

In talking to me about poetry, ChatGPT adopted a tone I found oddly soothing. When I asked what was making me feel that way, it explained that it was mirroring me: my syntax, my vocabulary, even the “interior weather” of my poems. (“Interior weather” is a phrase I use a lot.) It was producing a fun-house double of me — a performance of human inquiry. I was soothed because I was talking to myself — only it was a version of myself that experienced no anxiety, pressure or self-doubt. The crisis this produces is hard to name, but it was unnerving.

What’s the likelihood that children could be negatively influenced or actually damaged by these bots? What’s the rush?  Oh, I almost forgot—you never pause or even walk during a gold rush.  Faster, faster, before someone corners the market. 

The difference between the current high tech fix for education and all the failed ones that came before is that this one has the potential to alter what it means to be human. Haven’t children been abused enough by Silicon Valley??

Ken Derstine on Randi Weingarten, Part 1

Randi Weingarten: Sleight of Hand Artist - Part 1

Ken Derstine
April 19, 2015

On April 13, 2015 American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten appeared on the Tavis Smiley show to have a conversation about the state of public education in the United States.

In the course of the conversation (14:20 minutes into the video), Tavis Smiley relates a meeting that he had with high school students in Detroit and how he was struck at how all of the students “do not buy into teaching to the test” and saw standardized tests as detrimental to their education.

Randi Weingarten responded (15:42) that schools need more hands on engagement such as happens at some Career/Tech Education schools. She said there should be multiple assessments for students to demonstrate learning.

However, embedded in her flowery talk about the need for multiple assessments, later in the interview, she supports the Senate version of the revised Education and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that calls for annual testing. The reason she gives that annual testing is needed (21:14) is that “civil rights leaders” say we need the tests so kids from low-income families “are not invisible”.

Weingarten also says the ESEA rewrite adopted by the Senate education committee and now going to debate in the full Senate says equity must be part of how schools are funded, but she is OK with leaving this up to the states, which is a guarantee of inequity because it depends on where you live. It may also be an attempt to defuse the Opt Out movement which will have to deal with each states different sets of standardized testing standards, which could splinter the national Opt Out movement into fifty pieces. This makes it all the more important that the Opt Out movement reject Weingarten’s endorsement of annual testing and unite around a policy of no standardized testing of any sort to rank students, teachers and schools.

Weingarten does not address Tavis Smiley’s question about students being opposed to standardized tests because they are of no benefit to their education. She does not mention in the conversation the burgeoning Opt Out movement. Nor does she disclose that she has been working for years with The Gates Foundation and The Broad Foundation to create a teacher evaluation system based on standardized test scores.

The depth of her involvement with corporate education reform was revealed on February 5^th, 2015 at a conference of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. At the conference the paper “Singing from the Same Hymnbook”: Education Policy Advocacy at Gates and Broad” was discussed. The paper revealed (page 16 and 17) that between 2000-2012, Weingarten testified three times with corporate education reformers about their attempt to create a teacher evaluation system based on standardized tests.

As “Singing from the Same Hymnbook” stated of Weingarten’s testimony before Congress (Page 18 and 19):

Weingarten remained strongly committed to the collective bargaining process, but she also signaled a willingness to negotiate pay for performance systems. Weingarten’ s fellow panelists at the hearing were eager to note their alignment with the union leader. For example, Tim Daly of The New Teacher Project observed, “Secretary Duncan and some of my fellow panelists, including Randi Weingarten, are among those calling for more rigorous evaluation systems that recognize these differences.”

Shortly after Daly’s testimony, Professor Thomas Kane of Harvard University (and lead researcher on the Gates-funded Measures of Effective Teaching project), commented on Weingarten’ s cooperation with Measures of Effective Teaching: “Randi Weingarten deserves a lot of credit for supporting that effort, even when it was not easy.”

Citing the need for standardized tests to prevent “low-income kids from becoming invisible”, a perspective that many former civil rights leaders have been bought into. The standardized testing regime that Weingarten is supporting does make students from low income families visible, but it does the opposite of what is claimed. Standardized tests are being used to target schools and teachers in low-income communities for closure or turnaround from a public to a charter school for the profit of charter management companies. What the corporate reformers are creating is a two-tier education system segregating students by family income.

Weingarten was rewarded for her three appearances before Congress in support of teacher evaluation based on standardized tests. As stated in “Singing From the Same Hymnbook” (Page 17):

Overall, a pattern emerged wherein Gates and Broad increased advocacy grant

funding to groups that gave frequent testimony—defined as three or more appearances before Congress from 2000 to 2012. Advocacy grant dollars to these groups grew by more than $12 million from 2005 to 2010—well above the overall growth in funding for national advocacy groups.

As part of this group, up until 2013 (when an outcry from AFT members caused the AFT leadership to say they supposedly would no longer take money from The Gates Foundation), the AFT was given $11,343,925 by The Gates Foundation.

Earlier in the conversation on his show (10:15), Tavis Smiley asked Randi Weingarten about the involvement of hedge fund managers, Bill Gates, and Eli Broad in public education. Weingarten responded (11:20) that due to one of the worst recessions since the Great Depression, school-systems, especially urban and rural school-systems, were desperate for money and the “philanthropies” stepped in to help out.

Weingarten gives as a second reason for corporate “philanthropy”:

What Eli Broad, what Bill Gates, what others really believe, they really believe this, that the effort of a teacher is directly correlative to the success of the student. They really believe that, and that you can measure that by an English or Math test score.  So if all you do is shake the teacher up than that student will do better.

So once again, we have a sleight of hand. What she presents as benevolent “philanthropy” is an embedded apologia for corporate education reform, that they mean well but they just misunderstand teaching and tests.

What is actually happening to public education has all of the characteristics of a hostile takeover that are a constant churn in the corporate world. Even before the recession, the public schools were increasingly starved of resources to advance a corporate reform agenda of privatization of public education. The goal of privatization of public schools is to make taxpayer dollars available for corporate profit. Weingarten never acknowledges a hostile intent by corporate education reform, but presents them as well intentioned corporate entities looking out for the common good.

Perhaps Weingarten’s steering the viewers of The Tavis Smiley Show away from this understanding can be attributed to her more than ten year collaboration with the Gates Foundation and The Broad Foundation. Weingarten’s method is to say in public (within limits) - on talk shows, in speaking to the corporate media, and to her loyal supporters in the AFT - what a teachers’ union leader would be expected to say. The corporate media sees her as the go-to person for the teacher point of view. Behind the scenes, however, is another story hidden in plain sight, of the collaboration of the president of the AFT with corporate education reform.

Also see:

Turning “collaboration” Into a Bad Word | Defend Public Education!

Is Corporate Education Reform Trying to Coopt the Opt Out movement? Defend Public Education!

Talking to the Choir: AEI panels discuss their attack on public education | Defend Public Education!

Which Side Are You On? | Defend Public Education!

AFT Works to Prop Up Biggest Threat to Public Schools

by Abigail Shure

I would hate to be selfish, but it really galls me that the AFT president is wasting resources that my colleagues and I have invested in the union on imposter teachers who chose to upend the system and the hard-fought-for gains. 

Public school teachers have to work with any child who walks in the door whether he arrives on day one, or any other. He could be homeless, hungry, sick, or have special needs. I have had students threatening to commit suicide and one student, who had not taken his meds, was walking on tables. Those charter school teachers should spend a few class periods educating nonverbal autistic children. In one class discussion, every student knew personally someone who had been shot.

I have certification and many years of experience in my area of expertise. I was treated like complete garbage by my district. My moronic union president assisted some charter school teachers pro bono because they had not been paid their salaries. In New York City, the UFT allows the ATR debacle to fester year after year.

Instead of promoting the demise of public education by charter schools, I would be pleased if the AFT president spent more of her energy protecting the teachers who elevated her to her position.

The Education Spring and the Irrelevance of AFT/NEA

What do West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona have in common?  If you answered that they are states where teacher-led walkouts have resulted in gains in funding for teachers and school resources, you would be right, of course.  They are also right-to-work states where AFT and NEA influences are negligible.

The NYTimes Sunday Review had a piece this week that argued that the gains that are accruing to the teachers in these states will be short-lived without "strong unions."  I would agree with this if there were any strong national unions to choose from, but since AFT and NEA offer unhealthy choices that are more like Burger King or McDonalds than providing any substantive difference, then we are left with false choices, both of which are bad for you.

The Times piece offers the union in Racine, WI as an example of a strong union that has been effective in limiting class size, gaining resources, and increasing salaries.  Note that Racine is a local effort and not one headed by a bloated union hierarchy that pays its presidents almost a half-million dollars a year for doing PR for outfits that are in cahoots with the corporate education deformers.

The historic six-day wildcat strike in Arizona was led by a grassroots organization, Arizona Educators United (AEU), not the dress-up-and-go-to-a-luncheon crowd who run Arizona's NEA affiliate, AEA.  The future of teacher activism in AZ or elsewhere will not be in the hands of NEA or AFT functionaries who take hard earned teacher dues for nothing in return except the promise of supporting state candidates who, either Democrat or Republican, don't care a whit about the lives of public school teachers or their students.

The sad truth is that teachers around Arizona and the U.S. have been sending NEA and AFT hundreds of millions of dollars every year for, essentially, for liability insurance and some discount coupons for car insurance.

If organizations like AEU kept their dues money at home, they could build a legal defense fund that could support their actions in the streets and in the courts and in parent/student coalition building, where the battle to save public education will be fought and won.

Yes, it is time for strong unions for sure, which is bad news for NEA, AFT, and all their affiliates who stand by talking tough as teachers and children are abused, neglected, and humiliated by corporate education reformers and efficiency zealots trained to run businesses, rather than schools.

In my class on Sunday in Boston, a teacher told me about losing all their librarians in their system and 67 other faculty and staff. Another told me about losing all their ELL teachers, even though their student population is almost half English language learners.  This is in MA, where union membership is almost universal and collective bargaining is a fact of life.  The Education Spring has to grow in places like MA, too, which have, thus far, seemed immune from teacher activism outside the NEA/AFT bureaucratic stranglehold.

Children are being harmed.  That's the only justification any teacher needs stand up and to do whatever needs to be done to stop it.  Your AFT and NEA are not helping.

CTU/AFT's Pathetic Rationale for Caving to the Charter Industry

AFT apologist, Michael Fiorillo, continues his defense of the indefensible move in Chicago that effectively normalizes the corrupt and dehumanizing charter schools.  

My comments are interspersed:

Your reasoning is faulty, as is your understanding of politics.

Which is more likely, that "The People" will suddenly realize what charter schools truly are, rise up and eliminate them (which is my preferred outcome), or that, faced with a rising number of union contracts, a fickle Overclass looks elsewhere to loot, or tries a different vehicle for its looting?

The “Overclass” has no incentive to “look elsewhere to loot” as long as AFT has provided its seal of approval to the status quo.  Why would the charter industry fear the union, especially when the deal in Chicago provides no unified bargaining for those charter employees now rolled into the CTU?  The charter overseers can continue their exploitative, miseducative, non-professional, and abusive practices just as before, except for now they have union sponsorship. 

If the “Overclass” were at all concerned about the AFT “threat,” they would not have just announced the corporate charter takeoverof Puerto Rico’s public schools, where there are 32,000 AFT members among the island’s 45,000 teachers.  Do you think they give a dam how many AFT members there are in Puerto Rico, especially when Weingarten offers up such tepid remarks in response the the takeover?  Doubtless, she has already cut a deal to make sure the newly-exploited teachers on the island can retain the union membership.

As to the possibility of people realizing what “charter schools really are,” the AFT has to own the fact that it has done nothing to help educate the public.  In fact, AFT’s complicity with the charter industry extends to the actual creation of AFT’s own charter schools.  

Why would underprivileged parents think that charters are a bad idea, when AFT and NPE, forever spouting about social justice, support the continuation of thousands of these hell schools, with no end in sight.

Indeed, both AFT and NPE heartily endorsed the latest ESEA version known as ESSA, which offers expanded incentives for the accelerated opening of thousands of new “no excuses” charter schools.

Dr. Fiorillo continues:

I have my problems with what the CTU is doing, but things are so desperate that I don't see an alternative to bringing these teachers into the union, and using that as the potential - emphasis on "potential" - vehicle for culling charter schools, and integrating the worthy ones into the public system as legitimate schools.

What precisely is your plan to minimize the number and effects of charter schools, and who do you propose to implement it, if charter teacher remain unorganized? Short of an answer to that, it's all just posing.

This fanciful notion of leveraging charter teacher union membership as a way to alter the paternalistic organization of the “Broken Windows” No Excuses model of charter reform schools would be laughable if it did not have such tragic implications for both the teachers and children, who suffer daily in these dehumanizing sweat shop schools.  

With CTU/AFT’s recognition of the charter industry’s unprofessional corrections officers posing as teachers, the unionists have normalized the cultural sterilization practices of charter schools, while at the same time spewing meaningless rhetoric about social justice commitments.

I must say the ridiculousness of AFT’s argument does not surprise me, for, after all, there is no sensible rationale for what AFT is doing that does not admit to the fact that the unions are in bed with the Wall Street Dems of charter industry.  And that they will never admit.  

Meanwhile, they are stuck exactly where AFT/NEA/NPE support for the Clintons took them.  The Clintons, by the way, have never felt the need for silly cover stories to disguise their long-established endorsement of charter schools.  Under Bill Clinton, you may remember, the number of charter schools went from zero to 2,000.

As for AFT’s misleadership, Randi Weingarten remains, Trump-like, stuck in her own Twitter-verse, where she endlessly provides commentary on every subject other than AFT’s enabling of the charter industry.  Her lame remarks about the wholesale privatization of schools in Puerto Rico are emblematic of her do-nothing approach when faced with the all-out war on public schools everywhere.

As for what I would do, Dr. Fiorillo, other than taking the union route of capitulating to the charter industry, here’s a few things for the unimaginative “unionists” to consider, none of which are presently being practiced by teachers' unions that are sitting atop billions of unused dollars:

1. Organize every local union chapter in the nation to resist charter schools.  Make it a part of every every negotiations session a demand that no public money be spent for any school, either brick-and-mortar or online, that is privately managed, by either a non-profit or for-profit enterprise that is not subject to same oversight and regulations as the public schools.
2. Hold ongoing parent information sessions within the communities to educate parents on the dangers of charter schools to their children.
3. Provide ongoing public service announcements to appeal to charter school employees to gain professional credentials that would enable them to work in public schools.
4. Let charter school employees understand the benefits of union membership, and make it clear that those benefits are not available to charter school employees who are constrained by the abusive practices of charter sweat shop management.
5. Create a national movement calling for an immediate moratorium on the creation of new charter schools.
6. Engage with the media to create venues for debating the charter school question and to share information regarding the public school advantage.
7. Help to recruit and support political candidates, from local to national, who understand the anti-democratic threat that the charter school industry embodies. 
8. Provide funding for ongoing research into the economic and social effects of charter schools on employees, students, parents, and public education systems.
9. Make it clear that charter schools, which are staffed predominantly by women who are mismanaged by paternalistic and ignorant males posing as principals, represent an ongoing offense to women employees everywhere.
10. Inform teachers about the existential threat of charter schools to the profession of teaching and to the well-being of children and democratic communities.
11. Organize parents and teachers to show up at school board meetings at the state and local levels to make their demands known about ending the charter industry’s war on public schools.