Clinton gets American Federation of Teachers endorsement

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Saturday July 11, 2015 · 4:04 PM PDT

2015/07/11 · 16:04

The American Federation of Teachers endorsed Hillary Clinton for President.

Clinton's support from the AFT comes, at least in part, from the fact that she has distanced herself from President Obama's embrace of school "reformers." The teachers and their union are behind Clinton because her position is clear:

It is just dead wrong to make teachers the scapegoats for all of society's problems. Where I come from, teachers are the solution. And I strongly believe that unions are part of the solution, too.

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Clinton has overwhelming support from the AFT's membership, according to Randi Weingarten, the union's leader and a long-time Clinton ally. Clinton previously worked with Weingarten when she was head of the NYC teacher's union and Clinton was a Senator from New York.

In a meeting with the National Education Association, which has yet to endorse a candidate, Mrs. Clinton said:

Education is not just how well you do on a test. We know about a lot of different learning modes ant not every child learns the same way. We have funneled our kids into a particular educational model that I don’t think will ever produce the looked for results.
I would like to see us get back to looking at individual children, looking at age appropriate learning experiences, looking at enriching the classroom experience, using tests that are not done for the sake of getting a score but for actually diagnosing the needs of kids and helping those kids do better year after year.

The NEA backed Clinton in 2008 and is likely to do so again in this election.

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