Kamala Harris backs teachers unions and LGBTQ rights, blasts book bans in AFT speech

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In one of her first speeches since becoming the likely Democratic nominee for president, Kamala Harris delivered a fiery call to teachers and other union members to back her vision for America’s future.

That includes teaching the painful parts of U.S. history, protecting LGBTQ students and school staff from discrimination, and ensuring teachers aren’t pushed out of the profession by crippling student loan debt, she said.

“While you teach students about our nation’s past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history,” Harris told members of the American Federation of Teachers on Thursday at the union’s national convention in Houston. “We want to ban assault weapons, and they want to ban books.”

The AFT, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, was the first union to endorse Harris earlier this week , the vice president noted. The union represents some 1.8 million members, including teachers, school staff, college faculty, nurses, and other health care workers.

In her speech, Harris emphasized the importance of unions — noteworthy at a time when some cast teachers unions as working in opposition to students and families — and pledged to support them. She cited her experience leading a White House task force that helps workers organize and bargain collectively.

Harris also referred to herself as a “proud product of public education” and highlighted her first grade teacher, Frances Wilson, who encouraged her and later attended her law school graduation .

“I know who you are,” Harris said. “This work is personal, and it is professional, and it is so critically important. It is because of Mrs. Wilson and so many teachers like her that I stand before you.”

Harris spent much of her speech drawing contrasts between her agenda and the platform of Donald Trump , the Republican nominee seeking a second term as president. She also criticized Project 2025, a plan developed by former Trump officials that observers believe will influence Trump’s policy-making if he wins.

Harris characterized Project 2025 as “a plan to return America to a dark past.” She noted that it calls for eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, ending student loan forgiveness for public sector workers like teachers, and getting rid of Head Start , which provides early education to some 800,000 children from low-income families.

“Randi, can you believe they put that thing in writing?” Harris said to AFT President Randi Weingarten. Project 2025, Harris also noted, “would take away preschool from hundreds of thousands of our children.”

Harris emphasized the Biden administration’s work to forgive teachers’ student loan debt. She pointed to the example of Tonya Cabeza, a Philadelphia teacher who considered leaving the profession because she still had $40,000 in loan debt after making payments for 20 years. Her debt was forgiven under an administration policy last year .

Harris also drew attention to the wave of laws that have limited how teachers can talk about sexual orientation and gender identity in their classrooms . In 2004, Harris noted, she was one of the first officials in the country to officiate same-sex marriages.

“It pains me so,” she said, “to think 20 years later, that there are some young teachers in their twenties who are afraid to put up a photograph of themselves and their partner for fear they could lose their job.”

The Biden administration issued new rules earlier this year that say students and staff are protected from discrimination at school based on their sexual orientation and gender identity under Title IX, the federal civil rights law.

Republican lawmakers and officials have strongly opposed this interpretation and many are suing the Biden administration to block the new rules from taking effect. Those rules are on hold in at least 15 states.

In her first presidential campaign over four years ago, Harris said she would increase staff and funding to enforce the civil rights of LGBTQ students, and if elected president, she would likely be in the position of defending the new Title IX rules from any ongoing or future challenges.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org .