News Analysis
Randi Weingarten, the powerful president of the American Federation of Teachers, hasn’t been a working teacher in more than a quarter of a century.
Of the six years she spent teaching social studies, half of them appear to have been as a substitute. Yet despite the long absence from her short tenure in the classroom, the union leader described herself during a recent congressional hearing as being on leave from Brooklyn’s Clara Barton High School.
Through her decades of union activism, Weingarten has clocked service time as a public school teacher, enabling her to accrue an educators’ pension on top of the more than $500,000 in annual salary and benefits she earns as a labor executive, according to records obtained by the Freedom Foundation. She would receive about $230,000 total over her first 15 years of retirement, according to the public sector union watchdog’s analysis….