Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac DeVair.

Basically, Betsy DeVos is dismantling the entire civil rights commitment in the education department.

That has been there since Lyndon Johnson.

So she's in the midst of dismantling all that.

And the second thing... What does that mean?

What it means is that if I am a kid in Texas, and I think that something has happened to me that, you know, has been terrible, that I'm not getting a decent education and somebody

right next door who happens to be of a different

color is. I used to be able to go to the education department and say, wait a second,

something's wrong here. Today's guest, Randy Weingarten, president of the American

Federation of Teachers, the main teachers union, and one of the more prominent labor leaders in the country. I've known Wygarten since she was the head of the United

Federation of Teachers, her union's New York chapter, and I was covering politics in New York. She

was a big part of the debates over charter schools and teacher tenure, Mike Bloomberg's takeover

of authority for the city school system from the way it had been to that point,

and is in most other places, with the state government in charge.

How big of a political force was she?

Well, when Hillary Clinton left her Senate seat to be Secretary of State in 2009,

Weingarten was given serious consideration, and some tellings was one of the finalists,

for the appointment which ultimately went to Kirsten Gillibrand. That didn't work out for her, but not long after, she moved to Washington

and took over the National Union in an office that has a straight shot view of the Capitol

Dome right up New Jersey Avenue, which is where we sat down. She started off by showing me a

big blown-up paragraph she'd written, which she said she'd come up with on Martin Luther King Jr. weekend this year.

But first reminded me that, of course, she'd been a social studies teacher for six years herself.

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