If your child didn’t attend school regularly last year, Randi Weingarten is likely the reason why.
No wonder why the American Federation of Teachers boss has launched a soft-focus rehabilitation campaign in the media. Her p.r. people are working overtime to make us forget that no single public actor has done more to hurt kids, and education overall, in the last year.
Last week, The Washington Post ran an adoring interview with Weingarten, the latest in a string of carefully placed pieces in friendly outlets aimed at fixing her shattered reputation. Here she is “taking a strong stand”; there she is calling “for reopening all classrooms next year.”
It’s gaslighting, and the record must be set straight.
Last September, as schools across the country were trying to open, Weingarten could be counted on to oppose any such move. “If community spread is too high . . . if you don’t have the infrastructure of testing, and if you don’t have the safeguards that prevent the spread of viruses in the school, we believe that you cannot reopen in person,” Weingarten said.
It was nonsense. Other countries had long opened their schools by that point, and we had real-world models for making in-person school work. Schools in Europe had opened without masking, without social distancing and with no “infrastructure of testing.”
The Europeans put kids first, resting safe on (scientific) evidence that kids are at minuscule risk from the virus and spread it at a much lower rate than do adults. Weingarten was determined to put kids last.
In February, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was finally going to issue guidance urging full reopening of in-person schooling, the AFT successfully lobbied for language that kept schools closed.
The next month, when the CDC finally did the sane thing and changed its social-distancing guideline for schools to 3 feet (from 6), Weingarten wrote a letter questioning the change and demanding yet more “safety” concessions.
Weingarten’s local underboss, Mike Mulgrew, followed her anti-child lead lockstep throughout the pandemic.
Parental anti-union rage is naturally at a fever pitch, and the prestige press is here to help Weingarten tamp it down, with headlines like this one from Politico in May: “The Biden Campaign and Teachers Unions Are Mounting a Campaign to Return American Children to Classrooms Five Days a Week.”
But American children living in areas not under the union thumb were already largely in classrooms five days a week. Even in blue cities and states, parochial and private schools managed just fine.
When challenged about success stories — such as Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis resisted union bullying and made sure schools across the state opened for full-time learning — Weingarten regurgitated the oft-debunked conspiracy theory about the Sunshine State somehow hiding its real COVID data.
The Biden administration, too, is predictably backing Weingarten’s efforts to whitewash her stained image. First Lady Jill Biden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona both tweeted support at Weingarten, pretending she hadn’t been the one blocking the schoolhouse door.
But is Team Biden really sure Weingarten deserves support?
Who can forget her interview with Jewish Telegraphic Agency in March, in which Weingarten lied that “virtually every school district in New York state and in Connecticut is reopened, many of them have reopened in New Jersey”? In fact, Gotham middle and high schools ended the school year still mostly closed, while elementary schools would only open full-time at the end of April, weeks after the interview. Several districts in New Jersey didn’t open for in-person school this year at all.
In the same interview, Weingarten took aim at Jews who dared question why schools were still closed. Weingarten called them “the ownership class.” When casual Marxism, with bizarre anti-Semitic undertones, makes it into classrooms, it isn’t difficult to see where it originates.
Weingarten should be held and remembered in odium: a craven, bureaucratic monster who did everything within her power to keep schools closed — science, and kids, be damned.
Twitter: @Karol