“I believe kids are resilient and kids will recover,” said American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten in February 2021 when asked about education loss from school closures nationwide.
Now the numbers are in. And they confirm what she denied but every parent knew: Closed schools hurt our kids.
Because of the senseless policies Weingarten championed, our youngest students are missing crucial reading benchmarks. One study shows about 35% of students K-2 missing reading benchmarks, vs. 21% in 2019. Another shows less than half of students in kindergarten (47%) and 1st grade (48%) in the 2021-22 school year are “on track” to learn to read. That’s down from 55% and 58% in 2019.
Does that look like “resilience”?
The racial stats are grimmer: Only 37% of black 1st graders are “on track” to hit those literacy benchmarks in 2021, down from 51% in 2019. For Hispanics, it’s 42%, down from 54%.
All the endless talk about “equity” from people like Weingarten was empty noise. She and her peers pushed rules that hurt the most vulnerable groups in America.
And for nothing. Younger kids are the least at-risk group for COVID. And schools are not major vectors for transmission.
Yet teachers unions and their political flunkies conspired to keep schools shut or partially remote for no good public health reason whatsoever, with Randi leading the charge.
From summer 2020 on — despite her later attempts to erase the record — she and the AFT fought bitterly against opening schools back up, despite recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics to open. She even got the CDC to slow-walk a return to in-person learning in its February guidance. Just last month, Weingarten suggested that masks stay on in schools until they reach zero transmission.
Now we see the fruit.
Chancellor David Banks talks about the “betrayal” of kids by the school system. But it applies to Weingarten, too: a total violation of the trust placed in educators by students and parents.
If her union wants to regain parents’ trust — and it needs to, desperately, given national public-school enrollment drops — it must boot Weingarten out, immediately. No sane parent will ever believe a word out of her mouth.