COVID school closures were a disaster.
Rather than apologize, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten just misrepresented her position.
She said, “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open. We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools.”
VIDEO:
AFT President Randi Weingarten: “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open. We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools.” pic.twitter.com/1qNL05VD3u
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) April 26, 2023
Members of Congress investigating policy decisions made during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic focused on education Wednesday as the head of one of the country’s largest teachers’ unions appeared on Capitol Hill.
American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus pandemic, some of whose members allege she and her organization helped edit federal guidance for reopening schools.
Twitter users were having none of it – Twitter added context to the tweet.
They said, “Weingarten is misrepresenting her prior positions. She called attempts to reopen schools in the fall of 2020 “Reckless, callous, cruel.”
The Guardian reported (July 17th, 2020):
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, told the Guardian she watched Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, with disbelief that turned to anger when she appeared on TV this week to call on schools to be “fully operational” this fall.
“It’s as if Trump and DeVos want to create chaos and want to jeopardize reopening,” Weingarten said in an interview. “There’s no other reason why they would be this reckless, this callous, this cruel.”
They pointed out that her union pushed for closures at a local level and that areas with high union influence had their schools closed longer.
Even so, a couple of early studies have suggested that teachers’ unions are driving school districts’ reopening decisions more so than COVID-19 infection rates in the community.
One working paper by two political science professors looked at more than 10,000 school districts’ reopening plans for this school year and found that districts with stronger unions, as measured by district size and whether there’s collective bargaining, were less likely to hold in-person classes. (Experts note that district size is not a fail-safe measure of union strength.)
A policy brief published by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative firm, examined the reopening decisions in more than 400 Wisconsin school districts and found that districts with a teachers’ union were more likely to continue remote classes this fall. Community infection rates did not play a significant role in the decision to reopen, the paper asserted. (About half of districts in the state have a local teachers’ union.)
It was recently exposed that The American Federation of Teachers was more involved with the CDC’s re-opening guidance for schools than previously known.
The American Federation of Teachers was more deeply involved with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s school reopening guidance from February 2021 than previously known, emails and documents seen by The Post show.
Powerful AFT boss Randi Weingarten spoke twice by phone with CDC Director Rochelle Walensky in the week leading up to the Feb. 12, 2021, announcement that halted full re-opening of in-person classes — including the day before the guidance was released, according to records obtained by the conservative watchdog Americans for Public Trust.
AFT and its fellow union, the National Education Association, also asked the White House and CDC for help shaping its press strategy to show the rank-and-file they and the Biden administration were on the same page, emails reveal.
The extent of the unions’ role in government policy was revealed the day before Weingarten is set to face a House select subcommittee hearing about the effects of school closures on America’s kids.
This is what happens when a Big Tech outlet allows free speech on its platform – the truth is exposed.