Teachers Union Head Blames COVID School Closures on Trump, Says Biden ‘Gets Reopening Done’
Amid reports of severe learning loss suffered by American children during school closures, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten is trying to deflect the blame for the widespread school closures onto the Trump administration.
“While former President Donald Trump and his education secretary, Ms. [Betsy] DeVos, ranted and raved, their successors put the safety measures in place to get reopening done,” Weingarten claimed in a letter published Sunday in The Wall Street Journal.
The letter is a response to the newspaper’s earlier editorial, which called out the AFT for driving the nationwide shutdown of schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as its recent effort to rewrite history and rebrand itself as a champion of school reopening.
‘You Flunked the Pandemic, Randi’: WSJ
The AFT has left a trail of attempts to make it harder for schools to reopen for in-person instruction. A publicized email exchange between the AFT and the CDC shows that the union successfully lobbied the health agency to modify its school reopening guidelines, allowing teachers and staff living with a “high-risk” person to work remotely, and demanding that schools in communities with high COVID-19 case levels stay closed pending updated guidelines. When the CDC revised its school-distancing guidelines from 6 feet to 3, Weingarten opposed the change, declaring that the union was “not convinced that the evidence supports changing physical distancing requirements at this time.”
“After the first months of COVID uncertainty, the school shutdowns had nothing to do with safety,” the WSJ editorial board argued, pointing to a collapse in American 8-year-olds’ math and reading scores. “You flunked the pandemic, Randi, and set back America’s children for years.”
Instead of directly addressing the role the AFT played in prolonged school closures—which directly translated to learning loss, Weingarten equated the criticism of her organization with
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