Editors at the Washington Examiner offer a harsh assessment of national teacher union leader Randi Weingarten.
In the run-up to the election, and also in the time since, Weingarten has been advocating a return to in-person schooling. She glosses over or even lies about the fact that no one did more than she and her organization to prevent the return to schools, even long after it was clear that the coronavirus posed no serious threat to children and that they were not prone to spreading it either. Weingarten’s reversal smacks of “gaslighting” — like an attempt to make people think they were mistaken about everything she used to say on the topic up to and including her threats to go on strike if school districts attempted to reopen in-person learning in fall 2020. …
… Their endorsed candidate was just defeated in an election in which the key issue was education. He lost for several complex reasons, but one of them clearly points to AFT as the culprit. With their children locked out of schools for months on end, just the way the teachers unions wanted, Northern Virginia parents were confronted simultaneously with two very unpleasant realities.
First, there was the damage that this extended distance learning did to their livelihoods. Second, they were finally exposed to something the educational bureaucracy had long hoped they would never see: the idiotic postmodern racialist ideologies that the public schools were pounding into their children’s heads. …
… Weingarten and her special interest allies were just trying to make sure teachers didn’t have to show up and work. Instead, they got more than they bargained for when they trapped themselves in the biggest political self-own of the decade.
The public must never forget how teachers unions conducted themselves during COVID-19. They did everything possible to keep the schools shut down everywhere they possibly could. They also treated Virginia parents with contempt for trying to be appropriately involved in their children’s schooling.
