The National Assessment of Educational Progress shows the first-ever drop in math and the largest fall in reading in over 30 years. The nation’s report card results show black children had an even bigger collapse in scores.
We know closing schools are to blame. It wasn’t COVID. It was a hyper-political over reaction to reopening schools during the pandemic.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued the directives. Kids had to be kept six feet apart in classrooms and then switched to three feet in the 2021 school year. No one knows why. It made no sense.
Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, kept flipping back and forth on school opening before finally settling on the partisan position of arguing that Biden’s spending plan must pass before schools could open. This was in February 2021, when schools had been open for months.
The individual to do the most damage to children was President of American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten. An uber-left activist, Weingarten pushes her ideas into schools regularly, and was instrumental in keeping schools closed. After we were divided into “essential” and “nonessential,” Weingarten made sure that public schools were non.
Teachers who know that her influence has been a disaster for the children of this country should say so. She wasn’t protecting you, she was flexing her political power and showing she was boss. That came at a high cost for kids. A cost we will be paying long after Randi Weingarten has left the stage.
She seems blind that her insistence on turning schools into liberal indoctrination centers is a root cause of the national teacher shortage.
Last month Randi was praising the Inflation Reduction Act because it includes roughly $300 billion spent to slay climate change while doing nothing to improve education outcomes. It provided teachers a pronoun card including a question asking whether the students want their parents to know about their pronouns. AFT’s “Share My Lesson” website promoted using the cards in all grade levels.
Not only teachers need to demand her firing. Democrats like Patty Murray and Suzan DelBene need to own what they’ve done by giving this woman power. Since 2020, 1.2 million kids have left public schools. If you believe in public schools, you need to understand that Randi killed the system.
The Biden administration allowed Weingarten to craft school-opening policy for the CDC, and Democrats nationwide let Weingarten pressure them to keep schools closed. The NAEP results are theirs as much as Weingarten’s. If they don’t show her the door, it is a clear message: We see these results and the damage caused to children, but we don’t care.
She used kids as pawns for funds from the Biden administration before she’d open schools. She won because Democrats rely on her donations. But the kids lost. The money is unspent. As late as summer 2021, Randi Weingarten was refusing to commit to open schools. They continue to lose because of her leadership. The only way to open schools is to remove her from blocking the door.
Individual teachers are heroes and did the best they could. Plenty taught in person as early as fall 2020. But teachers need to understand that the face of their union is an anti-child activist who has done more harm to education in this country than anyone else. She has destroyed the relationship between parents and schools. She has led a divisive, politicized campaign to stop parental involvement. She does harm to us all.
