Despite the corruption and obvious ineptitude of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, the union’s president, received an appointment to the influential Homeland Security Academic Partnership Council (HSAPC).
Weingarten’s responsibility is, superficially at least, to advise the White House on school safety issues. Rory Cooper, a former White House staffer, was present when the HSAPC was created and predicts that Weingarten’s council will “erect bureaucratic barriers – between parents and children, children and learning, and children and safety.”
With nobody formally representing the customer, the students and their parents, the council is determined to repeat some of Weingarten’s worst, nightmarish mistakes. Among them are her support for the Department of Justice targeting as threats concerned parents speaking on behalf of their children at local school board meetings, advocating for federal law enforcement to threaten parents vocally opposed to policies she supports and purposely conflating their concern, and even anger, as potential violence, a statement so radical that even the National School Boards Association walked it back.
The Weingarten-led AFT is a commanding political player. The AFT and the National Education Association (NEA) are major contributors to the Democratic Party. Big cash contributions explain Weingarten’s new assignment. NEA and AFT gave $43 million to advocacy groups in 2018 and 2019, with a large chunk going to Democratic-aligned organizations. In 2020, they heavily influenced federal elections through the NEA Advocacy Fund and the AFT Solidarity Fund, which spent $5.7 million and $1.5 million, respectively, on lobbying through October.
If evaluated on her teachers’ performances, Weingarten could not possibly be considered for a plum job that will bring her close to the White House’s inner sanctum. Consider that the National Center for Education Statistics showed that math and reading scores for 9-year-olds in the United States’ K-12 public school systems fell dramatically between 2020 and 2022. Reading scores declined by five points and by seven points in math in the years between COVID’s beginning and its end.
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said that the nation is in an education crisis, an understatement. Cardona admitted that the grim results are “alarming” and “disturbing.” Students already behind pre-COVID struggled more; their math scores fell by up to 12 points, and reading scores declined as much as 10 points. Math scores for black and Hispanic children were lower than those of white children. Black students declined by 13 points, and Hispanic students declined 8 points. Other fallout from shutting down schools included increases in shootings, absenteeism and greater dependence on mental health services.
Cardona acknowledged, but did not apologize for, sanctioning the two-year classroom shutdown overkill. The union and the White House claimed, falsely, that public safety mandated closures. Completely missing in any accounting for the dismal test scores was identifying the AFT and Weingarten’s failure to fulfill their most fundamental mission: educating America’s children.
Looking back at statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among the nearly 60 million American children between the ages of 5 and 18, the risk in that group of dying from COVID worked out to one in 200,000. A child is more likely to die in a car accident, by suicide, murder, drowning, accidental poisoning or to die of cancer, heart disease or by a lightning strike than dying from COVID.
Stanford University School of Medicine researchers Cathrine Axfors and John Ioannidis calculated that the risk of death for children and adolescents who were infected with the virus was 0.001 percent – one in 100,000. Yet the classrooms were shut, and teachers still collected their checks, but were curiously omitted from the essential employee list that included nursery workers, grocery store clerks and trade contractors.
The poor test scores are an evolving story with more disappointing chapters yet to be written. Primary grade teachers know that, regardless of money spent or additional hours put in, ground lost is rarely made up. Recapturing earlier learning opportunities will be tougher for black, immigrant and diverse students who were further behind already. Their futures without a solid academic foundation will be uncertain.
Rewards for the perpetrators, Weingarten and others, insult the victims, the children and their parents. Expressions of contrition from the wrongdoers would be appropriate. Although the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that the extended school closures were not only unnecessary, but harmful, Weingarten, the CDC, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Biden haven’t and won’t apologize. Expressing regret isn’t their style.
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