On Oct. 25, just days before Virginia’s governor’s race, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten tweeted out with gleeful approval an opinion article in the Washington Post. “Great piece on parents’ rights and #publicschools,” she wrote. The piece was titled “Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.” Its central argument was that such a level of parental involvement would be “radical.” The piece also asserted that the spontaneous anger parents were showing at the racialist ideas being incorporated into the school curricula really just represented “a political tactic.”
Less than two weeks later, on Nov. 6, she circled back to the same article, but this time from a very different perspective. “The headline is terrible,” she wrote. “The piece tells all of us where the law is and why. Parents have to be involved in their kids’ education. They must have a voice. At the same time, we have to teach kids how to — not what to think …”
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.
Not only did she pressure school districts, but she also underhandedly pressured the Biden CDC into adding new and impossible preconditions for reopening.
So, what could have possibly happened in the time between these two tweets? An unfortunate series of events for teachers unions.
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. They were doing this with the explicit go-ahead from former Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s Education Department, which specifically recommended the doctrines of critical race theory and “white fragility.”
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.
For her own part, Weingarten threatened strikes if school districts tried to reopen for the 2020-21 school year.
Now, she claims that it was the teachers unions trying to reopen the schools all along. One rarely comes across such a flagrant attempt to gaslight the entire nation simply because it is too ambitious to work. It is impossible to fool that many people when such an extensive public record exists.
Weingarten has her eyes on 2022, when teachers union vassals in the Democratic Party stand to lose even more ground. She can pretend the last 20 months never happened at all, but the voters don’t have to play along.
