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 …”