The truth about education during the COVID-19 pandemic is clear, but teacher unions and a compliant media are attempting to rewrite history, downplaying their obstructive and anti-science roles during this time.
A recent headline from Politico caught me off guard: “The Biden Administration and teachers unions are mounting a campaign to return American children to classrooms five days a week.” Even more perplexing was a tweet from U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, who, just days earlier, thanked Randi Weingarten and her union for moving “quickly” to return students to classrooms, despite the unions’ prominent role in delaying the process during the pandemic.
This situation reminded me of Kellyanne Conway’s infamous defense of Sean Spicer’s false claims about the size of President Trump’s inauguration crowd. Conway referred to these claims as “alternative facts.” Similarly, the current narrative being pushed by teacher unions is their own version of “alternative facts,” which, as Chuck Todd pointed out to Conway, are nothing more than falsehoods.
Here’s what really happened: by the summer of 2020, it became increasingly clear that children were not as likely to spread COVID-19 as initially feared. Countries that had reopened schools showed no significant rise in COVID-19 cases, and in fact, some regions saw cases decline. The evidence, both international and domestic, showed that children were not the “super-spreaders” they were once believed to be. This led U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and the Trump administration to push for school reopenings—efforts that were met with fierce media backlash.
Yet, the teacher unions, particularly the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) led by Randi Weingarten, and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), seem eager to forget their own resistance to reopening schools. When districts attempted to reopen, unions fought back fiercely. In Washington D.C., the union staged protests with body bags outside district offices, while in Chicago, the CTU threatened strikes, forced teachers to sit outside in freezing temperatures to continue remote learning, and even suggested that calls to reopen schools were motivated by “sexism, racism, and misogyny.”
Let’s not forget Randi Weingarten’s direct involvement, particularly her lobbying of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to alter their reopening guidelines to reflect the political positions of her union. Meanwhile, private schools across the country remained open throughout the year with relatively few issues.
So why the push for revisionism now? One possible explanation is that the teacher unions, having held schools and families hostage for as long as possible to secure federal funds, now wish to rewrite history. Randi Weingarten and the unions achieved their goal of extracting funding from the federal government, but they did so at a significant cost to students, teachers, and families. And now, facing the consequences of their actions, they are trying to shift the narrative.
The truth, however, remains undeniable: while the unions and their allies in the media continue to spread “alternative facts,” the reality of the pandemic education response is one of unnecessary delays and missed opportunities for millions of students.