Not sure what Ms. Weingarten was going for here…
American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten raised a few eyebrows last weekend when she sent a tweet that contradicted peak COVID-era Weingarten who sang the praises of remote learning and fought to keep parents from sending children back to school.
She actually said “remote education didn’t work.”
“What we have seen in public education is that technology can’t replace teachers. Remote education didn’t work, in part because you have to have relationships. You have to build trust,” the teachers union prez wrote in a tweet last week.
Additionally, Weingarten tried to mislead Americans in a letter to the editor published in The Wall Street Journal in which she blamed former President Donald Trump and his Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
“No teacher I know enjoyed remote and hybrid learning—which, pre-pandemic, was championed by Betsy DeVos,” Weingarten wrote. “Not one teacher relished teaching art class via Zoom to 40 pupils, 20 of them in a classroom and 20 at home.”
So there’s two instances of Weingarten telling Americans what Americans were trying to tell her all along —remote learning is a total bust. The country is currently facing historic learning loss due to the shutdowns that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Weingarten was too busy wrapped up in politics to see the obvious failure around her.
In 2020, a total of thirty-four resolutions were published by the AFT, according to Government Accountability Institute research. There were 227 separate mentions of “elections”; 165 separate mentions of “COVID-19”; 111 mentions of “violence”; 93 mentions of “race” (excluding discussions of racial discrimination, which add a further 32 separate mentions); and 49 separate mentions of “police” and “criminal justice.” GAI’s analysis of AFT resolutions shows the most frequent topics discussed in AFT resolutions in 2020 and 2021 were COVID-19, elections, race, violence, and criminal justice, followed by education.
That’s a lot of topics BEFORE education.
Wake up and smell the pencil shavings, Ms. Weingarten. You stopped doing what was best for the children and now we have the worst learning loss recorded since 1990.
