It’s a clear a case of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse as ever you’ll see: American Federation of Teachers honcho Randi Weingarten just got named to the Department of Homeland Security’s School Safety Advisory Committee.
This, immediately on the heels of fresh news about how badly school lockdowns cost America’s kids — lockdowns that Weingarten pushed relentlessly and all too successfully to extend.
Last week’s final release of National Assessment of Educational Progress results from 2022 — and NAEP is universally seen as the gold standard for measuring learning — showed that US 13-year-olds had lost decades of progress in reading and math.
Today’s kids are doing worse than their parents in math and worse than their grandparents in reading.
And while the causes are long-term, there’s simply no question that a year or more of bogus “remote learning” triggered the drop.
Yes, we supported closing New York City’s schools when COVID hit Gotham like a brick in March 2020: No one knew for sure how the virus worked, and the case for caution was overwhelming.
But as the weeks rolled on, the data soon showed that children (except the tiny few with certain risk factors) just weren’t at risk, and indeed didn’t even transmit COVID much.
And it was equally clear that “remote learning” was a sick joke: While some heroic teachers strove nonstop to keep education, far more barely even pretended to teach online.
The city, and the nation, should’ve reopened schools by that fall. Many states did, as did Catholic systems and other private schools in our area — all to no ill effect.
Heck, Europe and most of the civilized world found the same.
Then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos pushed reopening hard, too — firmly proving she was on the kids’ side.
All across America, the systems that stayed closed were those where teachers-union power was strongest.
OK: Some teachers were sincerely scared, despite the readily available facts — but others found they loved getting paid not to work.
And the unions that for decades had justified their every demand for more perks and power as being “for the children” sided firmly with their members’ worst instincts, and against those children’s education.
Weingarten used her pull with the new Biden White House to force the Centers for Disease Control to reverse its recommendation that schools reopen, in favor of rules for “reopening safely” that amounted to advice to stay shut for the foreseeable future.
Randi’s now in deep damage-control mode, relying on her “reopen safely” lie.
She even just admitted to The New York Times that she was wrong to wave off DeVos and others’ warnings about massive learning loss from the shutdowns.
She’s trying to pretend that all the hate coming her way is because she’s a powerful progressive Democrat, leading a union that’s a mainstay of the party.
And the hacks controlling that party are playing along: Why else put a proven enemy of the kids on a panel having anything to do with “school safety”?
Make no mistake: This woman should be shamed entirely out of public life — ousted from any and every government position, and from any role in her party and union.
In standing by Randi, Democrats and her members admit they care only about power and perks, America’s children be damned.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
