Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, is attempting to deflect blame for promoting school closures that crippled American students’ educations.
After being called out by the Wall Street Journal editorial board in a piece titled “Randi Weingarten Flunks the Pandemic,” the teachers’ union boss wrote a letter to the editor placing blame on former President Donald Trump, former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, and Republicans, while lauding President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan.
The Journal‘s scathing editorial came after new education statistics were released by the federal government showing that school closures caused the worst learning loss in 30 years.
After wide reporting of the statistics, Weingarten appeared flippant, taking to Twitter to say, “Thankfully after two years of disruption from a pandemic that killed more than 1 mil Americans, schools are already working on helping kids recover and thrive. This is a year to accelerate learning by rebuilding relationships, focusing on the basics.”
“You’d think this would be cause for reflection by our education elites, but no such luck,” the Journal wrote, saying that Weingarten “pushed shutdowns as long as she possibly could before parents revolted.”
“Media headlines blamed ‘the pandemic,’ as if Covid-19 ran America’s school districts and decided to force students to sit at home in front of screens for more than a year,” the Journal said. “Educators—as they call themselves—did that.”
“She and her union were the chief disrupters,” the piece continued, saying Weingarten was responsible for “set[ting] back America’s children for years.”
But Weingarten soon responded in the Journal, attempting to shift blame for the disastrous education numbers, despite being a chief advocate for shuttering schools.
“As a union leader in the public eye, I’m used to enduring attacks from your editorial page,” she said, playing the victim. “While former President Donald Trump and his education secretary, Ms. DeVos, ranted and raved, their successors put the safety measures in place to get reopening done.”
Weingarten was not the only one the Journal set their sites on, calling out National Center for Education Statistics Commissioner Peggy Carr for having a “grab-bag of excuses for the tragic learning loss: ‘School shootings, violence, and classroom disruptions are up, as are teacher and staff vacancies, absenteeism, cyberbullying, and students’ use of mental health services.'”
“She missed the ‘classroom disruptions’ of not being able to go to class at all,” the Journal wrote.
As Breitbart News reported, data collected shows that nine-year-olds lost ground in math for the first time since the data started being collected in the 1970s, and reading scores dropped by its most significant margin since 1990.
Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @BreccanFThies.