A C-SPAN caller challenged American Federation of Teachers (ATF) President Randi Weingarten on Wednesday about her “role” in pushing for school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prolonged school closures and remote learning during the pandemic had detrimental effects on students’ aptitude in core subjects, including math and English. On “Washington Journal,” a Minnesota caller noted the “negative impact” of the closures and asked Weingarten about her involvement in “advocating” for them.
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“I believe that COVID closures did hurt kids. And I have said that over and over again,” Weingarten responded. “And in April of 2020, we were the first ones to actually put out a report about how to reopen schools and reopen them safely and try to make schools the priority … And so, you know, regardless of whether people put words in my mouth or not, if you look at the evidence, we actually tried. What we wanted to do — and nobody knew very much about anything — is we wanted people to be safe.”
“We wanted our kids to be safe, we wanted their families to be safe and we wanted teachers to be safe,” she continued. “But literally, we believe in public schooling. We believe that they should have been open far earlier than they were and that they should have been a priority.”
Host Pedro Echevarria asked Weingarten if AFT pushed for closures at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.
“AFT advocated for closures in March, but we were not the first ones to advocate for closures,” she said. “We didn’t know, you know, so we advocated for closures in March when we saw what was going on, but by the end of April, we were advocating for schools to be reopened, but reopened safely.
Weingarten collaborated with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in developing its school reopening guidance. She pushed to include reasons to close again and to include a “trigger to automatically close schools,” former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky testified.
Despite the collaboration, AFT called reopenings “reckless and unsafe” in January 2021. Weingarten also said in July 2021 that Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s insistence on reopening schools would kill “millions” of people.
Moreover, Weingarten warned in July 2020 that AFT leadership would back “safety strikes” if the health measures they wanted were not imposed, NPR reported.
AFT published an October 2023 report denying responsibility for school closures.
“The CDC’s guidelines were advisory, not compulsory. Therefore, to blame the CDC guidelines for the length and extent of school closures and their tragic consequences was both wrong and disingenuous,” the report asserts. “Even more wrong and disingenuous was the attempt to blame the AFT—particularly in light of its limited role in making suggestions for the guidelines—instead of the true decisionmakers from March 2020 to January 2021, namely President [Donald] Trump and [Education] Secretary [Betsy] DeVos.”
Trump’s advocacy for reopening public schools was “reckless and wrong,” Weingarten wrote in July 2020.
Students continue to struggle from the effects of remote learning, according to an analysis from The New York Times in March 2024, which found that elementary school students fell behind in math and struggled in reading and science.
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