American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten acknowledged on “The Conversation with Dasha Burns” Thursday that teachers’ unions made errors during the COVID-19 pandemic — but quickly deflected blame to President Donald Trump’s administration.
AFT and Weingarten often resisted reopening schools and collaborated with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Host Dasha Burns asked Weingarten on the podcast whether teacher’s unions and Democrats made “mistakes” related to school closures during the pandemic.
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“Of course there were. And there were mistakes made by everyone. There was huge mistakes made by the Trump administration to not be clear, to not focus on safety as they were focusing on reopening it,” Weingarten told Burns. “Reopening became political, not became something that we all should have prioritized. And we all made mistakes about it.”
“[T]he anxiety, though, what the biggest mistake that I saw was that once we started knowing what could actually help schools reopen and reopen safely, meaning making sure you had ventilation and testing, the fact that we couldn’t get the funding for ventilation and testing, the question to me is God forbid there’s another pandemic, how do we make that the priority so that we’re not pitting reopening schools against being safe?” she added.
Weingarten worked with the CDC to develop its school reopening guidance. She pushed to include justifications to close again and a “trigger to automatically close schools,” former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky testified.
Moreover, Weingarten and Walensky texted often when the school reopening guidance was being crafted, texts published in June 2023 revealed.
AFT called school reopenings “reckless and unsafe” in January 2021. Weingarten also said in July 2021 that Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis reopening his state would kill “millions” of people before admitting she had exaggerated.
Weingarten’s teachers also refused to work in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago until COVID-19 measures were satisfied. Even then-Democratic Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot criticized her union.
Furthermore, Weingarten wrote in July 2020 that Trump’s push to reopen public schools was “reckless and wrong.” Weingarten also testified in April 2023 that former President Joe Biden’s transition team reached out to AFT before his presidency to coordinate school reopenings.
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