Randi Weingarten says 'Biden transition team’ was first to solicit union’s advice on schools reopening.mp4
Teachers union president testifies that communications with Biden admin on COVID-19 reopening guidance predated his swearing-in
To the surprise of no one familiar with her jaw-dropping chutzpah, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten not only agreed to testify this week before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic but fully expected to make the hearing a referendum on everything from the ongoing budget debate, racism, homelessness, crime and, above all, former President Donald Trump.
As always, her goal was to distract, dissemble and disavow any responsibility for millions of American K-12 students being kept out of the classroom far longer than necessary thanks in large measure to a 2021 operational strategy developed the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with an extraordinary degree of input from Weingarten and her union.
She failed. Miserably.
On Feb. 12, 2021, the CDC released the Biden administration’s first school reopening guidance ¾ a draft copy of which had previously been shared with the AFT.
According to a subcommittee report issued in March 2022, "(A)fter reviewing the draft, AFT staff asked CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to install a ‘trigger’ in the guidance that would cause schools to close automatically if COVID-19 positivity rates reached a certain threshold. The CDC obliged, and thousands of schools across the country remained closed throughout the 2020-21 school year."
Republican Whip and Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis Ranking Member Steve Scalise (R-La.) and House Committee on Oversight and Reform Ranking Member James Comer (R-Ky.) concluded:
"The facts are clear. (President) Biden’s CDC overrode routine practice to allow a radical teachers union that donated millions of dollars to Democrat campaigns to bypass scientific norms and rewrite official agency guidance. The damaging edits by union bosses effectively kept thousands of schools shuttered across the country, locking millions of children out of their classrooms. The Biden Administration abandoned medical science and replaced it with political science to reward one of their largest donors, harming millions of children in the process. They bypassed the science to put union bosses ahead of children."
What makes her appearance before a Congressional committee all the more confounding is the reality that Weingarten’s tentacles reach deeper than the federal level. Because most school action is taken at the state and local levels, the true danger of AFT and the even larger National Education Association is their ability to bully not only presidents but blue-state governors into doing their bidding.
In a very real sense, CDC’s acquiescence to Big Labor is merely a symptom of the larger problem. The outrage isn’t that schools were kept closed and millions of students left to educate themselves solely because CDC told them to. It’s that union-compliant governors in too many blue states were going to do so anyway.
The CDC guidelines simply gave them political cover.
In a 25-page written affidavit filed with the subcommittee even before the hearing began, Weingarten followed a familiar script, first blaming the previous administration for disregarding the "Obama administration’s pandemic playbook, consistent with President Trump’s contempt for knowledge and expertise in health and education matters more generally."
As for her union’s contribution to the CDC guidelines, Weingarten insisted, "We did not draft the document, and we did not substantially revise the document. Nor did we have any ability to control whether the CDC would accept or reject the limited suggestions we made."
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Officially, no. And that’s the point. The nation’s second-largest teachers’ union was not only asked for its opinion on a matter of national health policy, but its suggestions were adopted almost word for word.
Why?
Presumably, the CDC bases its conclusions on hard science and a responsibility to safeguard the health of the nation as a whole. Weingarten and her union have no expertise in either area; consequently, the manifestly partisan and self-serving contributions of a powerful special interest are what the report’s authors should have assiduously ignored rather than actively sought out.
Instead of ending the controversy, Weingarten’s assertion that the union found little it needed to change in the original CDC draft only exacerbated it by laying bare the extent to which the agency has already been politicized by a president who vowed on the campaign trail in 2020 to make his administration "the most pro-union … you ever saw."
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If union operatives made relatively few changes to the school-reopening guidelines, perhaps that’s because CDC had already incorporated many of them already knowing AFT would have final approval over the document anyway.
Weingarten’s rhetorical flourishes notwithstanding, Wednesday’s hearing only exposed to anyone with the stomach to watch it that student outcomes and actually representing the workplace concerns of its members rank far down the list of AFT’s priorities ¾ assuming they show up at all. In fact, the union exists only to grow its financial resources and political power, which it leverages to advance the radical leftist agenda of ruthless leaders like Randi Weingarten.