Randi Weingarten's AFT needs an audit amid failing students: Peter Schweizer
Government Accountability Institute's Peter Schweizer tells 'Jesse Watters Primetime' Randi Weingarten's AFT should be audited amid public school students’ failing grades.
Way to go, teachers unions! America’s school children were among the big casualties of COVID-19 pandemic policies. Shuttered schools and remote learning sank national math scores, slashed individual lifetime earnings, and stunted the economic growth potential. Once again, our children were political pawns in a game rigged by teachers’ unions and blue state politicians.
Learning losses from teachers’ unions’ pandemic policies dumbed-down our children, setting us on a road to fiscal ruin. A newly released study by Stanford economist Eric Hanushek discovered in an of 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores that "eighth-grade math fell for every state, with a national average decline of eight NAEP scale score points. . .[The decline was] enough to erase all of the gains that had occurred since 2000."
Hanushek projected that learning losses could result in a $70,000 drop in lifetime earnings and a $28 trillion loss for the next century. Specifically, this downturn will affect states according to their students’ scores. Utah (-2.7 points) will fare better than Oklahoma and Delaware (-12 points); Texas (-5-7 points) will fare better than its bordering states (-7-10 points). "Without action," Hanushek warned "not only will individuals in the COVID cohort of students suffer long-term income losses, but also the individual states will see shrunken economic activity."
But teachers’ unions and blue state politicians don’t want action. They want to perpetuate the pandemic forever. Already, Philadelphia and Camden schools have temporarily brought back COVID-era mandatory mask policies for students and staff returning from the holiday break.
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Mandatory masking defies settled science, which has documented that "Children do not readily acquire SARS-CoV-2 (very low risk), spread it to other children or teachers, or endanger parents or others at home. . .In the rare cases where a child contracts COVID virus it is very unusual for the child to get severely ill or die." This is yet another example of mandatory policies that harm children. It is tyrannical behavior that could snowball into another round of school closures if parents fail to push back.
We should blame the teachers’ union.
The more the government acquiesces to teachers’ unions, the more they demand. It’s an exercise in futility. A Wall Street Journal editorial that targeted Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, exposed the real agenda of teachers unions: "America’s teachers unions demanded that schools be kept shut even as they remained open in Europe. At the same time unions used the pandemic to extort money from Congress. Schools received some $190 billion in federal COVID relief to safely reopen and address learning losses, but schools stayed closed and much of the money still hasn’t been spent. After the first months of COVID uncertainty, the school shutdowns had nothing to do with safety."
The shutdowns weren’t about safety for these unions. It was about more money for DEI and CRT programs as well as other pet projects. COVID-19 funding left some formerly, nearly bankrupt cities such as Los Angeles and Nashville flush with a COVID-19 cash surplus.
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What’s more, these same teachers’ unions and their blue state politicians claimed to be championing the historically oppressed by vigorously advocating for critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Their hypocrisy is astounding. It was they who pursued policies that harmed America’s most vulnerable—poor and working-class students of all races.
Despite the folly of their choice, we see from Philadelphia and Camden that the game continues. No amount of revisionism from Randi Weingarten can erase the losses and the responsibility that unions fully bear for self-aggrandizing policies. They’ve rendered our children pawns in a game: one our innocent youth can never win without strong advocates who will finally declare enough is enough.