If elected president, Harris would side with Randi Weingarten and her union monopoly power against parents.
If elected president, Harris would side with Randi Weingarten and her union monopoly power against parents.
B y midsummer 2020, weeks before U.S. government schools were scheduled to begin the 2020–21 academic year after the lockdown-trimmed 2019–20 year, the preponderance of scientific evidence was already showing that Covid-19 posed “minimal risks” to children under 18.
Moreover, there hadn’t been a single Covid-19 “super-spreader event” connected to schools in France, Germany, or Denmark, where public in-person primary and secondary education had already resumed, or in Sweden, where it had never been suspended. Meanwhile, mounting evidence showed that the absence of in-school instruction was hurting children physically, psychologically, and academically.
No wonder that more than 70 percent of parents nationwide supported the return of full-time or, at least, part-time in-person schooling once classes resumed at the end of the summer. But a relative handful of teachers’-union officials sought to stifle parents’ wishes. They were empowered to do this by laws on the books in the vast majority of states that hand Big Labor monopoly-bargaining privileges over public K–12 school employees,
Randi Weingarten, the camera-chasing chief of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT/AFL-CIO) union since 2008, epitomized the government union brass’s massive resistance to any feasible school-reopening plan until the 2020–21 academic year was mostly over, if not later. In July 2020, Weingarten outrageously denounced the pro-in-person instruction stance of then–U.S. education secretary Betsy DeVos as “reckless,” “callous,” and “cruel.” And in July 2021, after school districts in Right to Work Florida had reopened and remained open for a full academic year while “avoid[ing] major outbreaks of Covid-19,” she claimed hysterically that “millions of Floridians” were “going to die” because the state’s elected officials had refused to follow Big Labor’s orders to keep schools closed.
This prediction was so absurd that Weingarten subsequently decided she had no choice but to apologize for her “hyperbole.” But the bottom line is that she and other AFT union bosses, along with their counterparts in the National Education Association (NEA) union hierarchy, did practically everything they could to keep schools from reopening until March 2021. That’s when the Biden-Harris administration and Big Labor majorities in Congress handed unions what they’d been demanding: a nearly $200 billion, taxpayer-funded payoff for overwhelmingly unionized government schools.
By the time this payoff was rubber-stamped, nearly half of the American kids enrolled in government schools were already safely attending in-person classes full time. States and localities where teachers’- union bosses like Weingarten wield relatively little power had proved it could be done, with no massive new infusion of federal tax dollars. But more than 75 percent of all students in Big Labor–stronghold states such as Maryland, Oregon, New Mexico, and California still had access to remote learning only.
Weingarten and Co. are clearly responsible for the enormous damage inflicted on tens of millions of American children because school lockdowns in their communities continued for most, and in some cases even all, of the 2020–21 academic year. The 2020 Democrat presidential campaign, which furnished cover for union bosses’ false claims about the supposed “dangers” of reopening public schools, and the Biden-Harris administration, which in early 2021 issued unscientific reopening “guidelines” that in practice made it virtually impossible for many schools to reopen, share in the blame.
This fall, as union officials and Democratic Party operatives seek to elevate Vice President Kamala Harris to the presidency, they are hoping America’s parents have forgotten about the vicious and cynical attack that teachers’-union bigwigs perpetrated against them and their children in 2020 and 2021.
Just a few days after Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and designated Harris as the Democrats’ new nominee, she went so far as to publicly thank Weingarten, the nemesis of American parents, for being an “incredible friend and an adviser to the president and me”!
With Harris now vowing to push legislation that would extend to all 50 states the very monopoly-bargaining privileges that empowered teachers’-union bosses to keep schools locked down in half the country in 2020–21, it’s virtually certain that, if elected president, she would side with Randi Weingarten and her union monopoly power against parents.