Rewriting History

Like politics there are a lot of sayings about history. None more profound than history tends to repeat itself and those who don’t know it are doomed to repeat it. It’s for that reason that the history of what teachers' unions did to influence and in various ways derail education during the pandemic be known. In an editorial published in the Wall Street Journal, in response to a recent critical editorial published in the Journal, Randi Weingarten, the President of the American Federation of Teachers – parent to all teachers' unions in the state of Florida, had this to say: Teachers deserve our ear and our help, not shame and blame. Randi, who recently compared the actions of teachers to first responders during the pandemic, attempted to rewrite the history behind what actually happened, and in many cases didn’t, in public education during the pandemic. Blaming Trump administration officials for remote learning and crediting the Biden administration for reopening schools. It’s like the Bizzaro world because it was none other than her union which demanded schools be closed, demanded remote learning only education (only relenting last fall), and still demanding mandatory masking of all teachers and students (proven to significantly inhibit learning and educating) – which she even coerced the CDC into recommending last school year after the CDC’s original guidance dropped a masking recommendation. As I stated in March during the debate over Florida’s Parental Rights in Education legislation... 78% of Florida’s public-school teachers are members of a union whose parent is the American Federation of Teachers. The teachers' unions repeatedly sued to keep classroom education closed in Florida all throughout the fall of 2020 – only ending the effort in January of 2021 after having lost a series of legal decisions over the course of six months. As my February 2021 analysis revealed... Kids have been far more likely to contract COVID-19 outside of schools than in them. In fact, children who were remote learning, as opposed to going to the classroom for education, contracted COVID-19 at a rate that was three times higher than those who were remote learning. This is on top of the fact that fewer than 20% of students who engaged in remote learning maintained the same level of learning as those in the classroom. So, you had Florida’s teachers sue for six months to attempt to provide lower quality education, worse results for students and higher COVID-19 contagion risk. But already that history is being attempted to be rewritten, ironically by those tasked with teaching it.