By Ari Kaufman,
American Federation of Teachers comrade-in-chief Randi Weingarten recently asserted in a national newspaper that “Republicans are destroying our public schools. Teachers and parents must fight back.”
Talk about pots and kettles.
With a rogue person like Weingarten, it’s always about hyper-partisan politics and a faux “fight,” not the children or public education at large. She clearly will never apologize for the incalculable damage she and her allies did to vulnerable children in recent years with lies and will continue destroying them.
Weingarten deems anyone who dissents an “extremist,” wishing to put “their political vendettas and ideologies ahead of children’s education. I believe that’s called projection.
And no matter the subject, she spreads ignorance.
When COVID-19 policy dominated the landscape — as she demanded billions of taxpayer dollars, even as schoolchildren weren’t as risk and schools were safe — Weingarten refused to adhere to science and locked the school gates.
Making children a priority was the furthest thing from her mind.
Looking at the facts, you realize why the corrupt AFT never wants to discuss students.
In the 23 City Schools of Baltimore, zero students are proficient in grade-level math. The Baltimore Teachers Union, unsurprisingly, is among the nation’s most influential and a top AFT ally. They partner in hurting children.
Weingarten and her totalitarians love to talk about supposed “racism,”; but if her union cared about black Americans’ lives — instead of collecting massive salaries and funding Democrats — rather than political grandstanding, they would do something since the district is majority black.
They also might do something about the fact that 40 miles down the road in the Washington D.C. public school system, only 9% of black 3rd-12th graders counted as proficient in math last year.
Why doesn’t the Washington Post or NPR care that despite the massive amount of money the nation’s capital’s residents spend per pupil, their public school teachers cannot get 1 of 10 black students proficient in math? That’s not “economic inequality”; that’s a true scandal.
It’s not much better for other groups.
Only 17% of D.C.’s Hispanic students are proficient in math. And in English, only 20% of black students and about a third of Hispanic students count as proficient.
In predominantly white Appalachia, numbers aren’t great either, but schools get less public money, and insular Randi could not care less because it’s a Republican-leaning region. Politics always supersede student progress.
What is Weingarten’s answer? Apart from blaming Republicans and raising money for Democrats who continue the abusive cycle, she predictably blames “standardized testing.” But bad teachers — thanks to regressive Union policy on tenure — equal lousy test results. Bad test results lead to tough questions for Weingarten, who’s basically become the 65-year-old version of the petulant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The ongoing failure of American public education standards should shame the nation. We lead the world in many areas but are a global educational laughingstock.
As I wrote in a 2019 newspaper editorial, the U.S. spends nearly $20,000 per student yearly from kindergarten through 12th grade. That amount is nearly double the global average. Yet the average student in Singapore is nearly four years ahead of their U.S. counterpart; children in countries from Estonia and Finland to Germany, New Zealand, and Norway also consistently outperform the U.S., despite spending less per pupil.
Instead of producing a generation of young Americans who can compete worldwide, public schools fail them. The one group most responsible? The one led by a childless woman who hates parents as much as she detests children.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo once asserted that the most dangerous person for America is not a noxious foreign leader but Randi Weingarten. It’s increasingly hard to argue with that claim.
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Ari Kaufman is a correspondent for several U.S. newspapers and magazines from Minnesota and Ohio to Tennessee and Virginia. He taught school and served as a military historian before beginning his journalism career. He is the author of three books and a frequent guest on radio programs and contributes to Israel National News and here at The Lid.
