Democrats appear completely unable to escape the albatross that Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teacher, is around their political neck.
The Democrats and the White House are so politically tone-deaf and so much a fully-owned subsidiary of the teachers’ unions that they will put America’s school lockdown queen on a school safety panel.
This announcement comes just two days after the National Center for Education Statistics found math and reading scores in 202 plummeted for 13-year-old students (as we reported on in yesterday’s Hotline). President Biden appointed the symbol of teacher union machine politics to a Department of Homeland Security school safety committee.
During COVID, it was Weingarten’s AFT that used the pandemic to close schools and extort government officials into surrendering to their pay and benefit demands if they were to return to the classroom. Union-dominated schools were usually the last to reopen and showed catastrophic declines in children’s academic performance, physical health, and emotional development. Despite this record, Weingarten is paid over $560,000 a year as AFT head – nine times the salary of the average teacher.