Fire Randi From Everything

It’s as clear a case of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse as ever you’ll see: American Federation of Teachers honcho Randi Weingarten just got named to the Department of Homeland Security’s School Safety Advisory Committee.

This, immediately on the heels of fresh news about how badly school lockdowns cost America’s kids — lockdowns that Weingarten pushed relentlessly and all too successfully to extend.

Last week’s final release of National Assessment of Educational Progress results from 2022 — and NAEP is universally seen as the gold standard for measuring learning — showed that US 13-year-olds are doing worse than their parents in math and worse than their grandparents in reading. And there’s simply no question prolonged school lockdowns triggered the drop.

Closing when COVID hit was reasonable. But as the weeks rolled on, the data soon showed that children just weren’t at risk, and didn’t even transmit COVID much. And it was equally clear that “remote learning” was a sick joke.

The city, and the nation, should’ve reopened schools by that fall. Many states did, as did Catholic systems and other private schools in our area — all to no ill effect. Europe, the same.

But across America, the systems that stayed closed were those where teachersunion power was strongest. Weingarten used her pull with the new Biden White House to force the Centers for Disease Control to reverse its recommendation that schools reopen, in favor of rules for “reopening safely” that amounted to advice to stay shut for the foreseeable future.

Randi’s now trying to pretend that all the hate coming her way is because she’s a powerful progressive Democrat. But make no mistake: This woman should be shamed entirely out of public life — ousted from any and every government position, and from any role in her party and union.

In standing by Randi, Democrats and her members admit they care only about power and perks, America’s children be damned.