“Randi Weingarten is trying to use this Teacher Appreciation Week to act as though she had anything to do with reopening classrooms,” said Aaron Withe, CEO of the Freedom Foundation. “In actuality, she’s currently working harder to gaslight American parents than she ever did at getting their kids back to in-person education.”

“Randi Weingarten is right when she says that teachers, parents and caregivers helped carry our kids through a tumultuous few years, but she is perhaps the person most responsible for shutting down our schools and keeping them shut far beyond a reasonable timeframe in states dominated by her union politics.”

“We’re now getting a more complete picture of the damage these school closures have inflicted on our school children’s educational, mental, and emotional development, and Randi Weingarten bears a lot of the blame because it was her American Federation of Teachers that rewrote CDC school-opening guidelines that allowed schools to remain closed.”

“The Freedom Foundation helped thousands of teachers and other school employees leave their unions since the COVID shutdowns began in March 2020, and thousands more will continue to drop their union membership because of Randi Weingarten’s radical policies,” concluded Withe. “The AFT experienced a 2 percent decline in membership last year because so many educators were upset about how she manipulated the situation for partisan politics, and we are not going to let Randi Weingarten get away with rewriting the history of the past two years. She needs to pay a price for the damage she caused our school children, as do all the officials who followed her lead and kept the schools shut and kids isolated, staring at screens and not getting the education they needed.”