AFT’s report, titled, “In Search of Scapegoats: The GOP’s Failed Scheme to Blame the American Federation of Teachers for School Closures During the Pandemic,” attributes the perception that it helped keep schools closed to a “smear” campaign by Republicans. AFT and its president Randi Weingarten often opposed reopening schools and influenced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in its school reopening guidance. …

Trump’s push to reopen public schools was “reckless and wrong,” Weingarten wrote in July 2020. She suggested that all teachers should work remotely if remote work demands were unmet in December 2020, according to Education Week. …

AFT has faced criticism for working to block the return of in-person learning. Weingarten collaborated with the CDC to draft guidance on safely reopening schools and pushed to include reasons to close again.

Weingarten advocated to include a “trigger to automatically close schools,” former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky testified.

[This is downright Orwellian. Charlie Crist’s running mate Karla Hernandez-Mats, a teachers union activist, tried this revisionist argument in the 2022 election against Ron DeSantis in Florida, you’ll recall. And then DeSantis kicked their behinds in a 19-point landslide. People know damned well that Weingarten and the unions kept schools closed by continually moving the goalposts on what constituted a “safe” threshold for reopening. — Ed]