PolitiFact has a long tendency of misleading the public on all days ending in “y,” and this past Tuesday was one of those days.
Teachers union President Randi Weingarten advocated for reopening schools with pandemic safety measures. She criticized the Trump administration’s 2020 calls to reopen schools fully, but it’s misleading to claim that she opposed reopening at all. https://t.co/Km8FkMkXd2
— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) May 3, 2023
In an act of cruelly by PolitiFact’s leadership, writer Madison Czopek was assigned the impossible task of attempting to go through American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten’s past comments and reinterpret them to fit Weingarten’s new narrative that she “fought to keep schools open.” This is the same American Federation of Teachers that was exposed in May of 2021 influencing the CDC on reopening schools, which led to the CDC "putting the breaks" on a full reopening of in-person learning.
This wasn’t a usual article from PolitiFact where they’re evaluating a specific claim and assigning a truth rating, but a more “explainer” style article on the supposed ambiguity of Weingarten’s advocacy for school closures. The watchdogs over at PolitiFact haven't actually “fact-checked’ Weingarten since 2013.
In recent weeks, months, and years, many of the biggest proponents of “lockdown” style policies have been trying to rewrite history to distance themselves from them - which is just an admission that we were right all along.
Now, even if Weingarten did publicly advocate for opening schools, we all know that in politics you judge people by their actions not their public statements. Nearly all of the examples of Weingarten “supporting reopening schools” are just generic statements like “We want schools to open” and “We’ve been trying to get kids back into school.”
But even Weingarten’s past public statements back in 2020 and 2021 don’t support reopening schools unless you take a completely absurd interpretation of her bad-faith comments. Any comments Weingarten made that appear to support reopening schools have to be understood in the context that they’re only in exchange for an impossible to meet set of demands for her union.
For instance (and I’m being a bit hyperbolic), Weingarten could say she’d favor opening schools on the contingency that she’s written a check for a billion dollars, given a free beach home and Rolls Royce, and PolitiFact would say she favored reopening schools because she listed conditions where it would be appropriate.
And that’s really all the PolitiFact argument boils down to - that the hostage taker was willing to make demands.
In a first, Twitter’s new “Community Notes” fact-checking feature stepped in to fact-check the fact-checkers, and slapping PolitiFact’s post with a fact-check telling them they’re wrong.
One of the “community notes” pointed out four prior tweets from Weingarten in fall 2020 where she publicly voiced support for closing schools, and linked to a Guardian article where Weingarten said reopening schools in fall of 2020 would be reckless, callous, and cruel. In one of the tweets Weingarten praised a judge for slapping down a Florida’s schools reopening order, and thanked the Florida Education Association union for their efforts in keeping schools closed. In one tweet from September 2020, she praised the United Federation of Teachers President for advising NYC to shut down 80 public schools.
Others added that Weingarten’s union pushed aggressively for closures at the local level, which they continued doing even into 2022.
Gabrien’s Tom Elliott put together a nearly seven-minute compilation of Weingarten’s comments just on TV advocating for closures - and there’s no ambiguity here. She wanted schools closed, and took just the actions to do that:
SUPERCUT!
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) May 2, 2023
Don't let @rweingarten rewrite history. Here's proof she orchestrated the developmental destruction of a generation of kids. pic.twitter.com/vFChQsZ7vj
As Corey DeAngeles noted in August 2020, the influence of unions made a significant impact on whether or not a school would be reopening that fall. “Right now, school districts in states that require union membership are 25 percentage points less likely to plan to reopen with full-time in-person instruction available than school districts in right-to-work states,” he wrote. “About 38 percent of school districts in right-to-work states have decided to offer full-time in-person instruction, whereas only around 13 percent of school districts in states that require union membership are offering the same.”
Two of the quotes PolitiFact cites where Weingarten claims to want schools open are from before August 2020, so obviously she couldn’t have believed that if schools under her watch were less likely to open.
Matt Palumbo is the author of Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry and The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
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