American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten appeared before a Congressional subcommittee on Wednesday to testify to the role her Union had in school closures during the COVID pandemic. In her usual overtly emotional and barraging tone, Weingarten testified that the AFT had not championed or pushed school closures, but instead worked to open them.
Weingarten said:
I’m sorry, Congressman Raskin… I’m just… we spent every day from February on trying to get schools open. We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools.
To nobody’s surprise, many in the American public disagreed with Weingarten’s testimony. When the Washington Free Beacon published a video of this testimony, Elon Musk replied with:
Noted
Noted
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 27, 2023
In response to the criticism of her testimony, Weingarten posted a video of her making media interview appearances repeating phrases about how they wanted to open schools, but how they had to do it safely.
The caption of her video reads:
Republicans on the House Covid subcommittee want you to think I wanted to keep schools closed. Here’s what I actually said… over & over again.
Weingarten closed the comments section so that only the accounts she follows can reply. But, the Twitterverse finds a way. A Community Notes information box appeared on the tweet providing context that was rated as helpful, per the platform’s policies.
The Community Notes read as follows:
Weingarten is misrepresenting her prior positions.
She called attempts to reopen schools in the fall of 2020 “Reckless, callous, cruel”
Her union pushed aggressively at the local level
Areas with high union influence remained closed much longer
https://www.returntolearntracker.net/instructional_status/
They continued in 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/08/us/teachers-unions-covid-schools.html
This text also appeared on the Washington Free Beacon’s post of Wiengarten’s Congressional Testimony. Yes, her testimony got fact-checked by the Twitter community.
Republicans on the House Covid subcommittee want you to think I wanted to keep schools closed. Here’s what I actually said… over & over again. pic.twitter.com/TTWuYgC5nN
— Randi Weingarten 🇺🇦🇺🇸💪🏿👩🎓 (@rweingarten) April 26, 2023
While parents, school choice advocates, and people who don’t like being lied to celebrate the fact that maybe you can get away with disingenuous testimony in Congress but the internet will tolerate none of it, Weingarten made another plan to manipulate.
Randi Weingarten has a Community Note on her pinned tweet. Fantastic. pic.twitter.com/JAw0851pcw
— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) April 27, 2023
Weingarten unpinned her April 26 video, republishing it on April 27 and pinning the new post to the top of her profile in an apparent effort to subvert the text and sources added to her original tweet.
At the time of writing, there is another tweet awaiting a Community Notes approval process, that cites the same information on Weingarten’s misrepresented claims as previously used. In that Thursday tweet, Weingarten ironically claimed to have “set the record straight.”
It is unclear if it is a violation of Twitter’s terms of service to repost in an effort to subvert or manipulate the platform’s policies, or if the Twitter Safety team will be addressing this loophole.
Either way, for our readers at RedState we have taken a few notes of our own: Not only was the LA Teacher’s Union, an AFT affiliate, not pushing to re-open schools, they were demanding that the police be defunded, and Medicare for All be passed before they would return to classrooms. And for a moratorium on charter schools. And a wealth tax. And, more, more, more.
You can read it here:
So, the goal was not to get children back into classrooms as soon as possible, it was to hold out. A preemptive labor strike to push demands, some of them being massive federal legislation packages that don’t exactly happen overnight. Is there any way that Weingarten didn’t know about this list of demands from the nation’s second-largest district? If the readers at RedState knew about it nearly three years ago, then it’s safe to say Weingarten knew… since it was her job to know.
Community Notes or not she’s caught in a manipulation scheme: of the pandemic, of the public, of the social media platform, and of Congress. As always, students deserve better.
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