It’s being kind to call the last year and a quarter of public school – basically everything since March of 2020 – a disaster. Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, is determined to forget everything about it.

Much like the kids who forget everything they’ve ever learned over summer break – if they learned it at all in this last year – Randi Weingarten has blanked about how her teachers’ union helped keep schools closed, then bent the ear of the CDC to push schools into either staying closed or meeting extraordinarily high distancing and masking requirements that made zero sense (considering teachers were getting vaccinated and kids are, thankfully, not greatly sickened by COVID-19), and was recently making noise about how worried she is about the “Delta” variant. Now, Randi Weingarten would like you to believe that she has never stood in the way of schools reopening, and she wants everyone back in the schools this fall.

After all, if kids are back in schools, and not at home with parents listening in, then there will be less questions about the teaching of Critical Race Theory – which is not at all happening but should totally happen, according to the teachers’ unions – right? That’s a post for a different day.

But notice how, even while Weingarten publicly frets over COVID, she is pushing for a “public school renaissance.” Why, what could have happened in the last 15 months that would cause the public schools to suddenly need a “renaissance,” hmmm? Children have literally disappeared out of the school system, parents are pulling their kids out of public schools, and other frustrated parents are attempting change by getting involved and running for the school board (only to be accused of being some larger “QAnon” conspiracy because whoever heard of PARENTS GETTING INVOLVED WITH SCHOOLS, really?), but Randi Weingarten wants to bring about a “renaissance” by… hiring more teachers. Seriously, that’s number eight on her 10-point list, after getting smaller class sizes and forming “safety committees” to deal with COVID mitigation plans. Never let a crisis go to waste, indeed.

However, Weingarten, in all of her handwaving and pontificating and platitudes, finally said something that unintentionally got people completely on board with her vision of a “renaissance.”

thank you for the accidental endorsement of school choice Randi

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) July 11, 2021

I believe that this is what we call an “own goal.” The comments to this tweet are hilarious. Person after person thanks Randi Weingarten for expressing her support for school choice.

However, other people in the comments pointed out that Weingarten got that second sentence completely, absolutely, and utterly wrong.

My zip code most certainly decided that my child and the majority of my patients would not have access to in person education and was educational deprivation for many many students

— Dr. Jennifer Reesman (@jenreesman) July 11, 2021

And these people reminding Randi Weingarten of this fact are absolutely right. Those who lived in blue states were much more likely to see their schools remained closed, as TIME admitted in April of this year. And according to data compiled by the education news website The 74, released in June of this year, states that voted for Donald Trump were almost twice as likely to be back in the classroom as were states that voted for Joe Biden.

As @BurbioCalendar co-founder @Dennis_Roche diagrammed in-person learning across the country, a trend quickly emerged: “It started to look like an electoral map pretty intensely by the mid- to late fall,” he told @small_asher https://t.co/dAMhIpHw9d

— The 74 (@The74) June 20, 2021

Averaged from September through May, states that voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election gave students the chance to learn in the classroom 74.5 percent of the time, compared to 37.6 percent of the time in states that voted for Joe Biden. Red states account for over 22 million K-12 learners and blue states account for over 28 million.”

The full impact of that disparity remains largely unmeasured, says Chad Aldeman, policy director at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. But he suspects the effects on students could be vast.”

“Time is a rough proxy for learning,” he told The 74. “So lost instructional time is likely to lead to lost learning.”

So, Randi Weingarten has forgotten every single thing about the catastrophe that has consumed public education over the last 15 months. Not only has she forgotten that she did everything in her power to keep kids out of school, now she has conveniently forgotten that school WAS open full time in many places. They just happened to be mostly in “red” areas where her union influence fell short. Zip codes did absolutely determine how much in-person school a kid got in the last school year. For too many students, their demographics have bent, if not permanently warped, their destinies. And this all happened because the teachers’ unions were determined to not let this crisis go to waste, even if it wasted an entire year for students. It is only now, when leadership is sensing the change in the air coming from angry parents, that suddenly full-time in-person school is top of the priority list.

Don’t let Randi Weingarten get away with this crappy Jedi mind trick. The teachers’ unions, as a whole, have failed the students they claim to care about. It is now up to parents to take control of their kids’ education back.

Welcome Instapundit Readers!

Featured image: Randi Weingarten in February 2020, photo by Keith Mellnick via Wikimedia Commons, cropped, CC BY 2.0