In one of the most disturbing events in recent history, a generation of American schoolchildren was forced out of the classroom for months, in many places, years, by adults who ignored available facts and abused public trust regarding COVID-19. These children lost irreplaceable time learning, socializing, and developing. Many still have not recovered, and some never will.
Anthony Fauci may be the one making headlines now, and for good reason. But amid the fervor, we cannot forget the person bearing equal responsibility for this catastrophe when it comes to American children: Randi Weingarten.
Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), can keep insisting, “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open,” just as Fauci can keep demanding, “Show me a school that I shut down,” but parents remember what happened. Their children were the collateral damage of a reckless alliance in which Weingarten weaponized Fauci’s rhetoric and recommendations as scientific cover to exercise enormous control over when, how, and whether schools reopened.
Fauci did little to help his own case by invoking the Fifth Amendment 111 times as senators asked him under oath to explain his COVID-era decisions. That alone carried obvious implications of wrongdoing, or at least an effort to conceal the full extent of his role in the damage that followed. And now, thanks to his newly released diaries, we know that in private he practically bragged about his influence over initial school closures and early reopening decisions that would set the course for the rest of the country.
Whatever justification existed for that initial caution disappeared by the summer of 2020, when evidence increasingly showed that children faced far lower risks of hospitalization and death than adults, and early reports from reopened schools suggested that classrooms were not major drivers of community transmission. By May, organizations such as the Heritage Foundation released guidance on how schools could reopen safely, with states prioritizing a back-to-school plan that had students physically present, since closures were already harming children.
That should have been the end of the shutdown debate. Weingarten, however, made sure it was not. She capitalized on Fauci’s public words, using his authority to legitimize an ever-expanding list of union demands that kept her members home for as long as possible, children be damned.
In July 2020, the AFT threatened lawsuits and “safety strikes” against reopening plans, declaring that “nothing is off the table” in its fight to keep schools closed. It then demanded community positivity below 5%, transmission below 1%, surveillance and contact tracing, accommodations for high-risk employees, and authority to close schools again if their conditions were not met.
That same month, Weingarten brought Fauci before the AFT’s convention, where he warned educators that if they returned to their classrooms, they would become “part of the experiment” in determining what would happen. With the country’s most recognizable public-health figure validating her “caution,” Weingarten could present the AFT’s growing list of demands as reliably rooted in science.
By February 2021, the AFT, a labor union with no scientific or public-health authority, was actively shaping federal reopening policy behind closed doors. In the weeks before the CDC released its February 2021 guidance, Weingarten and other AFT officials spoke repeatedly with CDC Director Rochelle Walensky on her direct phone line, persuading the agency to adopt two proposed changes that gave unions and school districts more grounds to delay full reopening or close classrooms again. They thanked the CDC for treating the union as a “thought partner.”
Through it all, the AFT dismissed the documented academic, developmental, and psychological damage inflicted on children by prolonged school closures. They simply did not care.
Weingarten would not call for schools to reopen fully, five days a week, until May 2021. By then, millions of children had already lost more than a year of learning and social development they could never get back.
And for more than six years now, parents have been forced to watch the consequences of Weingarten’s selfish and baseless decisions play out in our own children’s academic struggles, mental health challenges, and delayed development.
The 2022 Nation’s Report Card recorded some of the largest declines in student achievement ever measured. Four years later, national reading and math scores still remain below pre-pandemic levels. As of 2025, more than one in five parents said the damage to their children’s mental health or social development still had not gone away.
Fauci may be the one invoking the Fifth now, but it was Weingarten who used his warnings as cover to hold school reopenings hostage to her union’s demands. Millions of families are still dealing with the ramifications of her influence. Her unscientific, entirely political power plays must not go unanswered, and Weingarten needs to be held accountable for continuing to prioritize political agendas over children.
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Alleigh Marré is the executive director of American Parents Coalition and a mother of four.
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