Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions, discusses Covid-19 school closures with conservative commentator Scott Jennings. #CNN #News
‘Why did we fail?’: Conservative commentator and union rep clash over Covid-19 school closures
Of coures she knows how hard it is to teach special needs children!!!!!!
How so? She isn’t certified in special education or speech pathology.
How? She’s an education bureaucrat who knows very little special education
She worked her way up from being a Teacher!!
America has to be proactive in it’s approach? Oh wow. That would be something
Apparently half the country would hear “proactive” and think it was some socialist plot 🙁
I’m trying really hard to come up with one thing our government is proactive about. Having a hard time!
If I was a 40 or 50 yr old teacher there would be no way I would’ve been in a classroom with a bunch of kids while half their parents were running around acting like COVID didn’t exist.
@gaiapj summer school isn’t a given, it has to be funded.
@Steve Stoll
super and it’s 2023. Stuffs back on again.
“I’m not as brave as a grocery store clerk.”
The privilage that you must feel that to think somebody should die or get sick for YOUR kids, for bad pay. America please!!
Agreed. So many people like Jennings talk about sending their kids back to school like it’s just a building. Teachers, more than most people, know how contagious kids are and how clueless they can be about it all.
You mean these people are going to college, spending thousands, to become a teacher, knowing bad pay?
Facts!❤❤❤
So the situation says that the AFT conspired with the government to keep schools shut longer than necessary? What was more important since they had no idea at that time, how to treat Covid, nor how to prevent it from spreading rapidly. It was hard for parents to have to help their children learn. Most of the parents weren’t working anyway because businesses had been shut down. Kids probably spread things to each other and then to everybody around them faster than other. Members of society. Or does anybody remember the thousands of people who died from Covid?
They knew at the time! What? This was 2 years after other countries opened schools.
@Daniel Zhang yes, because no one wants to repeat this
@Tele Bubba “it did slow down the spread”
Did it though? I’m not just trying to be contrarian. These actuarial kind of calculations have real consequences. Some of us thought they were flawed
@IYamWhatIYam how old were the parents? I know that sounds coarse, but this was an epidemic of the infeable. Maybe the future generation shouldn’t suffer to protect them
What are Republican neighbors don’t remember is that the hospitals were full of sick people dying and the healthcare workers and the doctors were dying
That’s what you were told happened.
and they would rather the teachers get covid than have their kids at home, it’s not just about the students
My favorite complaints about COVID and kids being home is that now they are acting like hooligans because they’ve been away from school for so long. Does anyone else see the irony in that complaint?
I don’t think that parents general complaint is that their kids are now COVID-hooligans. It’s that the structured learning and social experience that disappeared over the shut downs suppressed those growth needs. Kids r socially regressed, not jerks.
@Sean McCartney 🐑
Just your black kids, and those who identify as them.
Most people blame Democrats
@JONNYCABANI they’re really good at ruining things.
The learning loss is real
@aj smith that is does.
@Steve Stoll Didn’t need to.
Very true. The weird thing is the democrats/unions fail to realize that the pandemic hurt the poorest people in the country which is their black voting base. If this isn’t a wake up call to people that the government has so much power that it can just say “you’re going to jail if you’re in school or at work” then idk what will.
The pandemic showed us that we have a horrible educational system. European countries also closed the schools and they aren’t having these problems. We have shouldn’t let this crisis go to waste. It’s time for complete educational reform.
@Barry Berisha school choice. Privatize it
In Italy we had very long time school closure. From February 2020 to the end and then again some weeks in winter 2020-21. After that, masks and strict social distancing were mandatory in classroom all the way to summer 2022.
@Sheila Hargrave I’m sorry, I’m not able to answer to these questions, I am not knowledgeable in other EU countries school & covid stuff. What I can say subjectively is that my son, who was first-grader exactly in 2020, has developed a troublesome addiction to pc & smartphone… during lockdowns, I simply couldn’t handle him 14 hours a day while at the same time working remotely, so I gave up and let him too much screen time, and now is a struggle to revert back.
Anyway, my feeling is that, once again (as with debt and pollution), we traded younger generations’ wellbeing for that of older (and voting) ones.
@Sheila Hargrave at least a lot of them if not all of them and their family are not dead
Mi dispiace per quanto sia stato duro per te.
@Walter Bo That’s right, their 80 year old grandmother lived to 81 instead.
Peter Navarro and Newt Gingrich should have been called in and questioned, they withheld plenty of information.
DeSantis forced schools to open earlier near the end of the pandemic my friend was concerned for her kids, within a month 400 people at her school were sick. Two teachers died. Tell me how many deaths are acceptable before you have a mandatory reopening?
These people need to learn how to FORCEFULLY push back against the Far-right’s talking heads and propaganda!
What do you mean by FORCEFULLY?
In the Netherlands we also had school closures, because children were the driving force behind the spread of the virus.
Because we had lockdowns we kept our hospitals functioning.
Me debunking your FALSE CLAIM with one word – _Sweden._
You are lying!
Meh, the Netherlands does most things better than the US, so that’s hardly surprising. 🤷 Just look at how you handle city-planning and traffic. Not Just Bikes videos make North Americans cry in the comments.
The truth is that most parents cannot handle their children home. They are not competent teachers or even just babysitters in MANY cases. the distance learning has solid use before covid, but one of the big things about it is that the parents need to ensure the child is DOING IT and understanding it. To many times they are distracted or overwhelmed by the task. However, this all does not change that we have made our society to give our children over to the state…and no longer can handle them because there will be conflicts.
I homeschooled my children for years, was forced to place them IN school. They all tested at or above their grade level. My 3 yr old was reading before hitting 4 or preschool. I was with them all the time, and we still had time to learn the little that schools do teach anymore. However, I understand that in our crappy society where both parents have to work at least 1 job apiece, or 1 parent at least two jobs…there is no choice but public schools. Heaven forbid we actually pay people what their job is worth to actually live. Our corporations need that money for extra profits…like we see right now with the prices we are being screwed with this “inflation” problem.
This is a whole society systemic problem, and I do not know how to fix it past a complete breakdown and rework of it. Social nets help, increasing the tax on the rich/corporations would greatly help, NEVER trying the losing idea of “trickle down economics” would help
Anyway… lol enough griping Have a good one.
Very good points. I would only add that government is just as much part of the problem, because that’s the way people want it. They get the society they want. Corporations want what is essentially working slaves and higher profits without having to compete for them, but government wants the extra income taxes. It’s a partnership because both want obedience to authority, passivity, conformity, uniformity, and allegiance to controlling entities that want critical thinking individuals least of all. It’s akin to professional wrestling — enemies in the public eye (or not even that nowadays), but allies behind the scenes. Public school is the most efficient and manageable way to achieve those ends. That’s why it was developed in the first place. And it’s very easy to convincingly state the goal of ‘educating the children” as cover for it all. As to your solution, you are correct, there isn’t any.
I worked in daycare for over 10 years. It was so sad to see how many kids were there from the moment we opened till we closed. I had so many parents who loathed weekends cause they’d have to deal with their kids for 2 days! I don’t get why people even bother having kids if they don’t want to spend as much time possibly with them? I get having to work but some were married couples both working jobs dropping off their 1-2 kids from open-closed!! That’s insane and really unnecessary! We spent more time with their kids than they did, we toilet trained their kids, we were there for first steps and words. I don’t get how any parent would want to miss those things?
The problem with all of this is we had two different factions one saying, “Do this safely and create good plans. Then we has the ones spreading misleading misinformation. They did not want to follow the recommendations.
The recommendations were the misinformation.
Kids weren’t scared? My niece and nephew lost friends from school because they live in a highly Conservative area with one of the highest infection rates in the nation. My niece STILL wears a mask! And no one makes fun of her because they’re STILL scared of getting sick. She has survived multiple mass infections where they had to keep closing her school and classroom. Republicans are so out of touch with reality.
How sad that no one is ever accountable
In S. Korea we never closed down our schools. But every student and parent understood what was needed to keep everyone safe (masks, partitions between students, etc) AND abided by them. Unlike the States you’d have a handful of parents telling their kids don’t wear masks, it’s not needed, it’s stunting their growth/breathing. ( US population is 6x larger than SKoreas.. But 30x more covid deaths). No wonder they kept schools closed for that long
The upside to keeping kids home is that parents started to have their eyes opened as to what actually is going on in classrooms.!! Now they know whats being taught and whats not .
‘ The bacteria were sent from one laboratory without being properly killed off, and could have infected dozens of people along the way. So far, no one has fallen ill, but Dr. Frieden called the episode a “tipping point” that has forced the agency to realize that safety procedures must be improved. ‘ – New York Times 2014