American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten had many things to say on the topic of education in response to last night’s GOP presidential debate. Chief among them were criticisms of Governor Ron DeSantis, who during the Covid pandemic reopened Florida schools in fall 2020 and kept them open and who has implemented comprehensive education reforms throughout the state (supporting parental rights, banning critical race theory, adding civic education to curricula).

“DeSantis has been a disaster on education,” Weingarten said on Wednesday. “They’re banning history, they’re banning books, banning AP psych, and have a terrible teacher shortage. Nobody should be taking advice form [sic] him on schools.”

Set aside the hyperbole and distortions and focus instead on Weingarten’s own record. She used her influence to keep children out of schools during the pandemic. She defended her insistence on school closures relentlessly, until data proving catastrophic lockdown-related learning loss came out. She responded by attempting to rewrite history, claiming that the AFT advocated school reopenings. It didn’t.

Weingarten called attempts to reopen schools “reckless,” “callous,” and “cruel” and authorized teachers’ strikes for schools that tried to reopen. The AFT lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and peddled “scientific” excuses for why schools should remain closed. The Chicago Teachers Union claimed that the effort to reopen schools was “rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.” Weingarten now shamelessly claims, despite the record, that she did her best to reopen schools.

She has since admitted she “didn’t know what the right thing was” in regard to school closures, but that didn’t stop her from unabashedly supporting lockdowns at the time. If Weingarten didn’t know what to do, she should have been honest about it. She should have sought input from dissenting voices, including among teachers, and from parents. Instead, the AFT claimed that school closures were based on science. Some believe Weingarten sacrificed children’s educations for a political agenda. Others look at her record and chalk it up to incompetence.

This presidential cycle is discouraging for a number of reasons, but a bright spot is that the candidates are highlighting the education debate and calling out the education establishment for its failures.