The president of the American Federation of Teachers has no standing to complain about Trump’s effort to shrink the Department of Education.

Today marks five years since the world began shutting down over Covid-19. In marking that strange anniversary and the social legacy of the virus and our response to it, I wrote today that “the institutions most deeply implicated in the Covid response — the public health establishment, governments at every level, teachers’ unions, and more — have not yet recovered in public esteem. They may never.”

So spare me the indignation of Randi Weingarten as she protests Donald Trump’s effort to shrink — and perhaps even abolish — the Department of Education. I support this effort, though it is not without possible complications. Naturally, Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, does not: Her organization is the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union and is deeply implicated in the bureaucracy the Department of Education created. So, of course, she would write for MSNBC that

a gutted department would mean fewer teachers, more crowded classrooms and increased mental health and behavioral challenges for students. We’d most likely see increased absenteeism and decreased graduation rates. Fewer students would be able to obtain the degrees or credentials they need for well-paying jobs, meaning more students would have to settle for low-wage work or simply drop out of the workforce.

The declining rate of educational outcomes in American schools since the creation of the Department of Education ought at least to make us question these loaded assertions. But it certainly is interesting that Weingarten is now so keen on the value of teachers in the classroom. If you listen to her, she has always been this way. In 2023 congressional testimony on Covid-19, she claimed that “we spent every day from February on trying to get schools open” because “we know that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools.”

Nonsense. As National Review’s editors explained:

To put it mildly, this is not true. In the fall of 2020, Weingarten called attempts to reopen schools “reckless, callous, cruel.” Every few days during the spring and summer of 2020, Weingarten would give more reasons why schools must remain closed. Affiliated unions said even more bizarre things. The Chicago Teachers Union, in December of 2020, said that the push to reopen schools “is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.”

The AFT aggressively lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and even suggested language for the agency’s influential school-reopening guidance, language that would make it easier to seriously delay or halt reopenings. Two of the union’s suggested emendations were adopted verbatim.

The behavior of Weingarten and of other teachers’-union grandees during Covid-19 deprived students of in-person learning far longer than even the most abundant caution could have justified. Weingarten’s own words, with a few modifications, can describe the results: “fewer teachers” in the classroom (zero, often), more crowded classrooms (because they were empty), “increased mental health and behavioral challenges for students,” and “increased absenteeism and decreased graduation rates.” The Covid-19 pandemic revealed that it’s called the American Federation of Teachers and not the American Federation for Students, for a reason.

In condemning Weingarten, the editors added that we shouldn’t be surprised that “a union head like Weingarten relentlessly advocated for the narrow interests of dues-paying members.” But this behavior “should only warn the public against ever again treating her as an authority on what’s best for students or schools as institutions.” So, here’s our chance to ignore her and others like her who rail against the dismantling of the Department of Education. She has no standing to complain.