Anyone who believes there are no second acts in American lives should watch Randi Weingarten’s testimony Wednesday before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Weingarten, the head of one of the nation’s largest teachers unions , attempted to characterize the role she and other union bosses played during the pandemic as nothing less than heroic. She pointed to the road map to school reopening published by the American Federation of Teachers in April 2020 and on-the-record statements she made during the pandemic indicating that students should be learning in person, and ignored reports that prove she coordinated with federal officials to delay school reopenings for as long as possible.

Weingarten’s insistence that she supported school reopenings is like Leonardo DiCaprio insisting that he was actually on the Titanic: She was simply playing a role. She and her subordinates at the AFT correctly surmised that parents wanted their children back in schools and told the public what it wanted to hear — that the AFT was doing everything it could to get students back in class. Yet at the same time, the union worked at every level to keep schools closed and, even after they reopened, to give unelected bureaucrats the power to close them again.

The AFT based its 2020 reopening plan on demands for $750 billion in additional funding, limits on student testing, and the suspension of teacher performance evaluations. Once President Joe Biden took office, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky broke her pledge not to allow “political meddling” in the development of school reopening guidance by sharing the draft guidance with Weingarten and her political cronies weeks before its release in February 2021. Walensky then edited the CDC’s guidance to include the AFT’s demand, nearly verbatim, that school reopenings be delayed or reversed if positive tests began to rise in a given area.

The AFT’s local affiliates worked hard to make such delays a reality. In fact, research points to local teacher union strength as a prime indicator of whether schools were closed to students.

Several offered absurd conditions that had nothing at all to do with COVID-19. For instance, United Teachers Los Angeles said it would not support school reopenings unless they received $500 billion in federal money, "Medicare for all," wealth taxes, a charter school ban, and a defunded police department. Likewise, the Chicago Teachers Union gaslighted parents who wanted their children back in class by characterizing the push for school opening as being “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.” Likewise, the Houston Federation of Teachers demanded “racial and economic justice” equity assessments, suspension of testing and teacher evaluations, and, of course, a massive amount of money to reopen schools.

The actions of Weingarten and these AFT affiliates had dire consequences. The latest Nation’s Report Card results were dismal , showing the lowest reading levels among American students since 1992 and the largest math declines ever recorded among fourth- and eighth-graders. A recent study from Harvard showed that those who suffered the most were students who were locked out of their classrooms for longer — most of whom happened to be low-income, minority students. Anyone who claims to care about “equity” in education, as Weingarten and her AFT colleagues do, should be ashamed of the way the national union and its affiliates held students and their parents hostage during the pandemic.

The subcommittee’s leadership was right to demand testimony from Weingarten and the AFT. The hearing was a step toward accountability and perhaps progress in what will be a long campaign to dissociate these interest groups from the hardworking teachers they claim to represent. The more the teacher union bosses are called to account for the damage they have done to students’ learning, the more the average teacher will seriously question whether he or she should continue to surrender a portion of each hard-earned paycheck to fund the extreme political goals advocated by Weingarten and her allies.

If Weingarten believes she can reinvent herself and her fellow teachers union bosses as heroes of the COVID-19 pandemic, she’s out of luck. Parents, teachers, and lawmakers have a much longer memory than she might expect.

Paul Zimmerman is a policy counsel at the Defense of Freedom Institute and head of DFI's Teacher Union Accountability Project.