Mike Pompeo: Teachers’ union leader ‘a true threat to our nation’ | Commentary

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten recently brought her gaslight tour to Kansas in support of Gov. Laura Kelly.

During her visit, Weingarten sought to divert our gaze from our failing public schools and convince us that she and her teachers’ unions are heroes and victims of wrongful scorn.

The truth, as most parents can see with their own eyes, is that it is America’s public school children that have been victims of her union.

Even a cursory review of the state of America’s public schools shows that Weingarten and her progressive, activist union has for decades put special interests above our kids while refusing to account for the tragic outcomes they deliver.

Don’t take my word for it; just look at the data.

Weingarten personally pushed to lock kids out of their schools throughout the COVID pandemic, calling attempts to reopen “reckless,” “callous,” and “cruel,” while also endorsing teacher “safety strikes.”

These policies led to massive learning loss across Kansas.

A 2022 study found that Kansas students lost almost six months of math education and more than four months of reading education statewide. Students in the Kansas City, Kansas Public School District lost more than a year’s worth of math education. In Wichita — the district I was proud to represent in Congress — students lost eight months of math education.

And these statistics don’t begin to cover the long-term effects outside of learning loss.

One study, conducted last year using federal survey data, noted that more than 8 in 10 public schools reported stunted behavioral and social-emotional development in their students. In the 2021-2022 school year, twice as many students were chronically absent as in years past.

Families in Kansas and across America are now left to deal with these difficult problems and many more caused by the lockdown policies pushed by Randi Weingarten and her union, yet she has the gall to now play the victim. It is shameless and indecent.

It’s not just the pandemic, though. The state of America’s public education has been either stagnant or on the decline for decades. The 2019 National Assessment of Education Progress revealed that over the previous decade, there had been no progress in either mathematics or reading performance, with the lowest performing students doing even worse. During those years, reading scores actually declined in a majority of states across America.

Such dismal results help explain why not one student across 23 high schools in Baltimore tested as proficient in math last year. It’s not just the pandemic; this is the result of two decades of teachers’ unions, under Weingarten’s leadership, strenuously lobbying against school choice, lowering teaching standards in the places they are needed most, and pushing a progressive political agenda that has nothing to with the classroom.

Think about this: AFT published seven union-wide resolutions last year. They included such beauties as “Declaring a Climate Emergency” and “Support Healthcare Workers and Patients Impacted by Abortion Bans.”

Not one of these resolutions has anything to do with addressing the massive learning loss from the pandemic or correcting two decades of decline in American education. But AFT is not interested in advancing the interests of the vast majority of America’s teachers or schoolchildren; it is a political organization that uses the hard work of teachers to advance its own radical political agenda.

Predictably, Weingarten continues to treat any legitimate criticism of herself or her union as an attack on all teachers. This is gaslighting, and most parents know it.

My sister and her husband are both decades-long public school teachers. They are remarkable educators operating inside a system that burdens their work. Indeed, there are so many incredible teachers all across Kansas and America who only want to do the job they love, and what we should all want is to reward these excellent teachers by cultivating a system in which they can prosper.

Unfortunately, unions like AFT have made it more difficult for teachers to excel: They oppose higher salaries for excellent, deserving teachers, and they make it harder to fire bad, underperforming teachers. We all should support wonderful, hard-working educators across Kansas and America; but we should also call out the corrupt, selfish, and careless behavior of the unions that purport to represent them.

The leftist ideology Weingarten chooses to inflict on our kids is what makes her a true threat to our nation. Our republic depends on an educated populace and a virtuous people, who possess both the capacity to reason and an appreciation for American greatness.

When Xi Jinping, the president of China, sees us teach anti-American, politically-motivated ahistorical garbage to our kids instead of reading, writing, science and math, he knows American decline is inevitable and he is encouraged to continue his attacks.

When teachers’ unions push an ideology that teaches some students that they belong to an oppressor class based solely on their race while other races are their victims, Russian President Vladimir Putin feeds and reinforces this evil unfounded narrative to benefit his Marxist empire.

America’s continued freedom and prosperity depend on us seeing Weingarten and her ilk for what they are — idealogues who have failed a generation of our most deserving youth — and then returning our schools to being merit-based places of learning and hard work that reflect the exceptional nation we are, rather than seek to undermine the foundations of that excellence.