‘Learning Loss Is Real’: Lori Lightfoot Slams Randi Weingarten’s Teachers’ Union for Delaying School Reopening

Outgoing Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot on Monday criticized Randi Weingarten and the influential teachers’ union she runs for delaying school re-openings after the pandemic.

“Obviously, every union should advocate for its members, but it’s gotta be in the context of an organization,” Lightfoot said Monday on CNN This Morning.

Chicago Public Schools demonstrated that it had implemented a number of Covid-19 mitigation measures to make it safe for kids to return to the classroom, Lightfoot said, but “the union needed to work with us and they never did that.”

“Schools are about children. We demonstrated over and over again that our schools were safe. We put $100 million into retrofitting classrooms, making sure that they had the PPE, making sure that every single classroom had filters to make sure that the air was safe. Deep cleaning of every single building,” she said. “But fundamentally, we know that where children learn the best and where they are safest is in the classroom, and in-person learning, and none of our parents signed up to be homeschoolers. And the learning loss is real.”

In testimony before Congress last week, Weingarten attempted to rewrite her pivotal part in the prolonged school closures that led to massive education disruption nationwide. “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open,” she claimed. “We know that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools.”

Throughout the pandemic, the AFT fought to postpone reopening schools, calling such an idea “reckless, callous, cruel” in the fall of 2020. Weingarten made other arguments to keep schools shuttered through the spring and summer of 2020. Her union aggressively lobbied the CDC to adjust its school-reopening guidance. Two of its language recommendations were adopted verbatim.

“The CDC in February and March basically asked all sorts of different organizations to sit down with them and give them comments about what they thought was important. They talked to parent organizations, they talked to the two unions, and one of the things that we didn’t see in the CDC draft is that there were variants that were right around the corner,” Weingarten said in May 2021.

On Monday, Lightfoot disputed Weingarten’s revisionist account of the school reopening debates.

“That’s not the reality that was happening on the ground in cities like Chicago, like Los Angeles and other places,” Lightfoot said. “We needed to get our kids back in school, and I’m unapologetic about the fight to make sure that we put our kids and our parents first.”

AFT affiliate unions like the Chicago Teachers Union, which Lightfoot battled well into 2022 to reopen schools in the city, in December of 2020 said that the push to reopen schools “is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.” In January 2022, Chicago students missed multiple days of instruction due to the union striking against in-person school and allegedly inadequate Covid-19 safety protocols.

Speaking to lawmakers last week, Weingarten doubled down in her justification for consulting with the health arm of the government before reopening schools.

“It made sense to consult with the CDC and it was not only appropriate for the CDC to confer with educators, it would have been irresponsible not to,” she said during the hearing.

Lightfoot is set to turn over the mayoralty to Brandon Johnson later this month after failing to advance to the final round of the runoff in February.