Since 2008, Randi Weingarten has run the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers’ union. In that time, she has established herself as one of the most important voices on organized labor in the United States. An attorney and former high-school teacher, Weingarten previously served as the head of the New York City teachers’ union, engaging in acrimonious negotiations with the former mayors Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani. Today, Weingarten is known as a leading opponent of standardized testing and as a fierce advocate for the members of her union, on issues like testing and teacher tenure.
The past few months have been particularly tense for those involved in public education: as state and local governments have pressed school districts to resume in-person education despite the coronavirus pandemic, teachers’ unions have resisted a return to school buildings without further assurances of their members’ safety. In March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relaxed its guidelines for classroom settings, indicating that, with universal masking, elementary-school students can remain three feet apart from one another, rather than six feet, and that the same holds true for middle- and high-school students, except in communities with high rates of coronavirus transmission.
The change, which was based on recent studies of transmission in schools, aligned the C.D.C.’s guidance with that of the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics; it could allow many more students to return to school buildings. But Weingarten and the A.F.T. remain skeptical. Late last month, Weingarten wrote a letter to Walensky, and the Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, saying that her union is “not convinced that the evidence supports changing physical distancing requirements,” and requesting “a national checklist outlining the enhanced mitigation strategies that must be in place if we move to 3 feet physical distancing.”
I recently spoke by phone with Weingarten about her views on school reopenings. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed how she sees her job as head of the A.F.T., why the C.D.C. changed its guidelines, and whose role it is to insure that parents trust their school systems.
What do you see as your job when it comes to school reopenings?
I see my job as helping to get schools reopened safely, because we know that in-school learning is vital for kids, and we know that safe working conditions and safe learning conditions are vital for the entire school community. Pre-COVID-19, we would have told you that remote education should be a supplement, not a substitute, for in-person learning. In-person learning helps create resilience, relationships. And so, since last April, the A.F.T. has tried to figure out not whether but how to reopen public schools, basically.
One thing that you have talked about frequently is the lack of trust many parents have, especially Black parents and other nonwhite parents. What is the best way to insure their trust?
Our sense from talking to parents over and over and over again is that you have to create transparency and trust. And one of the best ways of creating trust is that if the educators feel safe, parents are going to feel safe. Now, part and parcel of this is that we have to overcome fear, particularly since COVID-19 spreads asymptomatically, and particularly since we’ve had a year, before this Administration, of an Administration that trafficked in misinformation. So you have to meet fear with facts. But what we’ve seen is that if you have a game plan that’s based in science and common sense, and people use that game plan and trust that it works, then you’re going to create a lot of trust. So that’s why, in the communities in which I’ve dealt a lot—urban sectors that had huge disinvestment in school buildings—we really have had to have the layer of mitigation, the testing, the vaccine access, and school-based committees on a local level. Parents and teachers would walk into a school building before it reopens in person, so they could see the windows being able to open, they could see the hand-washing stations.
And I assume that, for a lot of these communities, the lack of trust and the problems with not being given honest answers or good resources go back to well before Trump.
Correct. It’s well before Trump. And the forty per cent of places that had terrible ventilation was well before Trump. But take Philly, for example, where the community had worked together—parent groups, our union, the principals’ union, lots of elected officials—on facilities issues. When you have a leaky building or a building that just pours water, creates mold every time it rains, a building that doesn’t have windows that open, then already you’re exacerbating respiratory illnesses.
I don’t want to understate the problems with facilities, but they have existed for a long time, and they can’t be barriers to getting the kids back to school, right?
Correct. And we completely agree with you. That’s why you have to have a quick fix, like the air purifiers and fans—but the fans had to go the right way. You couldn’t use fans from a five-and-dime store that worked in a way that pulled air in instead of pulling air out.
There are quick fixes and there are long-term fixes, but in this pandemic you have to at least do the quick fix. As people are now seeing, it’s the ventilation systems, and it’s having enough fresh air in a classroom, so that if there are any droplets they evaporate.
You told the Times, about the change from six feet to three feet, “All of a sudden, because we can’t squeeze in every single kid if it’s six feet that miraculously there’s now studies that say three feet are fine. And what’s going to happen is, people are just not going to trust it.” When you say “miraculously,” you sound as if you’re implying that the C.D.C. just came up with this for political reasons. Is that accurate?
No, that’s not accurate. And it wasn’t that I was misquoted: when I gave that quote to the Times, the C.D.C. kept saying that there were a number of new studies, but they had not released any of these new studies. When Biden had just become President and Walensky had become C.D.C. director, they released several studies before they released their [February] guidance [on schools]— which I thought was actually very helpful, because people could read the studies, and the studies actually gave you a blueprint for where they were going. In this era of misinformation, just having someone, even someone you trust and respect like Dr. Fauci, saying something is not going to create trust. And so we said to the C.D.C., “We want to read the studies before you change this.” And they did not release them until after they made the change.
The studies essentially said that when they took a different cut at the numbers—when they looked at this again, based upon existing evidence—they thought that there was no difference between six feet and three feet, except in the following way: they believe that you have to be relentless on the other mitigation. So things that initially the C.D.C. didn’t think were as necessary, like ventilation, they now say are really important. And the C.D.C. then said the reason they changed it was because of the need to get more kids in schools. [In a press release, Walensky explained the change by saying,“CDC is committed to leading with science and updating our guidance as new evidence emerges.”]
So what they’re saying is that, if you really double down on the other mitigation factors, and you keep six feet in places like cafeterias and other congregate settings, then three feet in classrooms would be fine. And, ultimately, once we read that study, we sent them another letter that said, “O.K., answer the following questions so that we can figure out how to make three feet real. Because, ultimately, you have to have these other mitigation factors.
If everyone, including you, agrees that it’s really important to get kids back to school, and the C.D.C. can’t find a reason why there should be a six-foot rather than a three-foot standard for a lot of kids, especially younger kids, then it seems like there’s nothing nefarious about that. They’re just saying we can’t find any harm and this is really important.
That’s why we ask them to do studies in places that have poor ventilation, and in places that have overcrowding, and in places that have small classrooms, and in places that have high community spread. They didn’t do studies in those areas, where we’ve had the toughest time reopening. They didn’t do studies there. [According to Elissa Schechter-Perkins, the co-author of a Massachusetts study cited by the C.D.C.,“Our study was done in an area and time with high community spread. There have been studies across the country in areas with a high density of students, and in areas where ventilation was not upgraded.”]
That’s why we wrote a letter, and that’s why we want to make sure that the questions that we asked, included asking for studies in these harder areas, are actually answered. If the studies are done in these harder areas that have terrible ventilation, and they come out and say three feet is fine, then we’re going to feel great about it. But we need the studies in the places that have the most distrust and that were the hardest to reopen.
I hear what you’re saying, but you just talked about the importance of trust—and you also said “miraculously” about the C.D.C., and later told the Washington Post, “They are compromising the one enduring public health missive that we’ve gotten from the beginning of this pandemic in order to squeeze more kids into schools.” Does giving quotes like this undermine trust?
Look, I think that they needed to wait to have these other studies, because people, including myself, had worked with masking and physical distancing for this entire time, I think that there was not enough out there in terms of whether or not this would work before they changed the guidance from six feet to three feet. I said to them over and over again, in that week that they signalled that they were going to change this, put the studies out first. Then make sure that there’s trust about it, including with educators who had just spent the last two months reopening schools in hard-to-staff areas using six feet. We could have tried to get more kids in school over the course of the last few months by using some of the vacant space that’s in cities all across America. We could have found more space. So there was another way without jettisoning the one scientific piece of evidence that we had been told from the beginning.
In terms of teacher safety, which I assume is your No. 1 concern or one of your top concerns—
No. My concern is the entire education community. In their new regulations or their new guidance, they say that teachers should be six feet apart still from children and from other adults. How do you do that in a classroom?
Just to be clear, once all teachers have gotten the vaccine—and more data keeps coming out showing that it really cuts down massively, if not completely, on transmission—then is your message to teachers that it’s safe for them to go to work, even if it’s not a well-ventilated building?
Our message right now has been: if you have the road map of viral mitigation and testing and vaccines, it’s safe for you to go to work in person, except for those who are high-risk. We have been pressing to have in-person schooling. So the vaccines were not a prerequisite for that. The vaccines are an added layer of safety. And I think, to get back to your first question, trust gets earned when you have the protocols in place and people are actually acting by those protocols. And they see that, even when there’s cases in schools and people end up quarantining, you can keep schools or school systems open. So I think that the issue that’s unknown to me right now is: when do you get to herd immunity? When do you get to that magic number where there’s enough immunity, there’s enough vaccination, that everybody’s basically taking off their masks? So what happens next year? Do you have the three-foot rule? Do you have the mask on? I think that’s the reason why there is still some hesitation.
Sure. But teachers who have been vaccinated don’t need to worry about herd immunity for themselves.
I think you’re right. So I think I can answer the question like this: Does it mean after you’ve gotten either your J. & J. shot or after you’ve gotten your double from Moderna or Pfizer, are you going to be safe in school right now for the rest of the semester? The answer I believe is yes, but I’m hedging right now because I don’t think anybody knows what this means in a year from now, or six months from now. That’s why I’m hesitant, because I’m not the scientist, you know?
I totally agree with you on the issue of trust. And so I was just wondering if you thought that sometimes the message from you or the A.F.T. made people distrustful of the possibility of coming back safely.
So I think that, if you look at what the A.F.T. has done, we’ve tried to call balls and strikes this whole time. But the issue, in terms of three feet versus six feet, is we thought that, for the places that were tough to reopen, and places that had just reopened, that you couldn’t be so certain that six feet was absolutely key in February, and then so certain in March that it wasn’t key.
The Times reported, nearly two months ago, “Ms. Weingarten is considering making a big speech telling teachers that it can be safe to return to work and crucial to do so.” Is that speech planned?
That speech is planned, but that speech is probably going to be for the first week of May. But we decided that the speech we were going to make is about next year.
