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Straight from the “No matter how cynical I get, I just can’t keep up” file, it was recently announced that American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten has been appointed to the Homeland Security Academic Partnership Council. According to the Homeland Security website, the HSAPC will “provide strategic and actionable recommendations to the Secretary on campus safety and security, improved coordination, research priorities, hiring, and more.”
Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) vented his frustration with the appointment, tweeting that Weingarten “is the last person who should be advising anyone on school safety.”
Scott is right, of course. Coming on the heels of the utterly disastrous teacher union-mandated school shutdowns, where Weingarten was a prime influence, she is indeed the last person to give advice on school safety. In fact, a House subcommittee is currently threatening to subpoena Weingarten for her failure to disclose communications between her and the CDC on reopening schools in early 2021. If she is called in to answer questions, perhaps she can detail how deeply she was involved in affecting CDC decisions. Perhaps she could also explain why Sweden never closed their schools and not one child died from the disease, and teacher cases were rare.
Students have been affected in many ways by the shutdowns. The widely publicized learning loss is a huge problem, and violence in our public schools has escalated exponentially in the last few years.
According to EducationWeek, 44 percent of school and district leaders say they are receiving more threats of violence by students now than they did in the fall of 2019. Also, two out of three teachers, principals, and district leaders say students are misbehaving more these days than they did in the fall of 2019.
On a similar note, a nationwide American Psychological Association survey of nearly 15,000 teachers and staff from July 2020 to June 2021 reveals that school staff (paraprofessionals, school counselors, instructional aides, school resource officers, etc.) reported high rates of student physical violence, with 22% of staff reporting at least one incident of physical violence during COVID.
Additionally, the Institute of Education Sciences found that 36% of schools report increased student verbal abuse of teachers since COVID, and 48% reported increased acts of disrespect.
What does Weingarten want to do about this upheaval?
While she hasn’t commented on the latest data, her union, the AFT, and the National Education Association have, over time, been prime proponents of “restorative justice.” This touchy-feely new-age canard, which took hold in the 1990s but picked up steam in recent years, has taken root throughout much of the country. It emphasizes “making the victim and offender whole” and involves “an open discussion of feelings.” Restorative justice came into being because black students are far more likely to be suspended than other ethnic groups. The suggestion here, of course, is that white teachers and administrators tend to be racist. But the racial bean counters never get around to explaining why the racial disparity exists even in schools where black principals and staff predominate.
The AFT promotes restorative justice as an important tool for teachers, claiming that it focuses on “repairing harm, addressing community needs, and building and sustaining healthy relationships.” But the union won’t address the fact that their high-minded talk doesn’t match reality.
A Fordham Institute survey from 2019 found that teachers report “putting up with more misbehavior than they used to.” While some educators see value in restorative justice as an add-on, “they believe that suspensions remain a necessary part of any behavioral structure. It’s easy to sloganeer in support of abolishing suspensions in policy proposals or from social justice advocacy groups.”
In fact, a 2022 poll by the NEA finds that almost half of all teachers reported they desire or plan to quit or transfer their jobs due to concerns about school climate and school safety.
The Daily Signal’s Tony Kinnett sums up a typical restorative justice scenario. Quoting Milwaukee teacher Daniel Buck, he writes, “A student gets into a violent fight in the classroom—students’ safety is threatened, and the teacher struggles to break up the fight before calling the office. The office may (or may not) send an administrator, counselor, or other office-staff member to the classroom, where the fighting students are taken into the hallway or the office for a brief discussion about their actions. Most often, the students are told to get along, sent back to class, and within five minutes, nothing more has occurred than putting the safety of students at risk with both violent students back in their seats with no more than a polite ‘talking to.’ These students don’t buy into restorative practices. Why should they care?”
Hence, it’s not surprising that most teachers have a very different take than the unions on how to deal with misbehaving students.
One other safety issue that Weingarten and her union cronies strike out on is what to do about school shootings.
In the aftermath of the school shooting in Uvalde, TX, the media were filled with opinions and accusations about what was behind the tragic deaths of 19 school children and two teachers: lack of religion, fatherlessness, a mental health crisis, video games, the culture in general, the cops screwed up, etc.
Randi Weingarten insisted that guns were the problem. After the shooting, she took a group and protested outside Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s office and shrieked, “Schools are supposed to be safe and welcoming places. There’s no amount of hardening you’re going to be able to do if an 18-year-old comes in with an AR-15, shooting 300 bullets a minute, and is wearing body armor.”
There has been a pile of nonsense written since the shooting, starting with Randi Weingarten’s above statement. The union boss seems clueless that an AR-15 is a semiautomatic gun, requiring its user to pull the trigger each time a bullet is discharged. Firing 300 rounds a minute? Nonsense.
Contrary to Weingarten’s and other anti-gunners’ protests, we need armed teachers at every school. These volunteer educators would go through a rigorous background check and proper police-type training, and then should be allowed to anonymously carry a concealed weapon on campus. In fact, as of May 2022, 32 states allow teachers and staff to effectively protect children by packing a firearm at school. But sadly, few teachers enroll in these programs. Even in gun-friendly Texas, just 300 of the state’s 370,000 teachers have signed up to be campus “marshals.” These programs must be promoted.
To put things into perspective, the Superdome in New Orleans has a seating capacity of 73,208 people—and more than “900 public safety personnel, as reported by Just Facts. This amounts to one security guard for every 80 people. In a school of say, 600 students, seven or eight teacher carriers would be equivalent.
While the notion that schools should be “gun-free zones” sounds good, it is simple-minded. As firearms expert John Lott noted in 2019, there has “yet to be a single case of someone being wounded or killed from a shooting, let alone a mass public shooting … at a school that lets teachers carry guns.”
Evil-doers don’t play by the rules, and the consequences can be devastating. On airplanes, armed marshals are placed anonymously on flights to safeguard us and our children. Also, after the 9/11 attacks, willing pilots were trained by the TSA to carry weapons in the cockpits of commercial airliners. And presidents’ kids have armed secret service protection at their school. Don’t all of our children deserve the same?
Whether it’s defending the lockdowns, promoting restorative justice, or allowing armed teachers, Randi Weingarten and her fellow unionistas won’t budge. Their leftwing political agenda trumps teacher and student safety. Bigly. As such, it’s very easy to become cynical about Randi Weingarten’s appointment to a position that concerns itself with school safety. Cynical and sad, but these days, hardly surprising.
Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.
This was an interesting article to read. Her solution for the problems in our public schools may be to raise the salaries of the teachers, provide more benefits like full pensions with twenty years of service, maybe fifty holidays with pay. That may motivate them to do a better job. Here is one possible solution in the next paragraph.
Teachers have to understand, it takes time for certain students to do their homework. So, it takes three weeks to do one lesson and you never finish the book by the end of the school year.. Teachers should give them extra credit, if they can print their name in eight grade. Teachers have to allow an open book when doing a test. Maybe, even provide them with the answers the night before the test. Provide them with candy and ice cream so they behave. In high school, provide them with beer and wine so they fall asleep, then the teachers can relax the rest of the afternoon. Just wake them up to take the school bus home. We can’t have students sleeping overnight in schools. The parents would miss them.
Another thing to consider is the additional workers needed to tutor the students at all grade levels including college. All of this would be paid for with higher real estate taxes. When they graduate, they can sign their employment application with an X. That in itself would be a great accomplishment.
A little humor for this evening.
One possibility that isn’t being discussed is holding parents accountable for their kids’ misbehavior.
Your kid makes a violent threat against someone, bullies someone, or assaults someone? You get fined, go to jail, or get any other legal penalty. Your kid gets a hold of your gun and brings it to school? You’re legally responsible for letting that happen. Some punk kid does that to your kid? Then you can file a lawsuit against the kid’s parents.
I’m very much pro-2nd Amendment. That said, I strongly support safe storage laws and penalizing parents who fail to store weapons safely such that their kids can’t get to them.
Perhaps parents would care a lot more about their kids’ behavior (or misbehavior) if we did.
But will it happen? Not very likely.
Mr. Deplorable:
We can’t hold the Parents responsible, it would be a violation of the child’s civil rights. The law would be breathing down their neck. Remember, everything in American society is being turned upside down.
The teacher give a student a bad grade, the parents or single mom shows up and scream racism. Other incidents are covered up by the school administrators. Schools teach CRT, but tell the students not to tell their parents. You want to change your sex, no need to tell the parents. The kid is involved in riots and looting, the parents or single mom ask them what goodies did they get. What they don’t want, they sell at a discount. They grow up and don’t want to work, that OK, welfare will tell care of them. The high school kid want to have babies at 15, 16, or 17 that OK, welfare will take care of them for the rest of their lives. The kid bring a garbage bag to a retail store and load up the bag with all sort of goodies, and then walk out with all the stuff. No one will stop that person. Remember, its only a fine, not a real criminal act.
That was just a short list.
WHAT A WONDERFUL SOCIETY WE LIVE TODAY.
I’m waiting for a 17 year old to walk into a BMW auto dealership and demand the keys to one of their car. The sales person give him the keys and leave with the car. We cannot say no to our children.
I have had a thought or two on the arming of teachers. On its face it is a good idea and makes good sense to protect our kids at least as well as we do any bank, but some things are now holding me back on that.
There is a dangerous and strong cultural trend for teachers and schools (public ones) to consider the kids there to be “theirs” and parents are looked at as an enemy, or at least as an undesirable influence on the kids. During the lock downs schools expressed concern that parents would monitor remote lessons and some required parents to sign documentation stating they wouldn’t actively monitor lessons. Look at how school boards treat parents who confront them on their Leftist and Critical Racial Theory lesson plans and activities.
The Federal government, most notably in the guise of the Biden Administration and the DOJ has repeatedly claimed that parents who dare protest such trends, and attend public meetings to do so are to be considered “dangerous extremists”. Parents have had the FBI investigating them for it. A constant theme government officials espouse is that our kids are actually “everyone’s kids”, meaning, through their actions and speeches, theirs.
In many states parents are now finding out how far this trans mania has infected school curriculum. It is now at the point where states pass laws “protecting” children from their own parents if they think they might be trans. The predictable backlash from this insanity has further made parents into some sort of active enemy in attempting to protect their children from such madness.
Ask yourselves this question in light of all that is happening today involving the government’s and schools’ attitudes toward OUR children now: Do you really want these people armed now? How long would it be before they take the attitude some time that they can enforce their insanity at the point of a gun against parents who want to come take their kids away from such madness; “protecting their kids” from the enemy they claim openly to be parents who don’t buy into the Left’s orthodoxy?
One day, if it is allowed that teachers can carry guns in schools we all had better pay very, very close attention to the reasons for the sudden reversal of the historic reluctance for government to do that.
She was apppinted because she’s an intersectional (lesbian) far leftist whose union givrs the Dem Party huge piles of campaign dollars, not because she has anything to offer about school safety. The reason that the Parkland school shooter was able to purchase a gun which he used to kill 17 students and teachers is that his high school was into “restorative justice.” As a consequence, none of his serious conduct problems when a student were referred to the police, he did not get a criminal record, and was thus able to purchase the gun(s) which he used to commit the massacre. This “restorative justice,” which restores nothing and is no justice at all, was pushed by Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne to end the “school to prison pipeline” by avoiding actual justice for budding thugs that would give them a criminal record. But, as good Leftists, they were never held accountable. For anything. Ever.
In your first sentence, you mentioned her sexual orientation. One problem with some of these “minorities” is that they have an agenda, and this ‘agenda” gets in the way of common sense, making good decisions, doing the right thing. And I’m not talkng about just sexual orientation.
Well, her agenda is socialism the goal of which is, as V.I. Lenin said, communism.
I don’t think the increase in threats and violence in schools has much if anything to do with covid. It’s been increasing ever since obama’s justice department went after schools to decrease the racial disparity in suspensions without any regard for whether the behavior of black students was creating the disparity. Perhaps there may have been a slight hiatus in this drive when Trump was president, but since 2021 it’s been a continuation of the obama DOJ policies with the predictable results.
Two things I wonder from this article are is weingarten getting paid for this board position, and is the building containing the AFT’s national offices protected by armed security? I wouldn’t be surprised if weingarten herself is protected by armed security.
They need to ger serious against this kind of stuff and that means overturning the so called Separation of Church & State and more proper punishment for those who Bully others
There should be no questions about why public “education” in this nation is such an abject failure with morons the caliber of Weingarten in positions of authority.
Randi Weingarten is a lesbian/Marxist activist. Everything she touches is tainted by this radical, hate-filled fusion. To say she is a mortal danger to America’s children is an understatement.
It all starts with discipline I know that a dirty word these days its been missing from our vocabulary. since the 1970’s. Kids should act the same way at school as they do at home. I acted right my kids acted right my grandson acted right and he just graduated high school. My father held a firm hand in the study of disciplining his kids my mother did okay and in my day the schools still. Had the ball in their court. when the unions stepped in and help removed CORPORAL PUNISHMENT from the education system that’s when chaos be gain just what they wanted simple corporal punishment lets give credit where credit is due your local DARE police telling your kids your parents can’t spank you that’s hitting you.
Is the lost worth all the gain
In the 1990’s I taught at one of the most violent high schools in the USA in New York City. The school had 18 peace officer security guards. They were called “peace officers” because they carried handcuffs. Also assigned were two standard armed NYC police officers.. During my first year there were about 2400 enrolled, but then the school was “reformed” by converting it into three small schools with about 600 students in each school. The day began with students putting book bags through metal detectors. Students were randomly selected for hand wanding for weapons on their persons. Nevertheless numerous fights were breaking out throughout the day. One of my students bragged he had a Glock in his book bag. “Do you want to see it Mr. L.?” he asked me. A girl was shot in the leg exiting the school. A full scale riot broke out between Haitian and Jamaican students. One student tried to set fire to an historical building in the middle of the school grounds-Alexander Hamilton had gone to school there. Students regularly put crazy glue in the computer keyboards. I gently suggested to one girl that she move her computer cursor to a certain place in the screen, and she screamed “F*** You!!” and stormed out of the room slamming the door. Another girl jumped out of a window — although the first floor, it was an 8 foot drop. I opened the door to the stairwell one day and a female student was performing oral sex on a male student, with two other males as onlookers. As soon as I stepped into the scene, they fled. This is a short list. More details can be accessed at Amazon.com at The Catastrophic Decline of America’s Public High Schools; NYC A Case Study.
Curiously enough, discipline is carried out far more against boys than girls but I do not see anyone fussing about this disparity. I can’t imagine why.
“Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.”
Somebody needed to put a bu ll et in Randi Weingarten’s head years ago.