Free Republic

The labor union that represents most of New York City‘s public school teachers is allowing educators to “document issues” regarding the city’s quarantine mandate by uploading photos of violators. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), tweeted Sunday: “If you encounter issues in your classroom related to the mayor’s new quarantine guidelines for students, including cases where students are not able to maintain 3 feet of distance, please use this form to document them.” UFT then linked to an online form where teachers can report quarantine rule violations by uploading information that can include up to five photos. The form also...

Accuses Israel of war crimes, ethnic cleansing The San Diego chapter of the American Federation of Teachers passed a resolution this month rejecting Israel’s legitimacy as a country and accusing the Israeli government of carrying out ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and war crimes against Palestinians. In the resolution, AFT Guild Local 1931, which represents community college teachers in San Diego, refers to Israel as "historic Palestine" and calls on the Biden administration to "hold Israel accountable for its complete disregard of international law" and implement a "prompt reassessment of military aid to Israel." The statement does not mention Palestinian terrorism. It...

(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch announced today that it received 12 pages of *records showing the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA) influencing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director and the White House with their own their own “embargoed vaccine research,” as well as school reopening policy. Additionally, the CDC Director states that she used the unions’ language in the CDC’s school reopening policy.The documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the CDC asking for:All emails exchanged between CDC Director Rochelle P. Walensky and email accounts ending in aft.org...

New York City’s largest teachers union has won a battle to keep teachers and other teachers employed if they suffer from certain medical conditions and do not wish to comply as a result of the Big Apple’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. A arbitrator ruled late Friday that teachers with certain documented medical hardships should be offered assignments outside of classrooms and placed on the city’s payroll. Other teachers who do not want a COVID-19 vaccine should be offered unpaid leave that maintains their health coverage or a severance package. City officials announced last month that all 148,000 employees of the Department...

The Biden administration tightened its masking guidance after a prominent teachers union threatened White House officials with publicly releasing harsh criticism, internal emails show. The National Education Association sent a draft statement to White House officials that included harsh criticism of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's masking guidance, the emails show. But the teachers union ultimately published a version with a much softer tone, and the CDC clarified its guidance to indicate that everyone should be masked in schools, regardless of vaccination status. The new emails show further coordination between the White House and teachers unions just months...

The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) is resisting full compliance with New York City’s vaccine mandate for public school teachers and staffers. Michael Mulgrew, president of UFT, said city hall has asserted that unvaccinated staffers will be taken off the payroll without exception, including those with religious and medical exemptions. “The city, however, announced during our negotiations its intentions to refuse to honor medical and religious exemptions for Department of Education (DOE) staff from COVID-19 vaccination,” Mulgrew said in a statement directed to UFT members. The union is going to try to arbitrate the impasse together with other labor groups....

Would-be school teachers at the Oklahoma Aspiring Educators Association’s recent Racial and Social Justice Symposium were told that both public schools and many of the teachers within them are tools of white supremacy. But featured speakers at the online event offered a solution: Purge the teaching profession of many of its current members, who are majority white. “Really, I want to be an agent of discomfort for white folks,” said Terry Jess, a National Education Association Social Justice Activist finalist in 2017. “I want to get folks to either commit to the work or get out of the profession. And...

First, these educators said they should be showered with exultation and privilege for persevering through the pandemic. They’re heroes. They’ve had it bad. Forget first responders, health care workers, and other folks on the front lines fighting COVID. Teachers staying at home were the real soldiers. Go to hell, guys. You didn’t want to go back to work even though the science, a subject you clowns supposedly teach, said it was safe. It was your friends at the CDC who said so, but also the same people who you colluded with to keep the schools shut down. When parents objected,...

There aren't many figures in modern American life more contemptible than Randi Weingarten, political hack, union boss, and anti-child zealot. Her cynical agitation and endless fear-mongering deliberately cause active harm to be inflicted upon millions of American children who were denied in-person classroom instruction last year. The teachers unions, bureaucrats, and elected officials who fought to keep classrooms closed did so while ignoring overwhelming data and callously turning a blind eye to the myriad disastrous ramifications of their failed 'remote' learning regime. We know, for instance, that Weingarten's special interest group lobbied behind the scenes in order to shape the...

<p>On Tuesday afternoon the Centers for Disease Control officially recommended vaccinated individuals wear masks indoors. For children under 12, the CDC wants mask worn for hours inside the classroom.</p><p>"CDC recommends universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status. Children should return to full-time in-person learning in the fall with layered prevention strategies in place," the guidance states.</p>

The nation’s largest teachers’ union has quietly taken down a series of adopted and proposed resolutions from its website, including one that calls for the organization to defend the teaching of Marxism-rooted critical race theory (CRT) in public schools. The National Education Association (NEA), which represents more than 3 million employees in public education, previously showed on its website resolutions proposed during its 100th Representative Assembly. As of the morning of July 6, three days after the online convention concluded, visitors could use the website to track the status of those proposals, including whether they were approved, denied, or referred...

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) will feature Critical Race Theory champion Ibram X. Kendi Wednesday during its biennial TEACH (Together Educating America’s Children) professional development conference. Kendi, the author of Antiracist Baby, has received the backing of the Biden Education Department.

…”All your children are belong to us”…I’m not 100% sure whether this is unbridled arrogance or just jaw-dropping tone-deafness, but this is absurd. These are toxic sociopaths operating on a level of totalitarian outlook that is alarming as heck. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), a national union led by hard-line leftist Randi Weingarten, has announced adding $2.5 million to a legal fund specifically intended to fight parents for control over education curriculum. Apparently the AFT feels they should be permitted to determine the curriculum of what they teach. Parents do not get a say in what is taught to...

The corrupt way in which California Governor Gavin Newsom rigged his recall election once again confirms why 1.7 million state voters signed the recall petition against him. Newsom and his fellow Democrats reduced the state to the Banana Republic of California with their shameful moves leading to the September 14 recall date. Ballots will begin flooding to Californians’ mail boxes — whether they asked for them or not under COVID-19 “emergency” rules — in mid-August because Newsom and his cronies changed the rules to move up the election by 30 days. ... Changing the date of the election to a...

My fellow New Yorkers, you know what we are doing is crazy: Unmask. It’s time. It’s long past the time. What happened to us? How are we entering summer 2021, with many of us still masked, despite all the evidence suggesting we should stop? There was never any need to wear masks outdoors. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci admits that, yet on every street there are people, often alone, continuing to wear a mask. Some stores continue to require masking, even as nearly 70 percent of New Yorkers are vaccinated. And our kids suffer most of all, as the science-denying teachers...

Leaders of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) will vote in September on a declaration to call for an end of US aid to Israel. The resolution will also ask its members to vote in favor of “the international campaign for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against apartheid in Israel.” UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz sent a motion form to members that stated: I move that UTLA denounce the recent bombings in The West Bank and Gaza by the Israeli resulting in the deaths of hundreds of civilian people, mostly women and children. Palestinians have the right to self-determination free of violence and...

The president of America's second largest teachers' union has called for the full reopening of schools for the next academic year, saying 'schools must be open in person five days a week.' Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Thursday morning that 'nothing should stand in the way' of public schools fully reopening and staying open by the fall. Weingarten, whose union has 1.7 million members, admitted that a return to the classroom is not 'risk-free' but is crucial because 'prolonged isolation is harmful' to students across America.

President of the American Federation of Teachers Teacher Union Randi Weingarten defended indoctrinating children with Critical Race Theory on Thursday. Featured on the Black News Channel with anchor Charles Blow, Weingarten said, “All of the sudden, you’re hearing people talk about Critical Race Theory; people who have no idea what that term means.” She contended certain Americans are “trying to ban the 1619 project because it is trying to do exactly what you’re saying, which is to actually teach, uh, factual version of oppression in America, oppression of people who are in the in the indigenous nation, and oppression against...

A leftover from the weekend via the New York Post. There’s nothing unusual about special interests lobbying the federal government to try to influence policy, of course. But there’s cause for squeamishness when (a) it’s the “scientific” branch of the government responsible for pandemic guidance that’s being pressured and (b) the special interest in question happens to be a hugely generous benefactor of the party in power. The Post has documented two changes to CDC guidance that were made at the behest of the American Federation of Teachers, but that’s only because there are actual documents — emails — to...

We’ve been reporting on the influence the American Federation of Teachers union seems to have had on the Biden regime in regard to schools reopening.But now emails reveal that influence may have been even more than we thought.The emails were obtained by Americans for Public Trust, a conservative watchdog group, through FOIA, and provided to the New York Post.What they show is a lot of correspondence between the AFT and the CDC, with the White House and the CDC Director Rochelle Walensky included in the email train. According to the Post, the CDC had been “preparing to write that schools...