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During Trump’s day, they launched a successful and widely admired national protest movement, RedforEd, to demand higher salaries and funding for public schools. A wave of teacher walkouts in 2018 and 2019 drew wide public support, including from parents whose lives were disrupted by strikes.
When the coronavirus swept the country last year, teachers knew their power.
“You can’t say, ‘Well, half a loaf in a pandemic will be good enough,’” Ms. Weingarten said. “Half a loaf is what teachers have had to deal with for most of their lives.”
From the fall, politics became a major indicator of the opening of schools in a county. Even today, support for Mr. Trump is associated with the school in person. In Democrat-leaning America, where unions are strong, classrooms are often empty.
A body of international research now suggests that school-based transmission of Covid-19 can be effectively mitigated through precautions such as masks and social distancing, especially when local virus levels are controlled. But with the emergence of dangerous new variants and a slow rollout of vaccines, teachers remain skeptical.
Can Ms. Weingarten, 63, reassure them?
AFT represents some of the largest districts in cities that dominate educational policy, such as New York, Chicago and Washington. Another AFT local in San Francisco also reached an agreement in principle on Sunday to establish health and safety guidelines for the reopening of schools.
Ms. Weingarten was inspired to get involved in union activism as a teenager, when she saw her mother, a teacher, go on strike in Rockland County, a northern suburb of New York City.
Her first job in organized labor was as a lawyer for AFT’s New York local chapter, the United Federation of Teachers. She led this union from 1998 to 2009, during a period of extraordinary conflict with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and chancellor of her schools, Joel Klein. The two have sought to expand the city’s largely non-union charter schools and use standardized tests to assess teachers.
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