#Weingarten’s support of 1619 Project betrays union’s proud history

Randi Weingarten may be moving off her all-out resistance to school reopenings, but the powerful head of the nation’s largest teachers’ union is still betraying schoolchildren on another front by defending public schools’ use of The New York Times’ dishonest and dangerous 1619 Project.

It’s an outrageous betrayal of academic standards — which the American Federation of Teachers once proudly stood for.

Weingarten sparred this week on Fox News with host Martha MacCallum about the 1619 Project, which touts that year “as our true founding,” as it’s when the first slave arrived on our shores.

MacCallum noted that the project, led by the Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones, teaches kids to believe that “the country was founded on the basis of wanting to preserve slavery.” Weingarten denied it: “I’ve had several conversations with Nikole Hannah-Jones, and I have not arrived at the same conclusion from her work as you have,” she sniffed.

“That’s not my conclusion,” MacCallum retorted. “That’s directly from their work.”

The Fox host is correct. Hannah-Jones has tried to backtrack, but the writer, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her piece launching the series, has said the project declares “our true founding is 1619 not 1776.”

The project holds that the American Revolution itself was fought chiefly to preserve slavery. “Out of slavery,” one Times editor wrote, “grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system.”

That’s not true, of course, and many scholars, left and right, white and black, have loudly denounced the project’s claims.

And as MacCallum said, “it would be wrong as a historian to want to teach them something that is not true,” especially something that leads “to teaching kids that we live in a systemically racist country.”

Weingarten’s response to this sensible point? Deflection to Fox’s coverage of the 2020 race: “I would hope that Fox would be just as focused on — let’s get rid of the misinformation on this election.”

Nice try.

And what a drop in standards — in teachers’ union heads. “Policymakers and reformers,” longtime AFT chief Al Shanker wrote in 1995, “have gotten caught up in faddish and radical schemes” and “ignore what is obvious to people who work in the schools”: Without “high academic standards, which students are expected to meet and helped to meet, school programs become trivial and meaningless.”

But now Shanker’s successor Weingarten doesn’t dare call out a “faddish and radical scheme” to teach children fundamental falsehoods for what it is. The AFT now stands for nothing except its members’ most selfish interests.