The left closed schools, failed kids — and now sues to block choice
Democrats closed schools unnecessarily during COVID. Five years later, test scores continue to plummet. And now, unions and their allies oppose school choice with even greater intensity than ever.
This hostility toward parental choice has been the Democrat stance for decades, but since 2019 the consequences have become unmistakable. The numbers are in, and they are damning.
Red states emphasized learning; blue states kowtowed to union demands.
The first National Assessment of Educational Progress report since the pandemic shows American high-school seniors graduating in 2024 performed worse than their 2019 peers in both math and reading.
Seniors scoring at or above the “proficient” level dropped from 37% to 35% in reading and from 24% to 22% in math. The number of seniors failing even “basic” math climbed from 40% to 45%, while those below the basic reading level rose from 30% to 32%.
As The 74, an education-focused outlet, reported: COVID “took a bite out of already declining basic skills” and left seniors “reading and doing math worse than any senior class of the past generation.”
The class of 2024 spent nearly four years under lockdowns, masks, remote learning, and chronic absenteeism. By March 25, 2020, every public school in the country was closed, locking out 50.8 million students.
Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, in “In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us,” described these closures as “the most extensive and lengthy disruption to education in history.”
Unions kept classrooms shut
What Macedo and Lee underplay is the role of the American Federation of Teachers and its president, Randi Weingarten.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic concluded in its final report that many schools “remained closed because of AFT and Ms. Weingarten’s political interference” in the Biden administration’s reopening guidance.
That interference persisted despite mounting evidence that children were at low risk for serious illness and transmitted the virus less than adults. Early reports from Iceland and even the World Health Organization’s initial findings from Wuhan confirmed as much.
Instead of leading America’s schools back to normal operations, the AFT insisted that closures remain the default. The result: The U.S. more closely resembled developing nations than its advanced democratic peers.
The establishment’s response
Faced with the lowest test scores in a generation, the education establishment has not offered reform. Instead, it calls for more unions.
The 74 reported earlier this month that school administrator unions have expanded since COVID, with 11 new locals across eight states. It also noted strikes and strike threats in Washington state and Philadelphia, along with lawsuits from teachers’ unions trying to block school voucher programs as unconstitutional.
In short, the very groups that prolonged school closures now demand more money and more power, while students pay the price.
Spending more, learning less
The U.S. spent $15,500 per student in 2019 (adjusted to 2021 dollars), 38% more than the OECD average, while delivering worse outcomes. Yet unions still fight to preserve their monopoly and to block competition from private or charter schools.
But school choice is breaking through. As of May 2025, 35 states offer some form of private school choice program, most with more than one. Of those states, 27 voted for Trump in 2024. Among the 15 states without school choice, 11 voted for Harris.
The pattern is clear: The longest lockdowns happened in blue states, where Democratic leaders sided with unions over students.
RELATED: Stop blaming schools — the crisis starts in America’s homes
Federalism’s hard lesson
Macedo and Lee note that “lengthier school closures had strong political support in Democratic-leaning jurisdictions.” The Sunlight Policy Center of New Jersey measured the impact:
Red states (that voted for Trump in 2020) provided in-person instruction for 74.5% of the 2020-21 school year, while blue states (that voted for Biden) only provided in-person instruction for 37.6% of the time. Put another way, children in red states got 134 days of in-person instruction versus 68 days for blue state children. The bottom line: Red state kids got almost twice the number of in-person days than blue state kids during the school year. That’s an enormous difference in learning.
The bottom line: Red states emphasized learning; blue states kowtowed to union demands.
The takeaway
American seniors may be falling behind in math and reading, but the country has gained a civics lesson: Federalism matters. Where unions dictate policy, students suffer. Where parents have choices, students have opportunities.
The fight for school choice isn’t only about better scores. It’s about protecting families from the kind of educational malpractice that wrecked a generation of learning.
Shocking Absenteeism Report Shows Covid Lockdown Effects Still Linger
The absenteeism problem has hit hardest in those communities with the biggest need for quality education.'Dystopian nightmare': AFT boss Randi Weingarten announces curriculum partnership with World Economic Forum
The World Economic Forum seized on the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to realize its founder's proposed "great reset" of capitalism — a progressive liberal plot initially hatched in opposition to the "shareholder capitalism" championed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman.
The technocratic globalist organization's initiative was, however, exposed and torpedoed in recent years, thanks in part to President Donald Trump and so-called conspiracy theorists.
Weeks before he stepped down on bad terms as chairman of the WEF, Klaus Schwab noted in an April 1 letter to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, failed U.S. presidential candidate Al Gore, and the forum's other deep-pocketed trustee board members, "I am deeply convinced that in today's special context the forum is more important and relevant than ever before."
In the wake of Schwab's departure and the failure of his "great reset," it appears that the WEF is now playing the long game — working to shape the minds of today's youth in order to reshape the world of tomorrow.
Fellow travelers stateside appear more than keen to join forces.
Randi Weingarten announced on Friday that the American Federation of Teachers — which claims to have 1.7 million members — is partnering with the WEF "to create a curriculum that will lead to good jobs and solid careers in U.S. manufacturing."
'Americans aren't going to stand for it.'
"The goal of education should be to cultivate the skills necessary to succeed in our rapidly changing world, not to create good test-takers," said Weingarten. "That will require our education system to move beyond stifling accountability models that narrow what teachers can teach; condemn kids to low-quality, high-stakes standardized tests and excessive test prep; and do nothing to improve learning."
Weingarten made the announcement at the 2025 AFT convention, where the union also adopted a number of radical resolutions, including resolutions in support of statehood for the District of Columbia; in opposition to the Trump administration's detention and deportation of foreign radicals on student visas; in support of the advancement of gender ideology in schools, for "gender-affirming medical care," and for boys in girls' sports; and in support of working with Black Lives Matter and other radical groups to fight efforts by conservatives and parental advocacy groups to rid schools of woke propaganda.
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The AFT has not yet disclosed the details of the planned curriculum; however, critics suspect the objective will be more of the same from both the union and the forum — ideological uniformity, institutional capture, and the advancement of a progressive liberal agenda.
"This partnership is straight from a dystopian nightmare," Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Culture Project and a visiting fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, told Blaze News. "It's just what we need: the globalists running the education system for the entire United States."
"Americans aren't going to stand for it," continued DeAngelis, who is convinced this will push more Americans out of the public school system. "We don't want Randi Weingarten raising our kids. We don't want the globalists raising our kids."
'The great reset is still ongoing.'
While it is presently unclear precisely what role the WEF will play in the development of the curriculum, it appears that the AFT will at the very least lean on the forum's imagined authority to advance its climate agenda.
In a resolution adopted at the convention titled "Climate-smart and sustainable schools," the union cites the claim by the World Economic Forum "that 'urgency is our only savior' when talking about the climate crisis."
With this imagined urgency in mind, the union resolved to integrate a climate-focused curriculum to "facilitate comprehensive energy reduction, decarbonization, sustainability and indoor air quality projects," and noted that education on the supposed risks of climate change can be a "powerful driver for more sustainable development, including a transition to greener societies."
"They basically want to destroy industry," said DeAngelis. "They're pushing this crazy climate-change hysteria agenda, and they're trying to use the school system to achieve the World Economic Forum's goals."
Alvin Lui, president of the parental rights advocacy group Courage Is a Habit, told Blaze News, "The sustainable development goals that the WEF pushes [are] all about gender and identity; it's all about income redistribution. ... It's about climate change-ism. It's everything that we're trying to get out of school, get out of our culture."
"The great reset is still ongoing; tearing down America is still ongoing. And how do you do that? You get into their organizations," said Lui.
"Parents are not going to know that their children are consuming WEF curriculum because it's going to be hidden," continued Lui. "They're not going to say, 'Hi, this curriculum is from the World Economic Forum.' It's going to say, 'This is going to prepare your child for the global workforce. It's career readiness.'"
Reflecting on the track records of the WEF and AFT, Lui suggested that the likely goal of their curriculum will not be to produce effective graduates but rather useful idiots.
"When they go into the workforce, they're not going and saying, 'Hey, I want to work at Jaguar so that I can climb the corporate ladder,' or 'I can make this position and get this promotion,'" Lui said, singling out Jaguar as an example of a robust brand recently blown up by woke hires. "They're going and saying, 'Jaguar is not inclusive enough. Jaguar doesn't focus on human rights. They're don't have inclusive enough bathrooms.'"
DeAngelis suggested that the WEF will ultimately serve as another aid for Weingarten to "brainwash our kids into her socialist ideology."
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