Randi Weingarten doesn’t care about 58% chronic absence rate in Baltimore schools
Jack Elbaum
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If you scroll through Randi Weingarten’s Twitter account, you will see she posts a lot. Her more than 210,000 tweets consist of posts about gun control, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Ukraine, teachers, and even random economic policy. One thing you will not find her posting so much about, though, is educational achievement or outcome.
This should strike the average person as odd, considering she is the head of the country’s second-largest teachers union — a union whose mission states that it aims to ensure “high-quality public education” for students.
At the same time, if Weingarten did post about it, it may expose the embarrassingly bad conditions of many of the biggest public school districts in the country — districts where her union represents the teachers.
Take Baltimore City Public Schools, for example. It is one of the 50 biggest public school districts in the country, and its teachers union is a part of Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers. Shocking new statistics show that 58% of students were “chronically absent” in 2022, defined in Maryland as missing more than 10% of school. This is the highest rate in the state and also the first time the majority of students were chronically absent in more than 20 years. In fact, the rate has more than doubled since 2016, when it was 23% — a bad number, to be sure, but nothing compared to today’s condition.
https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/1663600026730344448?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
But a look at Weingarten’s Twitter or the AFT’s website reveals that neither has anything to say about this school district’s dire situation. Nor do they have anything to say about the other part of Baltimore’s crisis: youth crime. According to Fox Baltimore, “So far, in 2023 … five juveniles, between the ages of 10 and 17, have been arrested in connection with homicides.” Another 14 children under the age of 18 have been murdered.
The fact that this is not national news is unfortunate, but the fact that this doesn’t even have the attention of the leader of the second-largest teachers union in the country is a disgrace. And it tells us something valuable: Teachers union leaders are primarily political operatives who work for the benefit of their members, not for the benefit of students. Their passionate advocacy for school closures should have made that clear, but what they consistently reveal to be their true priorities hammer home that fact every day. After all, because this problem cannot be blamed on underfunding — the Baltimore City school district spends $21,000 per student, the fourth-highest figure among large school districts — you can expect to hear nothing about it.
I do not revel in this reality, though. It is an actual tragedy. To have a good education system is to prepare the next generation to succeed both personally and communally. To have a failing education system is to build a future devoid of the necessary elements of a good society. As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote, “To defend a country, you need an army. But to defend a civilization, you need schools. You need education as the conversation between the generations.”
Too many schools today are failing to equip America’s youth with the tools it needs to live a functional life, let alone defend our civilization — and Weingarten is too focused on partisan politics to care.
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Jack Elbaum is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.