American Federation of Teachers Sells Out to Rockefellers, Trilateralists, and Big Tech,  by John Klyczek

The country’s 2nd largest teachers union heavily lobbied the CDC to not reopen schools. While they framed their efforts as health and safety focused, there is more than meets the eye to the union’s push for indefinite remote learning.

On May 1st, 2021, Americans for Public Trust leaked email correspondences between the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, these emails revealed how the bureaucracy of this teachers’ union was lobbying the CDC to roll back its school reopening guidelines.

Pumping the brakes on the return to in-person learning, the AFT emails successfully petitioned the CDC to add “language” recommending that schools continue to provide “telework” and “virtual teaching opportunities” as alternatives to face-to-face education. The AFT also requested that the Center for Disease Control add a coronavirus “variant closing metric” that would renege on the CDC’s greenlight for in-person instruction “at any level of community [COVID] transmission.” By prioritizing “telework” and “virtual teaching,” while seeking to reinstate COVID lockdown measures in the event of new coronavirus variants, the lobbying efforts of the AFT basically pressured the CDC into relegating schools to prolonged virtual “distance learning” that is outsourced to private ed-tech corporations.

To put it bluntly, the AFT has been attempting to sway the CDC to ratchet up COVID restrictions that perpetuate public education’s reliance on Big Tech company privatization. These companies have been raking in record profits by selling ed-tech products to schools during lockdown. In turn, just after their email exchanges with the CDC, the AFT and the National Education Association co-authored Learning Beyond COVID-19: A Vision for Thriving in Public Education, which calls for increased access to “devices needed for online learning” along with increased access to “virtual” tutoring.

Why would the American Federation of Teachers go against “following the science” by lobbying the CDC to backpedal its relaxation of school health and safety protocols? Why would the AFT defy CDC experts by opposing school re-openings in favor of extending COVID restrictions that prop open the floodgates for the ed-tech industry to advance its privatization of public education through “remote” e-learning contracts? Why do this when mainstream medical journals, such as the Lancet, have published data which finds that “[c]hildren and young people remain at low risk of COVID-19 mortality”? What is the point when there is mounting evidence that in-person schoolhouse learning does not result in rising community transmission rates of COVID-19?

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