Skip to main content

Education

White House considered teachers union contract negotiations over science, students on school reopenings

December 27, 2021 2:56pm

Updated: December 27, 2021 6:38pm

The Biden administration was in close contact with the leading teachers unions leading up to the release of school reopening guidelines back in February, which newly released emails show emphasized how the rollout may impact ongoing labor disputes.

White House staffers also facilitated a meeting between Rochelle Walensky, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the head of the nation’s largest teacher’s union, National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle, the emails show.

"These emails show time and time again that the White House inserted itself into the shaping of school guidance with a primary focus of accommodating teachers unions," Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of government watchdog Americans for Public Trust (APT), told Fox News. "However, the only thing the White House should have been focused on was how to get our children safely back into the classroom."

The NEA outreach official who coordinated the meeting between Walensky and Pringle was later appointed to a position in the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS), under which the CDC operates.

The emails were obtained by ATP in a lawsuit they filed against the DHS and CDC in July over a failure to “completely fulfill” a Freedom of Information Act (FIOA) request for communications between agency leadership and teachers unions over the issue of school re-openings.

“We need to think about this in the broader context of teacher contract negotiations,” HHS official Michael Baker wrote to others in his department on Feb.8, the newly released emails show.

The CDC released its guidelines to re-opening schools on Feb. 12, which included language “suggestions” from the nation’s largest teachers unions. They were criticized as too slow by health experts who pointed to mounting evidence that schools were not COVID hotspots since children were less susceptible to infection than adults.

“What seems strange to me here is there would be this very intimate back and forth including phone calls where this political group gets to help formulate scientific guidance for our major public health organization in the United State,” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, a coronavirus expert at the University of California, San Francisco. “This is not how science-based guidelines should work or be put together.”

Input from teachers unions also convinced the CDC to tighten mask restrictions. The agency announced on May 13 that fully-vaccinated Americans could stop wearing masks indoors and outside. After a flurry of emails, the CDC updated the mask guidance on May 15 to say that all people should still wear a mask at school, regardless of vaccination status.