New Leader Pushes Teachers’ Union to Take On Social Justice Role
The New York Times
Becky Pringle, the country’s top Black labor leader, has plunged the National Education Association into the reckoning unfolding in public schools.
PHILADELPHIA — Becky Pringle was racing through her hometown to her fourth event one day in September when her staff alerted her to a looming controversy.
Fox News was preparing to publish emails between the White House and officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, showing that the C.D.C. had continued to advise masking in schools last spring out of fear of a public showdown with Ms. Pringle, the head of the nation’s largest teachers’ union and the highest-ranking Black labor leader in the country.
The story seemed to affirm the most fervent criticism of her union, the National Education Association, in recent months — that it had too much control over school reopening decisions during the coronavirus pandemic and was wielding outsize influence in the Biden administration. Ms. Pringle shrugged it off with a single-sentence tweet: “It’s no secret we want to keep our students and schools safe.”
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