Leonie spoke with Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, about the US Department of Education's rejection of state waiver requests for standardized exams, and how this would likely lead to the largest parent opt-out movement in history. They also spoke about the polls showing a consensus that teachers should be vaccinated as quickly as possible to reopen schools safely, and how we need to make sure that the State and the City don't cut back sharply on their own funding for schools, as they have in the past, once the additional aid to schools from new federal funds is approved. These funds are meant to help schools hire additional teachers and counselors so students can recover from the losses they've suffered this year. Then she spoke with Amy Zimmer about what factors contributed to Chancellor Carranza's resignation, and the disagreements he's had with the mayor on several key issues. They also discussed the repeated and damaging delays in planning for the schools' reopening this year, for summer school and for next year and whether this was caused by Mayoral control, in conjunction with de Blasio's micromanaging the DOE along with an apparent inability to think ahead. They also discussed Chalkbeat's exceptional eyewitness reporting in an article examining one week in the lives of six third-graders and their families, struggling with remote learning.