As RedState has previously reported, it's not uncommon for American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten to get Community Noted on the Twitter machine over the stories she tells on things like her activism and her position on kids going back to school during the COVID-19 pandemic.
While she hasn't yet been Community Noted on her latest fib, it's pending further review which makes sense considering the outrage and pushback her tweet has already generated.
It all started with a story that was posted by the Houston Chronicle headlined "Texas teacher fired after assigning an illustrated Anne Frank book." Because the headline was vague, one wouldn't know until they read the story that the version contained sexually explicit passages and sexually-themed LGBTQ illustrations that many parents probably would find inappropriate for their children:
A Texas middle school teacher has been fired after assigning an unapproved illustrated version of Anne Frank's Diary to her eighth grade reading class. Per a report from KFDM, a spokesperson for Hamshire-Fannett ISD, located south of Beaumont, released a statement confirming the teacher was sent home on Wednesday after reading a passage from Anne Frank's Diary: The Graphic Adaptation in which Frank wrote about male and female genitalia. An investigation into the incident has since ensued.
[...]
While previous versions of Frank's diary omitted sections in which she wrote about sexuality, the 2018 graphic novel adapted by Ari Folman and illustrated by David Polonsky, remains faithful to the original text. Folman's parents are Holocaust survivors.
Though media-darling Weingarten is a self-proclaimed educator, she pounced and seized on the Hou-Chron headline while apparently not reading the actual story, using the headline as evidence to insinuate that book banning and anti-Semitism were at play:
Texas teacher fired for reading Diary of Anne Frank to class-THIS Speaks for itself!!! https://t.co/fUXiEQcmv9
— Randi Weingarten 🇺🇦🇺🇸💪🏿👩🎓 (@rweingarten) September 20, 2023
Except there was more to the story than a teacher getting fired for just "reading Diary of Anne Frank to class." Conveniently left out of the Chronicle's piece was detailed information from their source for the story - CBS' Beaumont-based affiliate KFDM, the latter of which reported that the teacher in question allegedly went further than merely assigning the book to their 8th-grade class to read:
"A version of 'The Diary of Anne Frank' book that was not approved by the district was read in class," Mike Canizales, Hamshire-Fannett ISD spokesperson, told KFDM.
"The teacher was sent home [Wednesday]. There is an active investigation," Canizales said.
[...]
One Hamshire-Fannett ISD parent, Amy Manuel, said her twin eighth grade sons told her about what the teacher was doing in class with the book. Manuel said, "I mean it's bad enough, she's having them read this for an assignment, but then she also is making them read it aloud and making a little girl talk about feeling each other's breasts and when she sees a female she goes into ecstasy, that's not ok."
The report also notes that "district officials claim the adaptation of Anne Frank's Diary has never been approved, yet it was on a reading list sent to parents at the start of the school year," which is why the investigation is underway.
Whatever the case may be, while getting the details of this story nailed down is important for obvious reasons to the school district, the teacher, and the students and parents involved, Weingarten should have done her own research as well. But then again learning that that there was more to this story than met the eye wouldn't do for Weingarten's narrative and agenda, hence her tweet.
In essence here, what we had was a media fail from the Houston Chronicle but also a failure to do due diligence on Weingarten's part. While we can't expect much better out of the left-wing media, we should expect better from people who purport to be advocates for teachers and their students and healthy learning environments.
And speaking of, for anyone interested in reading more on the background of the varying versions of Anne Frank's diary that have been released over the years, this is a good place to start in understanding how they came about.
Knowledge is power. Too bad the Randi Weingartens of this world don't believe that.
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