Randi Weingarten, president of AFT, was arrested Thursday for blocking access to a school closure hearing in Philadelphia. AFT spokesman Marcus Mrowka told The Huffington Post that Weingarten was arrested with 18 other community activists for blocking the entrance to the meeting. Weingarten said afterward she knew her actions would lead to arrest, but it was a last-resort attempt to stop the Philadelphia School Reform Commission from closing some of the city's public schools, which she argues would detrimentally affect students, particularly African American and Latino students.

The Huffington Post quoted Weingarten:

The road to justice is long and the fight is not over tonight....Some schools were saved tonight, but at the end of the day, what I am told is that by all of us doing this together, reflecting on all the four corners of the community, people throughout the country are talking about it.

Weingarten said the commission refused to meet with AFT, and the parents and teachers of the Philadelphia public school students had come up with a plan to improve local schools, which was ignored. She said the closure plan wasn't about improving schools, it was about taking money away from public schools, particularly in light of the fact that charter schools were not to be cut.

This was really a plan to eliminate public education. This is not about how to fix public schools, but to close them—not how to stabilize but to destabilize public schooling.

A study from the University of Chicago's Urban Education Institute found that when students are displaced by school closures like those being considered in Philadelphia, only 6% of them perform better in their new schools. Other research, according to The Huffington Post, said school districts have a difficult time recouping the savings they project when closing schools.

Kids have suffered cut after cut....The powers that be don't care about opportunity for children.