Recently unearthed evidence suggests that Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) claim that she was fired after a single year of teaching public school because she got pregnant is false.
On the presidential campaign trail, Warren has repeatedly cited her experience as a young teacher as both an explanation of her switch to a career in law and evidence of the discrimination women face in the workplace.
At a town hall meeting in August, Warren said her lifelong dream had been to be “a public school teacher.” Oddly, though, when she went to college, she didn’t take the necessary classes to get her teaching certificate. Instead, after graduating, she was hired on an “emergency” basis by the Riverdale, New Jersey, school board as a speech pathologist for the 1970–71 school year. Warren was given a provisional certificate with the understanding that she would pursue a standard certificate.
Warren said she “truly loved” her job. But, she added, “By the end of my first year in teaching, I was visibly pregnant. And the principal did what principals did in those days: wished me luck and hired someone else for the job.”
Warren told the same story at the Democratic presidential debate in September and elsewhere during her campaign.
However, she offered a completely different recollection in a 2007 interview at the University of California, Berkeley. In that version, Warren resigned of her own accord after deciding teaching wasn’t right for her:
And my first year of post-graduation, I worked — it was within a public school system, but I worked with the children with disabilities. And I did that for a year. And then that summer — I actually didn’t have the education courses, so I was on an “emergency certificate,” it was called. And I went back to graduate school, and took a couple of courses in education, and said, “I don’t think this is going to work out for me.” And I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby, and I stayed home for a couple of years.
Warren went on to say that during a Christmas visit to her hometown in Oklahoma, she met some of her high-school classmates who had gone to law school and recommended it to her, so she ended up pursuing a career in law instead of public-school teaching.
The minutes of the Riverdale school board’s meetings from the period, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, corroborate Warren’s earlier account and contradict her current one:
The Board of Education minutes show a part-time contract for her first year of teaching received unanimous approval during an August 1970 board meeting. Meeting minutes from November 1970 confirm Warren’s account that she was working on an “emergency” teaching certificate, showing unanimous approval “that a provisional certificate be requested for Mrs. Elizabeth Warren in speech therapy.”
Toward the end of Warren’s first year on the job, in April 1971, the board approved her contract for the following school year, the meeting minutes show. Two months later, the meeting minutes indicate that Warren had tendered her resignation.
“The resignation of Mrs. Elizabeth Warren, speech correctionist effective June 30, 1971 was accepted with regret,” the June 16, 1971, minutes say.
In other words, the more-benign version of the story that Warren told back when she wasn’t even running for office, let alone seeking the presidency, seems to fit the known facts of the case far better than the current version. But now that she is seeking the nomination of a party that is increasingly hostile to men and in thrall to victimhood, which serves Warren’s interests more: the version in which she quits her job because she thinks she can’t hack it or the one in which a sexist principal fires her for being pregnant?
Whether Warren’s contradictory stories become major news — and whether they affect her chances of being the Democrats’ nominee — remain to be seen. Given that the revelation that she was greatly exaggerating her American Indian ancestry didn’t do her much harm, though, it seems unlikely that lying about why she left a job nearly half a century ago will derail her campaign, either.
Photo of Elizabeth Warren: Senate.gov
