Very soon teachers and schools employees around the state will begin to see the money they’ve been owed for nearly a decade after successfully pushing back against the now-infamous “3 percent case.” While some issues still need to be worked out, this is welcome news to working families who have had $550 million taken from their paychecks over the years.

But there’s one glaring matter that still needs to be addressed: Bill Schuette’s attempts to backtrack on his role in this case that kept money from the paychecks of 275,000 teachers and other school employees.

Governor Rick Snyder and Attorney General Bill Schuette fought for this unconstitutional money grab for far too long, but after years of fighting in court, the Michigan Supreme Court decided in December that the school employees should get their money back.

Now, Schuette is trying to rewrite history.

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, Schuette’s communications director immediately tried to spin the case to make the attorney general look innocent in dragging out this case for more than half a decade. Following the decision, she tweeted that Schuette “strongly agrees” with the Supreme Court’s decision.

But here’s the deal: Schuette doesn’t get to change the facts. For six years, he fought against teachers and support staff getting the wages they were rightfully owed. Schuette decided to drop from the case when the case was on death’s doorstep at the Michigan Supreme Court. Now he wants to claim he supports teachers getting their money back when he was the one fighting to keep it out of their pockets.

The years of appeals filed by Schuette and Snyder were a complete waste of time and taxpayer resources and were the latest in a long line of continued attacks on school employees.

If Schuette were playing a sport, his actions in this case would be like playing for a team that was losing the entire game, and then before the last play of the game, he went to the locker room and switched jerseys so he could be on the winning side.

Unfortunately, Schuette has consistently been on the wrong side when it comes to supporting public education and the people who make it happen in Michigan.

Over his years in office, Schuette has logged a sordid history when it comes to supporting teachers, support staff, and the public education community. He is outspoken supporter of Betsy DeVos and her radical for-profit education agenda. Even on his campaign website, he seems hell-bent on the broken idea that school choice, which has led to an disjointed and incoherent education system, is the solution to Michigan’s education issues when we know our public schools are underfunded and we’re not holding charter schools accountable.

Schuette will have to own his record as he campaigns over the coming months and explain to teachers and school employees why he fought to keep over half a billion dollars from going to them and their families. He’ll have to explain to taxpayers why he chose to defend a law so vigorously and waste public resources in the process. When Attorney General Bill Schuette claims he wants to make Michigan a “paycheck state,” we should take it with a grain of salt, considering how he used his position to keep over half a billion dollars in wages from the people who earned it.

David Hecker is president of the American Federation of Teachers Michigan.