For almost a year now, too many of our nation’s children have not been allowed to attend school in person. For a long time, the need to homeschool was understandable, if inadequate. We were, after all, in the middle of a global pandemic.
But as time passed, two things became clear. First, the immense damage being done to our children, both in terms of their missed educational opportunities, as well as their emotional and psychological needs, became obvious (not to mention the impact on parents who must put aside their work to provide child care and/or “remote learning”).
And second, the experts (remember when progressives wanted to “trust the science”) have, for a long time now, been clear that the potential downside of reopening schools does not justify keeping them closed. This is especially true for younger children. The data, the science… the evidence is abundantly clear.
ADVERTISEMENT
“It’s less likely for a child to get infected in the school setting than if they were just in the community,” says Dr. Anthony Fauci. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told reporters during a briefing this week that “there is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen, and that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated in order to reopen safely.”
For some reason, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki keeps insisting this wasn’t an “official” statement. On Wednesday, Psaki reiterated that the CDC Director “spoke to this in her personal capacity.” Why is Psaki making this distinction?
A better question: Why is Joe Biden siding with teachers’ unions in this debate against parents, local political leaders like Chicago’s mayor, communities like San Francisco (which is suing its own school board), Dr. Fauci, and the CDC?
I understand Biden has a strong relationship with unions. He doesn’t want to pick meaningless fights—especially with powerful constituencies. But in this case, it’s called for at this moment, because the stakes are so high. This is about our kids. The unions are being recalcitrant. If anyone deserves to be thrown under the (school) bus right now, they do. But clearly, the teachers’ unions hold considerable sway in the Democratic Party.
“The teachers, I know they want to work,” Biden said on Jan. 25. “They just want to work in a safe environment, and as safe as we can rationally make it, and we can do that.” Presumably, after we spend $1.9 trillion (more equipment, more testing, more ventilation) and wait 100 days, kids can go back to school.
Maybe.
In the state of California, Governor Gavin Newsom is battling with the unions to get the state’s 10,000 public schools, which have mostly been closed since last March, to open. “If everybody has to be vaccinated, we might as well just tell people the truth: There will be no in-person instruction in the state of California,” Newsom said last Thursday. In Fairfax County, Virginia, the teachers’ union wants all children vaccinated before school reopens. The problem? Children under 16 haven’t even been approved for the vaccine yet.
But that’s not even the craziest demand. And this summer, the Los Angeles Teachers Union said they wouldn’t reopen unless the state and nation met their demands of “implementing a moratorium on private schools, defunding the police, increasing taxes on the wealthy, implementing Medicare for All, and passing the HEROES Act…”
But it’s not just their increasingly large demands. Things are getting out of hand. In Washington DC, the attorney general just had to file a temporary restraining order to prevent the union from striking. In some cases, the unions have been both hypocritical and hostile. A while back, a Chicago Teachers Union leader said it was unsafe to return to the classroom—just before posting pictures of herself poolside in Puerto Rico. More recently, the group impugned the motives of those who want to reopen schools, tweeting that, “The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.”
Actually, the push to reopen schools is rooted in science and compassion. “[W]e know this is going to very substantially widen the achievement gap between wealthier/white students and poorer/students of color,” explained Dr. Ashish K. Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health and star of MSNBC. “Poor people don’t have iPads, they don’t have WiFi, they don’t have somebody at home to sit during the day and force the child to pay attention and without that, the virtual learning just does not exist,” said former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg this week.
But even if you put very real concerns about equity aside, the long-term impact of these school shutdowns could last the rest of our lives. So many kids have been deprived of friends and community and sports for almost a year. In some tragic cases, this has even led to suicide.
Because of the importance of their job, teachers are considered frontline essential workers. And yet, their unions are refusing to have them perform the essential work that this description entails. Imagine if police officers and nurses’ unions employed this same argument. What kind of monster would make a nurse go to work in a pandemic? I guess they need a better union?
We don’t have time to waste another hundred days. It’s time for Joe Biden to take a moral stand for America’s children, and for the unions to put our kids first. The virus isn’t keeping kids out of school. The unions are.
