The Fault Lies with Teachers' Unions

Tis the day after Christmas and I hope that your holiday was merry and bright.

And yet, as we return to the grind, we feel compelled to begin with one of the most horrifying stories of the pandemic years. That is, the closing of far too many American schools.

To our credit we have been following this story in numerous posts. We have sought out the best information available and have reported it. I trust you are grateful.

The damage done to children, especially to minority children, is probably inestimable. The teachers' unions that colluded with Democratic politicians to foist this horror on children were saying that children would be resilient and would quickly bounce back. Evidence available today suggests that they were grievously wrong. They should be held to account. 

The story is so big that even the New York Times is reporting it extensively. One should note that the issue is larger than the pandemic school closings. It is larger than the debates over critical race theory. The truth of the matter is that the pandemic tore back the curtain on what has been happening in our public schools and it has exposed the horrifying failure of American public schooling. 

Harvard public health professor Joseph Allen surveys the damage in the The New York Times. His conclusions are unambiguous. Closing schools was a calamity for children, and especially for minority children.

He begins by recounting a McKinsey report, previously highlighted on this blog:

Online learning isn’t the same as in-person learning. A report by McKinsey examining Covid-19 effects on the 2020-21 school year found that the pandemic left students five months behind on math and four months behind in reading. Schools with majority Black and brown populations saw deeper losses: six months behind in math and five to six months behind in reading. A separate study analyzing the impact of remote learning found that math and reading passing rates were lowest in poor areas and that going from fully virtual to fully in person counteracted the low math passing rates by 10 percentage points.’

Minority children suffered the most. Keep firmly in mind, these children have been damaged, perhaps irreparably, by policies advanced by teachers’ unions and Democratic public officials:

Black and Hispanic students were twice as likely as white students to be remote and were twice as likely to have no live access to a teacher. This disparity persisted into the spring of 2021 as schools reopened: Whereas 2 percent of majority white districts stayed closed, 18 percent of majority Black schools stayed remote, and nearly one in four majority Hispanic schools stayed closed.

The effects of closed schools go far beyond learning loss. We have a full-on child mental health crisis on our hands. The proportion of pediatric hospital visits for mental health reasons increased significantly in 2020 as the pandemic hit and schools closed, and the trend only worsened as 2020 wore on.

Here is some more bad news, regarding second graders:

We are coming up on two years of disrupted school. For those in the second grade, a life of closed schools, learning behind plexiglass and masks, learning to read without seeing their teachers’ mouths and no physical contact on the playground is all they’ve ever known. This is outrageous, dangerous and fear-based. The Omicron surge may make certain districts want to cling to these measures, but they shouldn’t.

As the costs of last year’s school closures became apparent, it became a mantra that “schools should be the last to close and first to open.” That sounded good and was catchy, and I think many people — including me — muttered this, suspecting deep in our minds that with the arrival of the vaccines, it wasn’t going to get bad enough again that anyone would contemplate closing schools anyway.

But now that there is an actual threat of schools closing, I’m realizing that this mantra was wrong. It should simply be, “Schools should never close.”

There you have it from a public health expert: Schools should never close. This should not be news. Around the world and in many parts of this country, schools did not close. We should examine those schools that did close, especially regarding the effect on children.

Emma Green offers a sketch on one Pennsylvania high school in The New York Times:

Like schools across the country, Liberty has seen the damaging effects of a two-year pandemic that abruptly ejected millions of students from classrooms and isolated them from their peers as they weathered a historic convergence of academic, health and societal crises. 

Nationally, the high school-age group has reported some of the most alarming mental health declines, evidenced by depression and suicide attempts. Adolescents have failed classes critical to their futures at higher rates than in previous years, affecting graduations and college prospects.

And as elected leaders and public health officials scrambled to bring students back to school last winter and spring, the focus on having the youngest and most vulnerable students return to in-person instruction left many high school students to languish, with large numbers missing most or all of the 2020-21 academic year.

Vestiges of remote learning remain:

At Liberty, vestiges of remote learning linger. Many students wear pajamas, the dress code of bedrooms turned to classrooms and a reflection of disrupted sleep schedules. Students move through the hallways sluggishly, looking at their phones or straight ahead, as if still staring at computer screens.

Last year, 66 percent of students did hybrid learning, and more than 33 percent went completely virtual. Students and educators use terms like “re-entry,” “recivilizing” and “reintegrating” to describe the transition back to a more normal routine. Covid restrictions still prevent full engagement. Masks have encouraged anonymity and discouraged dialogue.

Alarmingly, children have lost their ability to socialize, or even to communicate:

“People don’t know how to communicate anymore,” said Jazlyn Korpics, 18, a senior at Liberty. “Everybody’s a robot now — their minds are warped.”

Of course, the New York Times is loath to blame teachers unions. So they have trotted out their resident leftist twit, someone named Michelle Goldberg to run cover for teachers union head, Randi Weingarten. According to Goldberg, Weingarten has been misunderstood-- tsk, tsk:

But those who fault Weingarten for closed schools misunderstand the role she’s played over the past 20 months. Rather than championing shutdowns, she’s spent much of her energy, both in public and behind the scenes, trying to get schools open. And she’s been trying, sometimes uncomfortably, to act as a mediator between desperate parents grieving their kids’ interrupted educations and beleaguered teachers who feel they’re being blamed for a calamity they didn’t create.

As for the extent of the calamity, it is so bad that Goldberg feels compelled to defend Weingarten. Being a leftist in America means never having to take responsibility for your actions. As we learned from the Bill and Hillary Clinton saga, when you are the left you can get away with anything.

How bad is it? So bad that even Goldberg sees the truth:

Plenty of parents appreciate all their schools have done to try to weather this disaster, but others feel rage — at the emotional deterioration of their children, at the toll on their careers from forced home-schooling, at the fact that nothing seems close to getting back to normal, and at what sometimes feels like a lack of empathy for their plight. This anger has been the kindling for national conflagrations over critical race theory, which has become a catchall term for all sorts of classroom lessons about race and diversity.

Better yet, Goldberg, who dubs herself an elite liberal, rejects school closures:

Many elite liberals now feel, as I do, that long school closures in blue metropolitan areas were a disastrous mistake. 

Naturally, she has tried to find a way to blame it on Donald Trump. What did Trump do wrong? He wanted to open the schools. Only someone who is brain damaged, that is, who is the product of the American educational system, can suggest with a straight face that Trump, who wanted to open the schools is at fault for their being closed:

That July, when Donald Trump threatened to cut off funding to schools that didn’t fully reopen, many teachers felt their safety was going to be sacrificed to the president’s poll numbers, and their will to return collapsed. Trump’s “threats are empty, but the distrust they have caused is not,” Weingarten said at the time.

As we have suggested Randi Weingarten should be jailed for child abuse.

Anyway, Bethany Mandel answers Goldberg in The Daily Mail. She begins with the larger issue-- the failure of the American system of public education:

For public school parents around the United States, their participation in the public school system must, at this point, feel like insanity.

Public schools are shuttering again — as COVID cases rise — despite the opinions of children's health experts and the pleas of parents.

And like clockwork, teachers' unions appear to be on the side of closures.

'We’re not gonna sit here and say schools should be open,' said president of the United Federation of Teachers, Michael Mulgrew, who is complaining about the lack of testing in New York City schools.

Now, in a particularly cruel bit of gaslighting, the heads of the teachers' unions are hoping that parents have been driven so crazy by the last two years that they won't remember the unions' starring role in the destruction they've wrought.

In a recent profile in the New York Times, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, tried to sell the fiction that she didn't personally have a hand in school closures.

Columnist Michelle Goldberg, acting as her de facto press secretary, wrote:

'... those who fault Weingarten for closed schools misunderstand the role she's played over the past 20 months. Rather than championing shutdowns, she's spent much of her energy, both in public and behind the scenes, trying to get schools open. 

According to Mandel the fallout will haunt children for a lifetime:

From March of 2020 until the end of the next school year, a year and a half in duration, schools in blue America subjected their students to what they euphemistically called 'distance learning.'

In reality, students were parked in front of computers on Zoom while teachers 'taught' from home. 

The data shows very little actual learning took place, and kids who were trapped on Zoom will be facing severe learning loss that will follow them for a lifetime.

In mid-2020, The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), an organization devoted to kids' health, came out in favor of students returning to classrooms.

Of course, the fault lay with the teachers’ unions and the Democratic politicians who do their bidding:

The safety and mental health implications of keeping K-12 students, who by that point we realized were overwhelmingly spared from serious illness and death from the virus, were too dire to keep them home any longer.

For kids' well-being, kids had to be back in classrooms, come hell or high-water.

But that's not what many teachers or their unions wanted, and so, kids were locked out for yet another year. The well-being of kids was sacrificed and it was unions that lit the fire.

Today, with the omicron variant, the unions are back:

And now at the very end of 2021, with vaccines available to all over the age of five, they're operating out of the same playbook.

It's not Omicron to blame for closing schools in Prince George's county in Maryland or in individual districts in schools across the Northeast, in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. …

But again — unions have seen an opening for more brinksmanship, and in New York City, they're flexing their muscles and threatening future closures.

New York Times education reporter Eliza Shapiro recently tweeted about a UFT threat to, 'take a different position on this entire schools have to remain open.'

Despite the resilience of the hospitals and the mildness of illness for most, there are at least 11 New York City schools closed, with another 35 under investigation for possible closures, according to the NYC Department of Education's daily COVID case map website, as of the writing of this article.

These are not the words or actions of people who prioritize the well-being of children and their education first and foremost.

They didn't do it in the beginning of the pandemic, and they aren't doing it at the end, either. 

It’s a large issue. It goes beyond school closings. The pandemic has exposed the failure of the teachers unions in this country.

Time to follow Michael Bloomberg and to promote more charter schools. If we do not break the teachers’ unions, the teachers’ unions will break America.