Teachers' Unions Damage Children's Minds

Yesterday, we all celebrated Juneteenth, the day that slaves were liberated. It brings to mind an old Urban League slogan-- the mind is a terrible thing to waste. And that led us to start thinking of how many minds of how many black children have been wasted by pandemic school shutdowns.

If these policies had been advanced by Republican politicians and by right-leaning unions, the issue would be a national scandal. As it happened, they were  implemented by people on the left, by Democratic politicians and leftist teachers unions. 

Thus, the media has tended to ignore them. Exception given for an excellent piece that appeared in The New Yorker yesterday.

Alec MacGillis tackles the issue of pandemic-induced learning loss, problem that afflicted minority children disproportionately. 

It was very bad indeed. And it did not not just show children as having lost two years of learning, but as having lost the ability to socialize, to act appropriately in social contexts-- like classrooms.

Writing about Richmond, Virginia, MacGillis explains:

Research released by Harvard and Stanford last fall found that Richmond’s fourth through eighth graders had lost two full years of ground in math and nearly a year and a half in reading. Even more apparent was their difficulty with basic interactions—fifth graders hadn’t been in person since third grade; second graders, since kindergarten. “Socialization with each other was huge. How to be around each other—those are building blocks for ages six to ten,” Wright said. “There was a whole retraining—what does it look like when you and another student disagree? They had missed that, not being in the building.”

Whatever excuses people have come up with, the truth seems clearly to be that closing schools was a catastrophic for minority children:

Researchers have pointed to a number of causes, including the trauma experienced by children who lost family members to COVID, but the data generally show that the shortcomings are the greatest in districts that were slowest to reopen schools. They also show that the falloff was far greater among Black and Hispanic students than among whites and Asians, expanding disparities that had been gradually shrinking in recent decades. 

Some people naively think that this problem can be easily rectified. Credit to MacGillis for quoting a Stanford economist who explained that the children in question will suffer the consequences through their lives:

“This cohort of students is going to be punished throughout their lifetime,” Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, said, at a conference in Arlington, Virginia, in February. He presented findings demonstrating that the economic consequences of pandemic-related learning loss could be far greater than those of the Great Recession.

As for the evidence of learning loss, here it is:

Tracy Epp, the district’s chief academic officer, reminded the board just how dire the educational setback was shaping up to be. She presented the latest data on early-elementary students, which showed a large increase in the number of children who were considered at high risk of struggling to read, especially among Black and economically disadvantaged students. More than half of all first graders were at risk, up fourteen points from the previous year. “The science is clear about what it takes,” Epp said. “There’s a lot we can do during the school day, but, when we look at fifty per cent not being on track, we’ve got to find more time to tackle these literacy issues.”

Some administrators have proposed that the schools try to make up for the learning loss by extending the school year. It makes some sense, but, guess which group is militating against it. You guessed it: the teachers’ unions.

Recently, I asked Rizzi, who is now the chair of the board, about the change, and she said that her vote in the spring of 2021 was not to approve a year-round calendar but simply to study it further. She had doubted that it would actually happen, given resistance from teachers and their union, the Richmond Education Association. “I knew that the R.E.A. was mobilizing against it, and that there was going to be a lot of pushback, and teachers wouldn’t want it,” she said. “It wasn’t that we would definitely support it next year, it was that we would return to discuss it.”

Other districts in other cities added time to the school day. Again, the teachers’ unions were having none of it. They worked to undermine the programs, and succeeded in doing so in some cities. In others, like Dallas, the problem took effect, to the advantage of the children who participated:

Atlanta added thirty minutes to the school day. Los Angeles added four days to the school year, which it said would be optional for both students and teachers, with extra pay for teachers who took part; the teachers’ union objected, saying that it fell outside their contract agreement, and participation by students ended up being very low. Dallas had more success: it gave schools the option of adding up to twenty-one days for selected students, and forty-one schools, roughly one in eight, decided to do so. Five others opted for an extended-year calendar for the whole school. Hopewell, which is half an hour south of Richmond and has a majority-Black student population of slightly more than four thousand, became the first district in the state to institute a sweeping year-round calendar, in 2021. In Dallas, the schools with the added days showed slightly larger learning gains; Hopewell has reported lower rates of teacher turnover now that there are more breaks throughout the year.

Again, the obstacle was the teachers’ union:

Recently, I spoke with a newly elected member of the executive board of the Richmond teachers’ union, Melvin Hostman, who said that it was hard to agree to Kamras’s push for additional instructional time when there were so many other problems that needed to be addressed: lack of toilet paper, school buses arriving late, and widespread absenteeism among them. He added, “The whole thing about learning loss I found funny is that, if everyone was out of school, and everyone had learning loss, then aren’t we all equal? We all have a deficit.” When I noted data showing that the loss had had racially disproportionate impacts, he said, “Of course—because our society is inherently unequal.”

Figure out that one. Everyone has lost something, so everyone is equally stupid. And besides, the schools are running out of toilet paper. Also, the teachers themselves believed that they had better work/life balance when the schools were closed.

In Richmond, about 1,000 of the district’s 22,000 children will participate in the program. So, the teachers’ unions have won. Not only did they damage children’s minds, but they have successfully militated against real efforts to try to rectify the situation.

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