More than a month into the new school year, it is already evident that in-person school instruction is not causing mass outbreaks of the coronavirus.
Researchers at Brown University have found extremely low levels of infection among students and teachers. To be specific, the rate of suspected and confirmed student infections is just 0.21%. (The rate of confirmed infections is one-third of that.) Among teachers and staff, the infection rate is 0.51%. It appears that, thanks in part to schools’ precautions (social distancing guidelines, improved ventilation systems, mask mandates, etc.), one has significantly less risk of contracting COVID-19 inside a reopened school building than in most other places in society.
This is not to say there are no risks — that’s never true of anything in life, and it will certainly never be true of the coronavirus, not even after a vaccine is available. But given the American Academy of Pediatrics’s statement that the benefits to children of in-person educational instruction outweigh the risks associated with the pandemic, combined with the obvious inadequacy of most public school systems’ online instruction regimens, there is no longer any excuse for malingering by teachers unions.
Unfortunately, no one seems to have informed the union bosses about any of this.
The Little Rock Education Association in Arkansas is only the latest union to threaten or to encourage teachers to walk out of the classroom based on deliberately exaggerated and thoroughly unscientific fears about the coronavirus. We believe there are many teachers of goodwill, and we encourage them to disassociate themselves from this and other wayward unions, which, in fighting against education, have lost sight of the reason for their existence.
This sort of game-playing by organized labor is opportunistic, exploitative of others’ fears, and despicable. Union officials are taking advantage of a vulnerable population that lacks a voice in political life, barring children from the educational opportunities to which, in many states, they are not only morally but also legally entitled.
These unions, by focusing their energy and activism on preventing in-school instruction from resuming, are also putting millions of parents into a no-win situation. Those who cannot work from home are forced to make arrangements that are usually both expensive and disadvantageous.
This especially harms the essential workers, who cannot work remotely like other parents, sloppily trying to slog through their workdays while simultaneously supervising their children’s learning — doing the jobs that teachers should be doing.
Fortunately, most teachers are good, honest people, and they now have options to demonstrate this fact. The Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Janus v. AFSCME allows them, as public employees, to assert their independence from their unions. They can no longer be forced to pay dues or fees or to maintain membership in the union. They have been empowered to drop their unions like a hot rock, and although some unions have resisted by making it hard to quit, they are being successfully challenged in courts across the nation.
As union bosses carry on with their disgusting determination to exploit the pandemic, perhaps this is the moment for teachers of goodwill to step forward and disassociate themselves from the dying and backward institutions that have been holding back children’s progress and education reform.
