If teachers unions have their way, public schools will not reopen for in-person learning this fall.
Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, indicated as much this week. She claimed that the new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which advises fully vaccinated persons to continue wearing masks in certain situations, is a “curveball” that might change schools’ reopening plans.
“So the bottom line is, we’re going to keep kids safe,” said Weingarten. “We’re going to keep our members safe, we’re going to try to open up schools, and we’re going to move through this political battlefield.”
Compare this to Weingarten’s past commitment in May: “Conditions have changed,” she said at the time. “We can and we must reopen schools in the fall for in-person teaching, learning, and support. And we must keep them open fully and safely five days a week.”
It should be obvious at this point that Weingarten and the other teachers union officials are looking for an excuse. They will use anything they can to delay a return to in-person learning. The pandemic has allowed them to use their power over the public school system to gain political capital. They’re not willing to give up their leverage just yet.
Government officials at the local and state levels mustn’t allow them to backpedal like this. The CDC’s new guidance changes nothing. Children are still not at risk of spreading or falling ill from the coronavirus. Fully vaccinated teachers and administrators still have a greater chance of dying in a car crash on the way to work than they do of being hospitalized by the delta variant. There is simply no scientific justification for this step backward.
Children have already suffered enough from this pandemic. The threat to them now is not the virus or any one of its variants but the social, mental, and academic stagnation that would follow another round of school closures. Our leaders have a responsibility to protect students from those consequences, and that means standing up to Weingarten and her ilk when they try to hold our schools hostage once again.
