One year ago, parents picked up their children from school on a Friday afternoon, knowing that they probably wouldn’t be coming back on Monday. Few suspected that the rest of the school year would be taught remotely.
Nobody guessed that an entire year would pass with millions of children out of school. Yet that’s exactly what happened. In hundreds of districts, students haven’t seen the inside of a classroom in 52 weeks.
We confess to some naivete here. In hindsight, it was predictable that teachers unions would use their clout to hold school districts hostage. It was also predictable that spineless school boards and politicians would bow to the unions.
It’s more surprising that the politicians, the malingering teachers unions, and the sensationalist media have been so successful in scaring many parents. Sadly, in many big cities and large counties, half of the parents believe it’s unsafe to send their children back to school, despite a total lack of evidence for this alarmist view.
This shouldn’t be taken as reason to keep schools closed but as yet another failure of our educational system.
Educators should have spent this school year teaching families about how school could be made safe. Instead, they spent the year spreading groundless fear. A common protest sign was “I can’t teach from a coffin!”
In March 2020, this fear was understandable. It isn’t any longer, and it hasn’t been for a long time. The insane proclamations that teaching in a classroom would be a death sentence ignore that millions of teachers worldwide have been teaching in classrooms since summer 2020. All available data suggest that teaching in a school with reasonable precautions is no more dangerous, and, in fact, might be less dangerous, than standard daily living amid the pandemic.
The efforts to spin a different tale have all fallen flat. Media outlets in September tried to whip up fear about schools by listing the names of teachers who had died. Every single one, however, had been infected outside the classroom, during summer vacation.
When one teacher started a database of teacher infections and deaths, it became headline news. The National Education Association took over hosting the database. It was going to be evidence in its case against in-person schooling. Today, that database has been quietly retired and shoved down the memory hole.
It’s hard to believe the unions and the school districts buy their own scare stories. Montgomery County, Maryland, for instance, which tried to close not only public schools but private and religious schools as well, filled its empty classrooms all school year with “learning hubs,” where private daycare centers hosted remote-learning students (of parents who could pay) all day long. That’s not something you do if you really believe that teaching in a classroom is unsafe.
Los Angeles teachers warned others not to flaunt their carefree lifestyle, even as their union was claiming that schools were death traps. “Friendly reminder,” one leaked post stated. “If you are planning any trips for Spring Break, please keep that off Social Media. It is hard to argue that it is unsafe for in-person instruction, if parents and the public see vacation photos and international travel.”
Note what wasn’t said: Don’t travel because it’s impossible to be safe in enclosed places with others.
The science is overwhelming at this point. In-person schooling with rules about masks and precautions for distancing is perfectly safe. The spread in most schools appears to be approximately zero. There’s even evidence that children are safer from the coronavirus inside schools than they are outside of them.
And there are other, additional harms that come with missing school. Children need human contact with people besides their families. They need friends. Students often learn the most from informal interactions with teachers, coaches, and classmates. All that has been lost for a year now.
Please end this cruel experiment.
President Biden and every governor ought to tell intransigent school districts right now to open up, right away. Let the most needy students in next week — those with unstable home situations or limited access to technology. As soon as possible, let in every other student who wants to be there. End all remote learning, except in extreme cases, by this spring.
Why are unions behaving this way? They are bargaining units. It appears that they see leverage and they want to extract as much from the situation as possible. Well, they’ve already extracted plenty out of the nation’s children. It is time to end this now.
