Schoolteachers, in general, are real-life heroes. Teachers unions, as a rule, are special interest groups arrayed against schoolchildren, parents, and taxpayers.
Conservatives and libertarians have long known and proclaimed this. Democrats are only just learning it.
Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago, is the latest to come to this realization. If she is to side with the people of Chicago — with the children and the parents, particularly — she needs to battle the teachers unions.
The Chicago Teachers Union voted overwhelmingly to lock every single schoolhouse door amid the omicron and winter coronavirus wave. Mayor Lightfoot has disagreed, and at times, she has been polite.
I want to speak directly to the parents who are worried not just about what’s going to happen tomorrow, but the rest of this week.
I want to assure you that I am doing everything in my power to keep our students in school, where they belong, learning. ?
— Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot (@chicagosmayor) January 5, 2022
But she talks as if she is willing to play hardball. She has threatened to dock pay from teachers who sit out workdays, and reports suggest teachers have been locked out of their online classroom portals.
In many cases, classroom learning might be impossible — if the teacher is infected or a large portion of a class is sick, for example. But a blanket closure of schools and a move to “remote learning” is obviously an abdication of teachers’ duty to teach.
You don’t protect students or teachers by moving to remote learning. The past 22 months have shown that students and teachers are just as likely to get infected while in “remote learning” as they are while teaching in person.
You also don’t really teach while teaching remotely. It’s possible, of course, but it’s much harder, with much lower success rates. As David Leonhardt at the New York Times put it,
“‘We haven’t seen this kind of academic achievement crisis in living memory,’ Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute told Politico.”
There’s no doubt that locking children out of the classroom has harmed their mental health and dissolved community bonds.
So what, besides Leonhardt’s bravery in stating the inconvenient truth, has allowed some Democrats to realize this all?
In large part, it was Glenn Youngkin’s upset defeat of Terry McAuliffe for governor of Virginia. The national media focused on debates over critical race theory, but astute politicians know that Youngkin beat McAuliffe because Democrats closed schools for a year and didn’t even feel bad about it.
Who knows how Lightfoot will do going forward? Who knows how successful Youngkin will be against liberal local politicians going forward?
But for now, the media and Democrats are allowed to admit how much teachers unions are harming children (and teachers). Thank God for that.
