Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg hopes President Biden will teach labor unions for teachers a lesson.
On Wednesday, the billionaire urged Biden to take a "stand" against teachers unions, who have stonewalled public school reopening plans throughout the country.
“It’s time for Joe Biden to stand up say, 'The kids are the most important things, important players here,'” Bloomberg said during an MSNBC segment. “And the teachers just are going to have to suck it up and stand up and provide an education.”
Bloomberg, who faced Biden in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, acknowledged the risks associated with reentering classrooms but argued that uncertainty comes with the territory for many professional sectors.
“Teachers say, ‘Well, I don’t want to go back because it’s dangerous,’" he continued. "We have a lot of city and state and federal employees who run risks. That’s part of the job. You run risks to help America, to help your state, to help your city, to help your family. And there’s just no reason not to have the schools open.”
Bloomberg also pointed to class discrepancies exacerbated by school closures, saying virtual schooling is hurting "poor kids."
"What we’re doing to poor kids is a disgrace," he said. "These poor kids are not in school. They will never recover from this. … The virtual classes are a joke. It is worse than a joke. Poor people don’t have iPads. They don’t have WiFi, [and] they don’t have somebody at home to sit during the day and force the child to pay attention. And without that, the virtual learning just does not exist."
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Biden, who received a large chunk of the roughly $44 million teachers unions contributed during the 2020 election cycle, has continued to champion the unions' preferred positions as president, refusing to weigh in strongly in favor of reopening. After facing increasing backlash from those who want to return students to classrooms, the president has since softened his stance, calling for an expedited reopening that would see public schools open within the first 100 days of his presidency.
Debates are taking place across the country about school reopenings. A weekslong battle in the city of Chicago has resulted in Mayor Lori Lightfoot withdrawing a previous threat to lock teachers out of online learning software if they refused to comply with a Monday in-person start date, temporarily punting on the issue of school reopenings. As the Chicago Teachers Union continues to demand heightened coronavirus protocols before returning teachers to classrooms, upward of 77,000 students hang in the balance in the Windy City.
In San Francisco, local leaders are seeking to sue their own school district after the education system failed to produce a reopening plan during an 11-month hiatus since the onset of the pandemic. Schools in the area, backed by half a dozen unions, are demanding transportation to and from work, upgraded ventilation, and vaccines for all staff members before they return to educate over 57,000 students in person.
A similar dynamic has played out in Virginia, where parents erupted on school board officials for their reluctance to resume in-person instruction and called school administrators "cowards, hiding behind our children as an excuse for keeping schools closed."
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky, on Wednesday, appeared to rebuke some of the demands of prominent teachers unions, insisting that vaccines aren't necessary for reopening protocols safely.
“There is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen," she said. "Safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated in order to reopen safely.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki, when asked about the health institute's guidance, told reporters, “Certainly, ensuring teachers are vaccinated, prioritizing teachers, is important to the president.”
Children have been shown to be less likely to transmit COVID-19 than adults in several recent studies. Children are responsible for only 4% of household clusters infections, according to a study published early last December. The researchers, who performed a meta-analysis of the results from 57 studies that drew household transmission clusters from 12 countries and were published between Dec. 1, 2019, and Aug. 24, 2020, concluded that children were "significantly less likely to acquire SARS-CoV-2 than their adult family members."
Furthermore, of the 102 children identified among the 611 individuals in the 213 household clusters studied, only eight (3.8%) transmission clusters identified children as index cases, meaning that they were seldom the initial infection in a given household cluster. With children's demonstrated unlikelihood to serve as transmitters of the disease, public figures such as Bloomberg have increasingly called for school reopenings.
