About 15 years ago, I sat in a classroom in a one-horse, no-high-school town in New Jersey as the clock struck midnight. I was a reporter covering a school district reorganization meeting that had begun at 6 p.m. Friends a few miles away texted, wondering why I had to stay at the meeting until the building was empty when I’d already been there for six hours. The best I can explain it is to reference the famous joke in Europe about why the sun never set on the British Empire: Because God couldn’t trust the English in the dark.
Thanks to the state’s Sunshine Law, these school board meetings had to be public. So, the meeting was mostly a filibuster, designed to wear down anyone with children in the district’s public schools who would be interested in being there but also need to get home at some point. It was also designed to wear down the young, modestly paid reporters who would be covering such a meeting. I was the last person in the audience, and I wasn’t about to abandon my post.
The meeting finally ended at 12:40 a.m. I left at 12:45. If the Sunshine Law was to mean anything, it was that you couldn’t let the sun set on teachers unions, because you surely couldn’t trust them in the dark.
If that sounds harsh, it is appropriately so. Thanks to the Garden State’s proliferation of school district fiefdoms (nearly 600 now) and a statewide collective bargaining process, public school teachers and administrators were largely protected from cutbacks. The students weren’t. So schools closed libraries, relied on outdated textbooks, and cut after-school programs when the money started running out. This, naturally, cost parents more of their income because it reduced the total possible working hours for the household or else necessitated that money be spent on childcare. The school funding mechanism relied on property taxes, which kept going up even while the school systems offered fewer services. Those generous union contracts are negotiated not with someone representing taxpayer interests but with the government, which is usually Democratic and decides on the salary and benefit increases knowing a portion of the increase is going to be funneled back into the party’s campaign coffers, and round and round we go.
Won’t someone think of the children? Perhaps, but it won’t be the teachers unions. They aren’t called the children’s unions, after all.
Which gets at an important point: The harm — and it is indeed great harm — the teachers unions do to the country’s schoolchildren is done because the unions are operating as intended. To the unions, the system is working.
That is becoming impossible to ignore on a national level at the moment because the teachers unions are the reason that students aren’t in school. The science tells us children should be in school and so should their teachers, but President Biden is flagrantly disregarding our infectious disease experts and federal health institutions while undermining their position among the public, a massively dangerous thing to do during a pandemic. Biden’s hands are tied, you see: The unions haven’t given our president permission to tell the truth. And so, press secretary Jen Psaki has been sent out day after day to tell reporters and the public to disregard the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s definitive findings on school safety because they would require the teachers to go back to work, which they are determined not to do.
Yet public pressure could change the calculus. Frustration is bubbling up to the surface in places usually deferential to the unions and the politicians they have purchased. After nearly a year of lost education and socialization, the kids, it turns out, aren’t all right.
The writer Ann Bauer joined a Zoom meeting between the parents of children in a “wealthy” suburban Minnesota school district and their state senator, a member of the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, on Feb. 4. “There were parents who said they’d never seen their kids dark or hopeless or unhappy” before last year, she wrote on Twitter. “They described girls who hid in their rooms and cried and boys falling so far behind they might never catch up.” Parents cried out of fear and frustration; “they pointed out that teachers are less likely to be infected in the classroom than the community. They talked about suicidal kids, their own and others. They talked about promising athletes who couldn’t play sports. They said their kids are being sacrificed.” At one point, a girl “who looked to be about 15 spoke. She was eloquent and dear and intensely respectful. She started sobbing halfway through and said she got to a place so dark she didn’t know if she’d get out.” The senator, Bauer noted, “probably has no control over teachers unions, but again and again the rhetoric was around safety and infection, variants, systems. There was never a moment when the veil slipped and reality got its due.”
The teachers unions as the main obstacle in that reality is a fair characterization. What is the reality? A nationwide version, to varying extents, of what Bauer observed in Minnesota. Well before the worst of it, alarms were already blaring. The CDC, in a late June survey, found that “overall, 40.9% of respondents reported at least one adverse mental or behavioral health condition, including symptoms of anxiety disorder or depressive disorder (30.9%).” In addition, “the percentage of respondents who reported having seriously considered suicide in the 30 days before completing the survey (10.7%) was significantly higher among respondents aged 18–24 years (25.5%), minority racial/ethnic groups (Hispanic respondents [18.6%], non-Hispanic black … respondents [15.1%]), self-reported unpaid caregivers for adults (30.7%), and essential workers (21.7%).”
That presaged another development: Even in places where overall rates of suicide stayed about normal, rates jumped for minorities. As the New York Times reported last month, “From March 5, when Maryland announced its first Covid cases and declared a statewide emergency, until May 7, when public spaces began to reopen, the number of suicide deaths among Black residents doubled compared with an average of the same period during the preceding three years; deaths among white residents fell by nearly half. Similar shifts have been observed in Connecticut and Chicago.”
It’s important to note two caveats here. First, polls have shown parents of students of color to be consistently more hesitant to reopen the schools, so the delays are not necessarily against the will of the minorities affected by the closures. Not all of this can be blamed on the teachers unions: One hears from these parents a recurring point, which is that these institutions have failed them repeatedly, and now, they’re being told the schools are the same, just less safe. But this lack of trust in the institutions is not unrelated to the “unions first” approach to public education. Neither is it disconnected from the fearmongers drowning out the science, and the president letting them. The nonpartisan federal experts say it’s safe; the teachers unions’ ventriloquist act in the Oval Office says, without evidence, that those children should still be afraid, very afraid.
Second, the clear sources and causes of depression and suicidal thoughts and ideation are elusive. One reason to bring up the students’ testimony here is to make clear we are seeing first-person insistence of a change in outlook and/or symptoms. Another is to note that the conditions that worsen depression and anxiety at the very least raise a warning flag for those who are susceptible and for whom the school closings are adding to those existing conditions, or else spreading them to where they were previously absent.
For example, according to Kaiser Health News, Native Americans are bracing for the lockdown effects. The death by suicide rate among Native Americans in the relevant age group is nearly twice that of the general population, and “poverty, high rates of substance abuse, limited health care and crowded households elevate both physical and mental health risks for residents of reservations.”
A suicide cluster in the nation’s fifth-largest school district, in Nevada, sparked attempts to get the schools reopened. A journalist with WRDW-TV found that National Suicide Hotline calls “in Georgia and South Carolina were up last year. In just the first six months of 2020, Georgians in crisis made nearly 25,000 — 24,519 calls — to the hotline. South Carolinians made more than 10,000 calls at 10,199.” Across Georgia, “suicides in Richmond County rose 62 percent in 2020 from the year before, including 2 17-year-olds and a 19-year-old. Aiken County reported a 17 percent increase in suicides last year.”
This is just a snapshot of the near-term effects, since some mental health statistics are already measurable. But what about the long-term effects of shuttering schools? A recent CNN headline made clear that the only question would be the extent of the crisis, not whether it would be a disaster for the school-aged: “How will school closures affect children in the long run? Wars, disease and natural disasters offer clues.” Such situations offer us the chance at least to look at educational disruptions at the level we’re willingly entertaining. An economist told CNN that measuring the economic effects 40 years after World War II revealed that “Austrian children missed around 20% of classes during the war and their earnings dropped by around 3%. German children lost around 25% of classes and had earnings dropped by around 5%.”
A September working paper by economists from the University of Pennsylvania and from Goethe University, Frankfurt, pulled no punches: “The school closures themselves are primarily responsible for the negative impact of the Covid-19 shock on the long-run welfare of the children, with the pandemic-induced income shock to parents playing a secondary role.” That impact involved a projected drop in the share of the future population with high school diplomas and college degrees. Even those lucky enough to have parents of means taking an interest to try to fill the vacuum (think of those Minnesota students) do not see the effect entirely offset.
Another study, this one released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, projected an economic loss to countries of $14.2 trillion over the next 80 years, because “unless schools get better, the current students will be significantly harmed. Moreover, the harm will disproportionately fall on disadvantaged students.”
There is wide agreement, in other words, on the harm being done to children. There is also wide agreement on the fact that it is unnecessary. The “preponderance of available evidence,” according to the CDC, is that with mask-wearing and social distancing protocols in place, schools are safe to reopen.
But the science is irrelevant to teachers unions’ demands, and so it has become irrelevant to the Biden administration. Just before inauguration, Biden put out the following statement on Twitter: “Our Administration will lead with science and scientists — with a CDC and NIH that are free from political influence, a Surgeon General who is independent and speaks directly to the people, and an FDA whose decisions are based on science and science alone.” The sanctimony could perhaps be forgiven if the statement was at least true. But it was false, right from the beginning.
As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York reported, new CDC Director Rochelle Walensky was part of a White House COVID response team presser on Feb. 3 and said unequivocally that while agency guidance considers teachers essential workers with regard to vaccine group prioritization, “I also want to be clear that there is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated in order to reopen safely. So, while we are implementing the criteria of the advisory committee and of the state and local guidances to get vaccination across these eligible communities, I would also say that safe reopening of schools is not — that vaccination of teachers is not a prerequisite for safe reopening of schools.”
A crystal clear statement from the very hand-picked official Biden promised would take the lead on this issue. The next day, press secretary Psaki was asked about this statement. She responded, “Dr. Walensky spoke in her personal capacity” — a very strange and nonsensical lie. Psaki then snapped at a reporter who asked about pressuring the teachers unions, and then did so again the very next day.
Problem is, Biden made getting the public school teachers and students back in the building a campaign promise, calling it a “national emergency” and accusing President Donald Trump of indifference. So, the administration has “adjusted” its promise: Psaki says the goal is more than 50% of schools having one day of in-person classes a week. Which … we already have, according to Burbio.com. In fact, 50% would be a step back since we’re at about 60% “hybrid” education, meaning a mix of in-person and virtual, with in-person generally being two or more days a week. We could actually regress to Biden’s new goal. Unions in big cities, such as Philadelphia and Chicago, have a stranglehold on their school systems. It doesn’t help any of those children that students in Texas and Florida can go to school.
Neither does the idea that “more funding” is needed pass the smell test. Billions from the last federal COVID aid package to schools remain unspent, and the CDC’s recommendations are based on the fact that the schools that have opened aren’t spreading the virus. What the president hopes to do is lure teachers back to school by shoveling money at the unions that will go to pensions, benefits, and political donations — not COVID theater in the schools. This is a dispute about money, not health or safety. And the president is abdicating his responsibility by outsourcing education to his benefactors in the unions, all while teenagers continue to take their lives, begging for help the Democrats are dragging their feet to provide.
The Biden campaign was centered on “empathy.” But the broken promises display the opposite, a callousness toward those who aren’t old enough to vote or donate millions to the Democratic Party. This corrupt bargain threatens to derail the nation’s future.
Seth Mandel is executive editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine.
