Public schools in the Washington, D.C., suburbs (and in Baltimore) have been closed since March 2020, and the teachers unions want to keep them closed fully or partially through the end of this school year and into the next.
When Fairfax County’s union takes a position against full in-person schooling even next school year, even after every single teacher has been vaccinated, you could consider that to be just a tough negotiating tactic. But what they’re threatening is immense harm to students and parents, which makes it hard to view the union as acting in good faith.
Teachers unions’ refusal to show up to school for the last 10 months has been not only unreasonable and costly but an intolerable offense against children, families, and communities. The very people who have most loudly declared the importance of public schools now are deliberately destroying public schools.
So it’s good, if long overdue, that Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan is calling on schools to reopen. Hogan was a hero over the summer when he defeated the Montgomery County government’s efforts to close down all nonpublic schools on a completely unscientific basis. The first semester has been completed in Maryland, and rural counties that have open public schools and in-person private schools have proven safe.
A massive and growing body of scientific evidence tells us that in-person schooling is safe. Most recently, in Charleston County, South Carolina, where public schools are open, a researcher was shocked to find almost no in-school transmission.
“There have only been a handful of cases that may have been transmitted within the schools and within the classroom,” infectious disease specialist Dr. Allison Eckard reported. “There have been cases, there’s no doubt, but the majority of them have been acquired outside of the classroom. The ones that did happen inside the classroom most often involved a teacher giving it to a teacher or a teacher giving it to a student. And I have no examples of students giving it to teachers — the thing that everybody was so worried about.”
Sure enough, teachers unions all cried that school boards expecting teachers to show up at school were trying to kill them.
In Montgomery County, there were no large outbreaks at private schools during the school year. Across the state, there have been zero deaths related to in-school outbreaks. I haven’t found evidence of even a single hospitalization caused by in-school spread.
It’s hard to believe Montgomery County’s government even believes their claims that in-person schooling is dangerous, considering that it is renting out public schools to for-profit “learning hubs” that house a dozen remote-learning public school students all day in a classroom with instructors. Yes, that’s right — the county that tried to outlaw private schooling is fine with private schooling, as long as it doesn’t compete with public schools.
Which brings us back to the unions. They don’t seem to care that remote learning is proving a total disaster for parents and students.
Hogan is standing up for parents and students. That means he’s standing up to teachers unions. Hopefully, local governments will follow Hogan’s lead and reopen the schools.
