Despite what teachers union bosses such as Cecily Myart-Cruz claim, parents do, in fact, place a premium on their children learning their times tables instead of “the difference between a riot and a protest” and politically loaded uses of words such as “insurrection” and “coup.” We know this because nearly 2.6 million students transitioned to home schooling during the mass school closures spurred by the coronavirus pandemic. The overall number of households engaged in home schooling doubled in the last year and a half, such that 1 in 10 students nationwide is now home-schooled.
While some states, such as Florida, committed to keeping in-person schooling as normal as possible, more left-wing environs such as New York City oscillated between closures and reopenings by the day. In Los Angeles, Myart-Cruz didn’t just lock children out of classrooms for well over a year — she successfully capped Zoom school hours at just four per day at the beginning of the pandemic, even as teachers continued to receive a full day’s pay.
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For those parents who couldn’t infer the meaning of school closures, teachers unions said the quiet part our loud — that they themselves didn’t view in-person public schooling as being particularly important to their children’s development. Myart-Cruz’s baffling assertion that learning-loss simply didn’t happen and doesn’t exist might have been particularly gauche, but she was in no way alone in making that assertion.
The Chicago Teachers Union rebuffed the notion that Zoom school constituted a “lost year,” instead what-abouting the “racist” history of standardized testing, which is meant to hold teachers accountable to taxpayers and parents. North Carolina teachers union boss Tamika Kelly similarly deemed the very concept of learning-loss a “false construct” as she fought to keep schools closed. In New York City, teachers trying to reject an unconditional return to the classroom have demanded that standardized testing be canceled in favor of refocusing “resources on the social emotional well-being of our students.” Even Randi Weingarten, head of the nation’s largest teachers union, has called for discontinuing testing, even as she tries to save her industry’s relevance.
Under normal circumstances, advocates for public education are the first to point out that schools offer critical nonacademic support to students, such as community and socialization for all students and life-saving adult supervision and basic nutrition for the least privileged. But when remote schooling erased all of that, the teachers unions cast all that aside and pounced on the chance to do less for the same pay. Their leaders also explicitly admitted that quantifiable and crucial skills in standard reading, writing, and arithmetic just aren’t that important.
Ironically, the very same unions that claimed the mantle of antiracism drove black and Latino families out of the traditional public school system more than white ones. Nearly 1 in 8 Latino families and 1 in 6 black families no longer participates in the traditional education system, compared with 1 in 10 white families.
The school closures resulted in half of all mothers of school-aged children being locked out of work. If the option was watching Dick and Jane receive a 30-minute lecture about white privilege or taking matters into her own hands, is there any surprise that parents, disproportionately mothers, took matters into their own hands and started teaching their own children?
