Before his administration even began, President Biden was boasting that he could reopen a majority of schools within the first 100 days of his tenure. But less than a week into the job, Biden decided to side with teachers unions that are refusing to return to work. This poses a grave danger to children.
Chicago teachers have defied an order to return to in-person teaching. When asked whether they should report to work, Biden firmly stood up for unions, rattling off their demands for more money to fund various safety precautions.
“It’s not so much about the idea that teachers aren’t going to work,” Biden insisted. “The teachers I know, they want to work. They just want to work in a safe environment.”
Appearing on CNN, White House chief of staff Ron Klain also read from the union playbook when asked why public schools were not reopening. “I’ll give you a word: money,” he said, arguing that schools would not be able to reopen unless Congress approved more funds.
But he went beyond merely talking about the usual demands of more sanitation and ventilation to talk about class size: “Students in very small pods, classes of about 11 or 12, distanced, in a rural area — they can go to school safely, and governors who made those investments … in other states, we haven’t seen those kinds of investments.”
Of course, creating such class sizes in large cities, where schools are overcrowded and extra space is scarce, is not feasible and certainly not a condition that can be met soon.
For months, we have been urging policymakers to trust the science and reopen schools. Not only does COVID-19 pose virtually no threat to those aged 18 and under, but study after study has shown that schools are not a big source of transmission. While some students and teachers have fallen sick, they have done so at rates equal to or lower than the broader community, and the evidence suggests that they became infected elsewhere.
At the same time, school closures have devastated parents and students. Parents are finding it nearly impossible to juggle full-time jobs while keeping up with distance learning, especially for children in younger grades, where attention spans are low and social-emotional development is even more important than academics. Students, meanwhile, have been earning F’s at an alarming rate, and the term “digital dropout” has been added to the education lexicon to describe students who simply do not show up for virtual school.
In Las Vegas, it took a surge in teenage suicides to convince local officials finally to reopen schools for in-person classes.
It’s also become clear that not only are school closures devastating but also that they are particularly detrimental to lower-income and minority students who lack the resources to pursue other options, such as attending private school, that have enabled better-off families to navigate this disruption.
Unfortunately, Biden has already backed off his push to reopen schools amid union opposition.
Union officials in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Fairfax County, Virginia, lobbied to get to the front of the COVID-19 vaccine line, ahead of many elderly and more vulnerable residents. Yet now, they are raising questions about returning to class even in the fall, which would be a year and a half since they initially closed. They justify this with the excuse that children will not be vaccinated. The vaccines haven’t even been tested on children yet, in large part because the virus itself poses virtually no threat to them, so waiting for children to be vaccinated could delay school openings into 2022 or beyond.
In Montclair, New Jersey, teachers have torpedoed a partial school reopening plan by refusing to show up to in-person work, and the president of the state’s union declared that parents should be ready for “interruptions in learning for maybe another year.”
This is completely unacceptable. Last May, we warned that if schools did not find a way to reopen by last September, arguments would proliferate ad infinitum for delaying reopening, with references to vague and constantly shifting definitions of safety. The original rationale for closing schools was the early assumption, which proved wrong, that schools would exacerbate the spread of COVID-19 and lead to the collapse of hospital systems. Now, we’ve reached the point at which every teacher receiving a vaccine that is 95% effective is said to be not enough.
As teachers unions display reckless disregard for the well-being of children, it’s enraging that Biden is too afraid to stand up to them. Don’t go with the flow, Joe. Take the lead for the nation’s children.
