Teachers Unions: Anti-Heroes of the Pandemic

by Richard Schulman

US education was in crisis before the Covid-19 pandemic; now it is worse.

Progressives love to play the race card against Republicans on every occasion, but in the real world, especially the world of education, it is the progressives to whom that inflammatory accusation best applies.

K-12 public education in Democrat-controlled cities fails to educate minorities and compares poorly with comparable Republican cities. This is documented in the study (pdf download), “The Secret Shame: How America’s Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity for All” (Brightbeam, January 2020). The study reports that “Progressive cities, on average, have achievement gaps in math and reading that are 15 and 13 percentage points higher than in conservative cities, respectively. In San Francisco, for example, 70% of white students are proficient in math, compared to only 12% of black students reaching proficiency — a 58-point gap. In Washington, D.C., 83% of white students scored proficient in reading compared to 23 percent of black students — a 60-point gap. By way of contrast, three of the 12 most conservative cities — Virginia Beach, Anaheim and Fort Worth — have effectively closed or even erased the gap in at least one of the academic categories we examined.”

Complicity of mayors and progressive press

Using the excuse of the pandemic, Democratic mayors kept public schools shut and even forbad private and parochial schools to open. Teachers in Democratic Party-affiliated teachers unions refused to return to schools. Los Angeles’ UTLA teachers union demanded as pre-conditions for returning to classrooms the banning of charter schools and the enacting of Medicare for All and state-level wealth taxes. A board member of the Chicago Teachers Union, self-identified as a socialist, wrote from a Puerto Rican beach vacation that schools were “unsafe.” An accompanying Instagram photo showed her grinning poolside in a low-cut bathing suit while her classroom-deprived students back in Chicago endured 35-degree cold. After the embarrassing photo went viral, she removed it from public view on her Instagram account.

Progressive publications like The Atlantic, The New Republic, and the New York Times defended the teacher boycott. In so doing, progressive politicians, unions, teachers, and publications denied children the intellectual capital they need to prosper as adults.

Closings unjustified by science or childhood needs

There is no scientific justification for keeping schools closed and teacherless. Not only are children harmed; so are parents who have to stop working to care for home-bound children. Some parents may never be able to regain the jobs forgone.

Schools meanwhile are open in most of Europe and Asia, and most of the K-12 schools that reopened in the US have suffered no Covid surges so far.

Not surprisingly, there is a stark partisan split over school re-opening. The Federalist reports that “According to market research and public opinion group Ipsos, 78 percent of Democrats oppose re-opening schools while 79 percent of Republicans support the decision.” A nurse wrote in The Atlantic, “I’m a nurse in New York. Teachers should do their jobs, just as I did. Schools are essential to the functioning of our society.”

The teachers unions as anti-heroes

Her comments were echoed by the National Review: “Workers we never would have thought of as essential before — grocery-store employees, delivery guys, meat-packing workers — have kept absolutely necessary parts of the economy operating even while most of their fellow Americans were staying at home. Not only have doctors and health-care workers put themselves on the line, but cops and firefighters have done the same…. Then there are the teachers unions…. Their first and last thought has been of their own interests. They have sought to limit their labor while still getting paid.”

Not only did teachers unions refuse to have their members teach: they did all they could to prevent alternate educational institutions from operating. Early in the pandemic, Breitbart reported that teachers unions were “pressuring states into clamping down on virtual charter schools that are continuing to provide children with instruction at home.” Oregon governor Kate Brown issued an executive order banning students in the state’s public schools from withdrawing and enrolling in alternate schools that were providing instruction.

Meanwhile, teachers unions moved to free their members from accountability. “A Coronavirus A for everyone. Pushed by unions, school districts abandon grades for this year,” the Wall Street Journal editorial reported.

Unions acting like slaveowners

In writing of “The Students Left Behind by Remote Learning,” ProPublica notes that by the mid-19^th century, “95% of adults in New England could read and write, and… the rest of the North was not far behind…. In the South, however, slave owners denied instruction to nearly all the Black children they claimed as property, and local and state governments lagged behind in building public schools.”

Democrats were the slaveowners’ party in the 19^th century. Today it is the Democratic Party teachers unions that continue slaveowners’ policy of denying their dependents an education.

Richard Schulman can be reached at hormel@ssl-mail.com.