This pandemic has shown that unions hold undue power — an ability to keep millions of students relegated to their homes on a whim.
This pandemic has shown that unions hold undue power — an ability to keep millions of students relegated to their homes on a whim.
I don’t blame schools that closed last March. My school did, and I supported the decision. We knew little about COVID, so the risk of mass casualty outweighed any benefits of in-person instruction. Nor did I much blame schools that opted to shutter their doors in September, for the same reasons. However, today, it is difficult to justify continued online instruction as health officials learn more about the disease, more schools open without detrimental results, and we see the immense cost of prolonged closure.
Safe, in-person education is a possibility. In the fall, my school opened. We mask. We wash our hands. We socially distance. We have desk separators. A few students have tested positive, but we’ve traced all transmission to exposure outside of our walls. When this happens, students, teachers, and even entire classes quarantine at home. I work with a Bluetooth earpiece switched on and a Google Meet running for any students at home after a positive exposure. As a result, we’ve had no known spread within the building, no mass outbreaks, no nightmare scenario. It’s not a particularly complex or difficult affair.
Few families have such a privilege. While I read poetry aloud with students, millions of children remain stuck online tapping away at keyboards, sedentary, staring at screens for hours a day. My students laugh in our classrooms with masks on our faces and play four-square at recess together. Recently, while reading Romeo and Juliet, we had a sword fight with rulers, and another stood on a chair to pronounce Romeo’s banishment.
We have all considered the risks from the beginning, of both courses of action. Opening risked a public-health crisis. Closing risked substantial learning loss and the degradation of student mental health. The latter scenario turned out to be the far greater danger. Accordingly, Anthony Fauci recommended as early as November that we “close the bars and keep the schools open.”
For months now, private, Catholic schools across the nation have opened without detrimental effects. Similar stories exist even in large districts such as Baltimore, but the evidence extends beyond mere anecdotes. Any meaningful crunching of the numbers has found that schools are not, in fact, super-spreaders. Most recently, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an authoritative call to open. It reads:
As many schools have reopened for in-person instruction in some parts of the US as well as internationally, school-related cases of COVID-19 have been reported, but there has been little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission.
The study’s author writes, “The conclusion here is with proper prevention efforts . . . we can keep transmission in schools and educational settings quite low” — exactly as my school and so many others have done. These data alone are frustrating enough without a consideration of the very real trade-offs of online learning.
Last year, few of my students attended online classes and even fewer completed work. Such a dismal showing repeated itself across the country. By some estimates, students will have lost up to nine months’ worth of learning by the end of the academic year, with even more severe losses among students of color.
That students struggle online surprises no one. Even as an adult, I struggle to focus on Zoom meetings when the addictive call of social media is one click away. Similarly, who can blame a student who would rather not live their life on virtual calls? A student this year described online learning as “reading a book with no words.” Other students simply cannot find a quiet place to work.
The academic costs do not concern me as much as the mental-health ones. The American Association of Pediatrics “strongly recommended” that schools open where possible, citing the academic, social, and emotional benefits of in-person instruction. AAP’s concerns have manifested in reality. An upsurge in student suicides forced Las Vegas schools to open. I’ve watched the mental health of my own students deteriorate when isolated at home.
An influential paper in sociology provides insight into the cause for this deterioration. We need close relationships — friends and family — but the paper also cites our need for what it terms weak-tie relationships, all the acquaintances between close friend and stranger that give us a sense of place, regularity, and purpose.
As a middle-school teacher, I don’t really know any of the little ones in my school, but they greet me happily in the hallway regardless, and I’ll either wave or make some slapstick joke — like hiding behind the tiny trash can. Other students aren’t particularly popular or integrated into social circles, but they still join kickball games or complete group projects together. Students still see their families and their close friends, but they have lost the wealth of minor relationships that they have to every other person in a school.
The coronavirus is a terrifying disease, and opening schools is a risk. This reality cannot be denied, but sustained closures eschew any prudent reckoning with the trade-offs and the comparative safety of in-person instruction.
As such, the demands unions are making to open are past the point of reason. The demands of the Chicago Teachers Union could push opening as far out as 2022. Unions in Fairfax County and California deem that not even vaccinations would make school safe enough for in-person instruction, threatening to shutter doors in the fall. When Corey DeAngelis, the director of school choice at Reason Foundation, crunched the numbers, he confirmed what many suspected: Union power, not pandemic concerns, forced school closures.
The last two decades have seen an ongoing weakening of union influence over our politics. Janus v. AFSCME guaranteed a national right-to-work without mandated union dues. Various state legislatures curtailed extensive pension systems and required public employees to pay more into them. However, this pandemic has shown that unions still have undue power, with an ability to keep millions of students relegated to their homes on a whim. Accordingly, at least 14 state legislatures have introduced bills to advance school choice, a policy that shifts power away from centralization committees and unions toward families and local schools.
The options are not closed and safe or opened and dangerous. My school opened in September and, with precautionary measures, has successfully balanced the physical, academic, and emotional concerns of our students. Perhaps not every school should open. Families should have a choice for virtual instruction too, but the stranglehold demands that unions have made must be called what they are: cruel, ideological, and unjustified.