San Francisco Teachers’ Unions Are the Ultimate Grifters

F ollow the science? More like follow the money. San Francisco’s public-high-school seniors are finally allowed to return to classes in person this Friday. This date just so happens to be the day before the May 15 deadline for the district to receive an estimated $12 million taxpayer bailout for reopening schools in person. What a coincidence.

California governor Gavin Newsom and the state legislature announced an agreement on March 1 to provide $2 billion in state funding as an additional incentive for public-school districts to reopen in person by this Saturday, just weeks before the end of the school year. The grant funding requires school districts to provide an in-person option to all elementary students and at least one grade of middle or high school. That’s right. Their latest plan does the bare minimum required to line their pockets.

It gets worse. The deal between the district and the San Francisco teachers’ union only calls “for at least one day” of classes at two of the city’s 15 high schools. And while the two schools will provide in-person supervision, their teachers will not provide in-person instruction.

But if schools are safe enough for in-person supervision, why aren’t they safe enough for in-person learning? If it’s safe enough for schools to reopen for twelfth graders, why isn’t it safe enough for eleventh graders? And if it’s safe enough to reopen on May 14 for a bunch of cash, why wasn’t it safe enough to reopen days, weeks, or even months ago?

The answers to these questions should be obvious by now. But the reality is that the entire school-reopening debate has been more about politics and power than about the safety and needs of families.

The scientific evidence has consistently shown that schools could safely reopen in person and that school reopenings were generally not major contributors to increased community transmission or hospitalizations. In the Journal of the American Medical Association, for example, CDC researchers pointed out that “the preponderance of available evidence from the fall school semester has been reassuring” and that “there has been little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission.”

At the same time, substantial evidence revealed that keeping schools closed harmed children academically, mentally, and physically. Data also indicated that preventing families from having in-person learning options exacerbated already existing educational inequities, not to mention the adverse labor-market effects, which disproportionately affected women.

At least six studies have found that public-school districts with stronger teachers’ unions are significantly less likely to reopen in person. Several studies have also found that public-school reopenings have been linked to the politics — but not COVID-19 risk — of the surrounding area. For example, my recent peer-reviewed study with MIT’s Christos Makridis found that “school closures are uncorrelated with the actual incidence of the virus, but are rather strongly associated with unionization” which “implies that the decision to close schools has been a political—not scientific—decision.”

Contrary to the teachers’-union narrative, the reason that public schools kept their doors shut isn’t because they desperately need more money, either. Congress has approved $190 billion for K–12 education since March 2020, which is well over the amount the U.S. dedicated, in real terms, to the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II. That’s in addition to the roughly $60 billion that the federal government already allocates toward K–12 public schools each year.

In a recent study of over 12,000 public-school districts in the U.S., Christos Makridis and I did not find any evidence to suggest that more funding was associated with a higher likelihood of reopening schools in person. If anything, some of our models indicated that fully remote school districts were better off financially than their in-person counterparts in the same state. In fact, an analysis by researchers at Georgetown University found that Los Angeles public schools, which opted to keep their doors shut, had an estimated funding surplus of over $500 million for the 2020–21 school year.

The stark contrast between Florida and California is a prime example of our findings. The latest data indicate that in Florida, a state that spends about $10,700 per student per year, or about 29 percent less than the national average, all students have access to full-time in-person instruction. Yet in California, which spends about 38 percent more per student, and has much stronger teachers’ unions, most families do not have that same opportunity.

Keeping schools closed isn’t about a lack of financial resources, and it isn’t about safety. It’s about power. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the people working in the public sector have bad intentions. Public-school employees are arguably rationally responding to the perverse incentive structure that’s built into the system.

Incentives matter. A study published by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University found that public schools with more Catholic private schools nearby were more likely to reopen in person. Those public schools had stronger incentives to reopen because families had more realistic exit options. But the California government’s massive taxpayer bailout for reopening by May 15 gave public schools a top-down incentive to check a box rather than cater to the needs of individual students and their families.

Top-down solutions such as these are destined to fail because they don’t address the root of the problem: a massive power imbalance between the public-school monopoly and families. The only way that we’re ever going to fix the messed-up set of incentives that’s baked into the public-school system is by funding students directly and empowering families.

Thankfully, American families are waking up because the teachers’ unions overplayed their hand. Three nationwide surveys have revealed surges in support for educational freedom over the past year — and a recent California-based survey from April 2021 found that 55 percent of parents would choose private schools if they had the option, a jump of five percentage points since April 2019.

State lawmakers are also making moves. Legislators in over 30 states have introduced bills to fund students instead of systems this year — and eleven states have already passed at least one of these bills. For example, this year West Virginia and Kentucky passed the most expansive education-savings-account programs in the nation, and, just this week, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed the state’s largest expansion of private-school choice into law.

In a way, teachers’ unions have inadvertently done more to advance school choice this past year than anyone could have ever imagined. But it appears California’s teachers’ unions haven’t gotten the memo. If they keep it up, families just might fight hard enough to make educational freedom a reality in the Golden State, too.