Anthony Fauci, Miguel Cardona, and National Review don’t agree on much. But we do agree on this: In-person K–12 instruction should not be canceled on account of Covid.
Not that long ago, “in-person K–12 instruction” would have been redundant. Everyone understood that going to school, sitting in classrooms, eating lunch with friends, and playing outside at recess were important parts of childhood development.
The pandemic intervened in March 2020, and many schools went online. At the very start, when we didn’t know what we were dealing with, that was perhaps a defensible position. In January 2022, it is not.
Even Anthony Fauci, with his low tolerance for Covid risk, has come around to that position. “If you look at the safety of children with regard to infection, we have most of the teachers, [an] overwhelming majority of them are vaccinated,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. He still wants masks in schools, but he’s clear on this: “It’s safe enough to get those kids back to school, balanced against the deleterious effects of keeping them out.”
That last part is key. Throughout this pandemic, there hasn’t been a whole lot of balancing going on in the pronouncements of public-health officials. Fauci should have been talking like this a while ago, but it’s nonetheless good to hear him say it. We don’t need to be convinced of the merits of this position, but perhaps the people who still hold him in high regard will be persuaded if advocacy for schools opening comes from him.
Children are at extremely low risk for Covid. In 2020–21, 678 people aged 0–17 died from Covid. To put that in perspective, 1,161 people in that age cohort died from influenza in 2012–13, and 803 died in 2014–15. Covid is more severe than the flu for adults, but it is not significantly different from the flu for children. The adults have multiple safe and effective vaccines, and now antiviral pills as well to treat Covid. We don’t close schools for influenza, and we shouldn’t close schools for Covid.
Education secretary Miguel Cardona also seems to be getting the message on this issue. On Sunday, he told Trace Gallagher of Fox News, “Our expectation is for schools to be open full-time for students, for in-person learning. We remember the impact of school closures on students last year.” So do parents, which is likely part of the reason for Cardona’s statements.
But it’s not up to Cardona whether schools actually open. That’s a district-by-district decision, and according to Burbio’s school tracker, 3,229 schools were closed at the start of this week. Who is driving these closures? Teachers’ unions.
To hear them tell it, teachers are basically 19th-century coal miners, risking their lives every time they go to work. “At this time, schools are not safe for students and staff,” said a teacher who is part of a lawsuit in New York City that aims for a court-ordered school closure. The Chicago Teachers Union says that if Chicago Public Schools don’t get more students to opt in to Covid testing, “our members will once again step into the breach, despite their many other duties, because lives depend on it.” The president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association said, “It is fair to say that the health and safety risks we face from COVID-19 far surpass those presented by a nor’easter.”
This melodramatic nonsense must not be indulged. Teachers are not at any more risk than grocery-store workers, restaurant workers, or any of the other “essential workers” who have been working in person throughout the entire pandemic. If fast-food employees can show up to work, so can teachers. In fact, they have a higher obligation to do so because schools are more important than Taco Bell.
This should not be controversial, and it is becoming less so. Officials in state and local governments have in many places rejected unions’ pleas for school closures. This is not a red–blue issue. Most of the local officials are Democrats, and the Democratic secretary of education advocating in-person learning on national TV might have helped give them a permission slip to say “no” to the unions.
One hopes that by crossing the unions on this matter, state and local government officials might realize it’s not so hard and start standing up to them on other issues as well. But at the very least, all Americans should expect that their public schools will be open for students to attend. Politicians who disagree should be voted out of office and take up some other calling where they can hopefully be less harmful to the nation’s children.