Last week, two new reports confirmed the catastrophic damage caused by a year of remote schooling. Not only did American schoolchildren fall dramatically behind in the school year, the damage was substantially greater for low-income and minority schoolchildren, whose families tended to lack the resources to navigate the perils of turning their home into a virtual classroom.
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Also last week, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten slipped a rather ominous comment into an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. “We’re going to keep kids safe, we’re going to keep our members safe, we’re going to try to open up schools,” she said. That “try” was a notable retreat from her concession two months ago that, after more than a year of throwing up impediments to in-person instruction, “we can and we must reopen schools in the fall.”
The mere possibility that some schools may be forced to haggle once again with their unions to reopen school in the face of incontrovertible evidence of the need to do so is maddening enough. But the cherry on top of this sundae of public dysfunction is the fact that the national teachers unions have refused to support a vaccine mandate for teachers. “Vaccinations must be negotiated between employers and workers, not coerced,” says Weingarten. The National Education Association supports allowing an option for weekly testing for teachers instead of requiring a vaccine. New York’s state United Teachers union likewise opposes a vaccine mandate.