By summer 2020, it was increasingly clear that kids weren’t at risk and weren’t major sources of spread. And yet, when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos called to reopen schools, she was lambasted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for “messing with the health of our children.” When Missouri Governor Mike Parson called in July for his state’s schools to open, the Missouri Democratic Party slammed his call as “despicable and morally reprehensible.” Such vitriol was routine when teachers unions or the mainstream media discussed governors, like Ron DeSantis or Brian Kemp, who insisted that schools open that fall. Then, of course, there were the school boards that ridiculed parentswho wanted schools reopened, dismissing them as whiners who just wanted “their babysitters back.”
Teachers unions energetically resisted reopening, with members out protesting using fake body bags, caskets, and tombstones as props.
In fall 2020, teachers were taking to outlets like Education Week and CNN to decry the “coronavirus-deniers” who wanted schools to reopen, arguing “I love my students” but “don’t want to die.” There was the oft-heard claim that the push to reopen schools was, well, racist (as with the teacher who asked “Are We Going to Let ‘Nice White Parents’ Kill Black and Brown Families?”). The Chicago Teachers Union flatly explained that “the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.”
For their part, education leaders insisted that they would reopen if only they had more money. This tactic played neatly into school leaders’ propensity for insisting that schools are perpetually starved for funds. (New York City’s chancellor lamented, “We are cutting the bone. There is no fat to cut, no meat to cut.” At the time, his was one of the nation’s highest-spending districts, with a district bureaucracy that cost $5 billion a year, to which he’d added 340 central-office positions the prior year.) In the meantime, district leaders were left to assert that virtual learning was a decent-enough alternative, proclaiming: “For those who say we need to get back to school, we say SCHOOL IS IN SESSION. Teachers are teaching their hearts out during live virtual instruction every day.” Parents felt gaslit.
