National Review Online
Tuesday, March 30, 2021
Tuesday was supposed to be a big day for a lot of
kids in Oakland — they were supposed to be going back to school. Some of them
were to be going to school for the first time. Unfortunately, it’s not going to
happen.
A deal between the school district and the teachers’
union had provided for reopening all of Oakland’s elementary schools, but, in
spite of the deal, more than half of teachers are declining to return to the
classroom, and so most of Oakland’s schools will not reopen as scheduled. Out
of 50 pre-K and elementary schools covered by the agreement, only 21 — fewer
than half — will reopen.
A substantial number of teachers — almost a fifth — have
indicated that they do not intend to return to school as required in mid April.
While acknowledging the damage this is doing to children — isolation,
depression, and other mental-health issues — Oakland School Board Director
Shanthi Gonzales pleaded powerlessness, telling the San Francisco
Chronicle, “I wish more teachers were volunteering.” That is what you
get when the school district works for the teachers and not the other way
around: schools in which the interests of children and their families take a
distant second place to the desires of the public-sector unions that dominate
Democratic politics around the country and run the show practically unopposed
in California.
This isn’t bare-knuckle labor politics — it’s political
child abuse.
The Centers for Disease Control has said that schools can
be safely reopened while maintaining social distancing of as little as
three feet. And, as we all know, the pronouncements of the CDC are the gold
standard for our progressive friends — right up until they run into the demands
of an important Democratic constituency, at which point, they become trash.
American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten says she’s “not
convinced” by the CDC’s advice. Weingarten, a lawyer by education and a union
goon by profession, is, to say the least, not very well prepared to critically
review the CDC’s public-health findings.
We have been through a great deal in the past year, with
the schools and other institutions taking extraordinary measures that were
generally, even when we disagreed, understandable. But 100 million Americans
have now received at least one dose of one of the COVID-19 vaccines, and the
research overwhelmingly finds that elementary-school education is a relatively
low-risk proposition — and that every additional unnecessary delay in the
return of ordinary education does real and lasting damage to children,
especially to those whose families do not have the resources to adequately pick
up the slack. A great many people have worked throughout this terrible episode,
many at some considerable personal risk, and not only doctors, nurses, and
ambulance drivers but also grocery clerks, warehouse workers, and taxi drivers.
They have kept the country running while unionized teachers in Oakland and
elsewhere have turned up their noses at the children they are supposed to be
serving and looked instead to their own two-point agenda: (1) not going to
work; (2) getting paid.
Randi Weingarten exercises more real practical political
power than any senator or cabinet secretary, and her power is exercised
exclusively in the interest of public-sector workers and the Democratic Party,
which they effectively control. Perhaps it is time for Americans to take back
some of that power.
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