Why Are Teachers So Averse to Returning to the Classroom?

By Dan McLaughlin

Friday, April 16, 2021

 

A major theme of the “when do we reopen” debate across the country has been the resistance of teachers to reopening in-person school. This is partly a function of public-school teachers’ unions, which often do not reflect the views of their members. Then again, while many teachers have been bitterly frustrated with online teaching, it is clear that there is a lot of sentiment out there from rank-and-file teachers against returning to the classroom even when they are fully vaccinated, at least until every single student is vaccinated or the pandemic is over entirely.

 

We can see that level of caution from the news across the country.

 

Seattle:

 

The Seattle Education Association voted to stay home, despite jumping the line for vaccines. Fifth grade teacher Danielle Woods told a local radio station that “the vaccine is not a silver bullet. The vaccine is going to reduce risk but it’s not going to go to zero.”

 

Cleveland:

 

“Teachers wouldn’t be able to do their job, because the equipment simply isn’t there for them to do their job,” union president Shari Obrenski told News 5. “Having a vaccination, and a first dose of a vaccination, doesn’t keep you from getting COVID. My vaccination does not help my students. My students are still at risk for COVID. Their families are still at risk for COVID, if we aren’t doing what we need to do.”

 

Tacoma:

 

Andrea Kunkle, told a local TV station that personally getting a vaccine isn’t enough. The entire community needs the vaccine—including children. “What about our community? Because sure, we can have a big push and say, ‘Yeah, let’s all of us jump the line and we all get vaccinated. Great, we’re all safe,’” Kunkle told KIRO 7 TV. “But our family, members of our community and our students are not. And many of our students are in Black and brown communities. They are in multi-generational houses and they are particularly vulnerable to this disease.”

 

Chicago:

 

“Our members took a vote to keep learning remotely to avoid disaster,” Stacy Davis Gates, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said last week.

 

Baltimore:

 

The Baltimore Teachers Union protested [returning], saying it wants the district to provide a COVID-19 testing plan, a nursing plan and new ventilation assessments for all classrooms.

 

This level of zero tolerance for COVID exposure is belied by medical science. There is little evidence of schools as vectors for transmission of the virus, which is one reason why schools have remained open in many parts of Europe. The CDC acknowledges that vaccinated people are at little to no risk to catch or spread the virus, and can travel safely. The CDC concluded in February that it was safe to reopen schools even before all teachers were vaccinated. And the CDC is, if anything, hypercautious, ignoring data that more strongly support reopening schools.

 

Moreover, the debate on reopening schools has not happened in a vacuum. Over the many months that students have been doing online learning, dozens of other occupations have returned back to work, facing the public long before vaccines were available: doctors, nurses, cops, firemen, grocery clerks, 7-11 cashiers, meat packers, bus drivers, train conductors. Some businesses, such as barber shops and nail salons, have been chafing to reopen.

 

Studies looking at the most high-risk occupations have, to put it mildly, not found that teaching is anywhere near the top of the list. A University of California–San Francisco study of deaths in California of people between the ages of 18 and 65 found that the highest-risk sectors were “food or agriculture,” followed by “transportation or logistics;” the highest-risk occupations were cooks. Teacher assistants were the only educational job to make the list of riskiest jobs, and that was behind 24 other jobs. A Massachusetts study found “education, training, and library” workers to be the lowest-risk sector, with health-care support workers facing ten times their mortality risk, and “transportation and material moving” workers more than eight times the risk.

 

So, why is there such particular caution among teachers? Undoubtedly some of this is the simple fact that classrooms are notorious breeding grounds for head colds, the flu, and other ordinary ailments, conditioning teachers to think of their job as a petri dish of germs. Some is the culture of unionized work forces in general, although that is really not a complete explanation. Many cops are unionized, for example, yet police forces have had the opposite problem: a resistance among the rank and file to wearing masks on duty. One mid-2020 survey found that just 36 percent of firemen said that wearing a face mask helped reduce the risk of COVID, and only 37 percent of cops said that wearing a mask kept them safe — in each case, vastly lower rates than reported by EMS workers. Thirty-seven percent of cops said that they did not wear masks in public off duty.

 

The contrast between teachers and cops gets to something that runs deeper in how people have reacted to the pandemic: Some people just have a higher tolerance for risk than others. We can argue about whose risk tolerance is too much or too little; you can obviously go too far in either direction, between shutting down your life and taking reckless risks. Moreover, it should not surprise us that different jobs attract people with different risk tolerance. Cops and firemen take those jobs knowing that they will be called upon to run towards danger, such as facing down armed criminals or running into burning buildings. Unsurprisingly, both occupations disproportionately attract men.

 

Now, look at the teaching profession. Teachers, as a group, get uninspiring pay but tremendous job security and little risk of variation in their salaries from one year to the next. Their in-class schedules are extremely predictable, and after a few years on the job, the out-of-class hours are predictable as well — you know how long your lesson plans and marking up homework will take. The calendar never varies. The material changes only slowly. The work environment itself, particularly for elementary and high-school teachers, is literally the same environment they inhabited as children. Teaching can be a stressful and draining job, but it naturally attracts caregivers, not risk-takers. It has always disproportionately attracted women.

 

Different fields have different cultures. Those cultures can come from the collective experience of the job, but you cannot ignore the fact that careers are also self-selected. It is not an accident that lawyers are more argumentative as a group, or that soldiers are more adventurous. Cops will always be bigger risk-taking personalities, as a group, than teachers, because that is who wants the job.