Posted on 12/28/2020 4:51:35 AM PST by george76
Schools have been closed for the better part of a year now, for the putative reason that COVID-19 makes them unsafe. Only distance learning and Zoom and other online classes are safe enough for both teachers and kids, we’re told. Even though the science says otherwise, powerful teachers unions keep schools closed anyway. But why?
Let’s start with a blunt fact: The teachers unions — including the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), along with a host of radicalized local unions — don’t have your kids’ best interests at heart, despite their well-funded, slick propaganda to the contrary.
They oppose reopening schools, despite overwhelming evidence they should be reopened immediately.
As a must-read piece in the American Institute for Economic Research recently noted:
Significant evidence shows that a truncated school year supplemented with online learning is vastly inferior to the education children get in-person. Virtual learning is particularly harmful to students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds who do not have sufficient resources to support their learning.
This is a looming disaster for all children, but especially for poor and minority kids.
A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) estimated that school closures could cost the 24.2 million affected U.S. students nearly 5.53 million total years of life, largely due to lower incomes, less educational achievement, and worse health outcomes.
Higher levels of drug abuse and overdoses, massive increases in mental health hospital visits, along with surging suicide rates among children have been cited by the Centers for Disease Control as stemming from pandemic school closures.
Meanwhile, fears of schools becoming incubators for renewed surges of COVID-19 infections are grossly exaggerated, other studies and data show.
Start with the fact that, according to the Centers for Disease Control, just 168 kids 17 or under have died from COVID-19 through Dec. 19. That’s less than 0.05% of the total of nearly 300,000 COVID-19 deaths. By comparison, those aged 65 to 74 accounted for more than 21% of the total deaths.
Studies this year by peer-reviewed journals back these data up.
“COVID-19 is generally a mild disease in children, including infants,” a study in the British medical journal Lancet found.
Even the usually union-friendly New York Times was recently forced to admit: “Researchers once feared that school reopening’s might spread the virus through communities. But so far there is little evidence that it’s happening.”
The most cynical expression of unions’ lack of concern for students came earlier this year in Los Angeles, where the 35,000-member United Teachers of Los Angeles demanded, among other things, that local officials defund the police; pushed for a “moratorium” on charter schools; and insisted policymakers enact Medicare for All, provide more welfare for illegal immigrants, and levy enormous new taxes on commercial properties and “wealth.”
Of course, none of these things have anything to do with education. They’re just part of the much broader extremist agenda of the far left, which now largely controls American education.
The frightening thing is leftist teachers unions seem to have a strong ally in Joe Biden, who recently suggested that it might be better to keep schools closed all year.
So what is the unions’ price tag for reopening schools nationally? A cool $100 billion “investment,” as the left calls it. Smells more like ransom to us. The Democrat progressives and unions are holding your kids hostage.
Too cynical, you say? Not at all. Unions have been behind the closures all along.
As a recent study of 835 school districts asserted: “Using data on the reopening decisions of 835 public school districts in the United States, we find that school districts in locations with stronger teachers’ unions are less likely to reopen in person even after we control … for differences in local demographic characteristics.”
But health concerns weren’t the reason for closures. They were a pretext.
As the study cited above noted, closures “provide additional benefits to union members by reducing childcare responsibilities, hours of direct instruction, and commute times. Furthermore, because teachers’ unions with more power are in better positions to influence school districts, we expect that school districts in locations with stronger teachers’ unions will be less likely to reopen with in-person instruction.”
In short, teachers unions are using COVID-19 to extort more benefits and more money from the education system for their members. They don’t care about the kids.
For his part, if he gains office, Biden will be more interested in keeping his solid union support happy than in sending kids back to school.
Polls show parents want their kids back in school. The only people who don’t want the schools to reopen appear to be leftist politicians and their union supporters. For the record, since 1990, the the NEA and AFT, the two largest teachers unions, have given Democrats at least 94% of their political contributions.
There’s a solution for this dilemma. De-unionize the nation’s public schools. Unions have damaged American education, dumbing down curricula, filling kids’ heads with anti-American socialist dogma, and presiding over decades of rising costs and declining or stagnant test scores. It’s time to restore local control by parents over education. A system that works.
Real homeschooling is better than any public schooling, whether at home or online
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Yep. And those where both parents scramble to work and don’t think they have the education to homeschool their own kids ought to organize pods.
There is no reason in 2020/2021 to send your children to the public monstrosities.
State and local governments can’t have it both ways. They can’t shut down restaurants and gyms over COVID health concerns, then turn around and tell everyone that schools should be opened.
I would insist that schools should remain closed indefinitely as long as there is a single private business establishment shut down under a stupid governor’s order.
This ping list is for the other articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. This can occasionally be a fairly high volume list. Articles pinged to the Another Reason to Homeschool List will be given the keyword of ARTH. (If I remember. If I forget, please feel free to add it yourself)
The main Homeschool Ping List handles the homeschool-specific articles. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping list. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from either list, or both.
Parents need to demand that property taxes be reduced by the portion allocated to schools. Start neighborhood schools, get together with other parents and hire your own teachers.
Only if no teacher gets a single penny of a paycheck.
The concept of “school boards” is a disaster for parental interests. Better would be a single elected official, with the election happening in November in a presidential year to maximize turnout.
If you could, but don't, I don't want to hear any more about evil liberal teachers.
Chicago Public Schools have lost over 20,000 students who are not signing in for Zoom school. The CPS has no idea who is actually attending class.
But the CPS teachers will not return to real school until September 2021 because it is not “safe” It is not about the children.
Here in SC public schools are open for classroom learning. There hasn’t been a problem. Open red states like Fla, SC, and Tx are making blue states look bad.
Years ago we had a high teacher absentee rate. My town was spending a lot on substitutes. It became an issue. A not so bright teacher wrote a letter to local paper saying your kids make us sick. That’s what’s going on with teacher unions. They hate kids.
I have seen a few teachers locally post on Facebook about how they really, really, really, really, really want to get back to the classroom to teach the kids this summer is teaching but keep coming up with different excuses how it’s not safe yet, etc. Of course, the demands of what “safe” is seem to change anytime the subjects come up. The demand, Say, plexiglass shields and masks and get them then come up with some new excuse as to why they can’t go back.
So the unions are demanding 100 billion to re-open and the feds are saying no?
ONLY if property taxes are refunded and salaries are unpaid for services not rendered.
Then I’ll agree.
I’ve thot about opening my house to a pod like this. We have a whole downstairs not being used.
Interesting thinking. I wonder what you could learn about demand with a little local networking.
They would like nothing better than to do "virtual learning" for the rest of their careers so they can sit at home in their pajamas. There is a high school history teacher that is a neighbor of mine and he records about 30 minutes of content per day that he produces for all his students, who watch it on demand. He then assigns the homework and sets up Zoom sessions for any requested one-on-one extra help but very few students take advantage of that. They just submit their homework via email.
So his workday is just a few hours a day and he rarely has to leave his house. Needless to say, he's loving it and hoping this continues as long as possible.
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