How Teachers Fought for Their Safety in the Pandemic—and Won

The Nation ^ | MAY 17, 2021 | Bryce Covert

[artichokegrower]

As the debate over in-person schooling roiled, teachers’ unions secured significant protections­—often with parents’ support.

[artichokegrower]

Those actions resulted in an agreement to send high schoolers back to classrooms that includes a vaccination program for parents and students, which the Chicago Teachers Union said is the “first of its kind in the nation.”

Demanding that parents be vaccinated before the kids can return to,school.

[billorites]

Any day that the teachers unions take it in the shorts is a good day.

[phoneman08]

Teachers “won” and students lost.

[ConservativeInPA]

Funny how teachers and teachers unions fight for better pay, more support staff, better medical benefits, tremendous and unsustainable pensions, and now not to teach. They never fight for students. They barely work for students.

Most professions, teaching ain't one of them, see a progression over time with measurable improvements both in quality and cost. However, with teaching, quality has gone down and cost has gone through the roof. And they say it is for the children. Bullshit.

[GreenLanternCorps]

What a load of crap. My kids have been back to school (in a very large suburban district) since last August. All COVID cases were reported and tracked. In school transmission was minimal at worst. Most cases came from contacts outside school.

Big city teachers unions do not care about their students and are using COVID as an excuse...

[napscoordinator]

Florida teachers got a good gig. Work from home and the legislature is giving them a thousand dollar bonus. Not a bad days work.

[glennaro]

Dennis Prager noted decades ago: “Teachers unions care as much about students as the communist party cares about workers.”

[mewzilla]

Don’t forget the cadillac health bennies...

In NYS teachers can get nose jobs and boob jobs on the taxpayers’ dime.

[mewzilla]

Kids aren’t customers.

They’re grist for the diploma mills run by the public sector.

[BookmanTheJanitor]

Suicides among teens increased dramatically, a whole year was lost never to be returned, and kids fell even further behind in math and science … but, hey, the teachers won. (puke)

[kiryandil]

I’m gonna hurl, Earl.

[artichokegrower]

“When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.”

Albert Shanker (September 14, 1928 – February 22, 1997) was president of the United Federation of Teachers from 1964 to 1985 and president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) from 1974 to 1997.

[Bookshelf]

Check the FR questionable blogger. Then check the Marxist Nation. Then heck its publisher:
Katrina vanden Heuvel – Useful Stooges
https://usefulstooges.com › tag › katrina-vanden-heuvel
... but our old friend Stephen F. Cohen – the Russia “expert,” Kremlin sympathizer, and spouse of Nation publisher and limousine Marxist Katrina vanden Heuvel ... etc.

[glennaro]

That’s it! That’s the “money quote” that reveals all!

[Uncle Miltie]

Teachers are fat.

I’ll bet more than an average number succumbed to the covid by any of the crap measurements.

[Bernard]

I am surprised that nobody at the state or local level has proposed legislation to declare the current school year as lost, as in no student gets promoted. I witnessed first-hand the education that two grandchildren got from a school district that was remote only for most of the school year, and neither got anything that resembled an education. To pretend that all of the kids got enough from the remote process to advance through the current school year requirements is delusional.

Not all school districts, just the ones that did remote only for a significant amount of time in the last 12 months.

[RetiredScientist]

It is far more complicated than you present. My wife and daughter are both teach STEM subjects. My wife teaches in a Christian school. My daughter teaches in a Charter school. Both spend long hours developing lesson plans and lab experiments. My wife has done this for over 20 years. Both tell me that the work ethic of students has really tanked.

This coming week will be interesting: The school year is winding down and the students who have been goofing off meet the math that accompanies goofing off: They are trying to get "credit recovery" - that is doing the work they should have done months ago. Some are starting to respond well.

Yes, the pandemic created problems. All the teachers I know have been using Zoom and other tech to help the students. In Rochester, the school districts sent buses with wifi hot spots to help students. My wife and daughter were making and posting videos to explain both lessons and homework problems.

If one looks at the distribution of grades and the percentage of assignments that each person turned in, one gets a clear picture of how some students have the work ethic to succeed and other just won't do the work and won't ask for help. "Ghosting" was common in businesses during the pandemic; it was much worse in the schools. Both teachers in my family reached out to parents to make them aware of the problem. Very few did anything about it. The old saying still applies: "You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make them drink".

[NonValueAdded]

and who lost? /rhetorical

[rockabyebaby]

Teachers fighting for their safety has caused a lot of kids to have failing grades. Teachers say kids shouldn’t be kept back because it will hurt their feelings, parents say screw that, kids need to learn and because of the teachers unions, kids got screwed out of a year’s worth of learning, keep them all back.

[ConservativeInPA]

It is far more complicated than you present.

Quite honestly, it isn't that more complicated. I realize there are some good people who teach, but they are the very ones that did not stand up to the leftist bullies and unions. They did not fight. There is also plenty of blame upon parents. They need to to team with the good teachers and literally drive these Marists from classrooms and school boards.