Schools Don’t Spread Covid. Teachers' Unions Don’t Care.
Their insistence that classrooms be shut down during the pandemic contrary to the science punishes the kids they are supposed to care about.
Lecture circuit.
Photographer: Octavio Jones/Getty Images
My first boss in journalism was Charlie Peters of the Washington Monthly, whose way of mentoring his young staff writers was to assign us articles that took us well out of our comfort zones. Given that my parents were both public school teachers, it was inevitable that when the teachers’ union in Washington, D.C., called for a strike in the fall of 1978, Peters told me to write about it.
Working on that article turned me into a critic of teachers’ unions, as Peters knew it would. Sadly, nothing that has happened in the ensuing 42 years — including, most recently, the unions’ insistence that schools be shut down during the pandemic — has caused me to change my mind.