Many of us have watched with a mixture of horror and grim vindication as schools around the country have shut down yet again over the last several weeks.
The New York Times, meanwhile, has a report that should freeze the hearts of even the most cynical critics of the modern educational system:
As More Teachers' Unions Push for Remote Schooling, Parents Worry. So Do Democrats.
As the Times makes clear, teachers around the U.S. are pushing for, and often succeeding in, getting classrooms closed for fear of contracting COVID-19. This is leading to ire from parents and worry from Democrats who see bad portents for the 2022 midterms.
Right away, we have a sign that something's different here. Teachers' unions have assuredly very often been contemptuous of the wishes and desires of the parents they nominally serve, but for unions to go against Democrats—for teachers to risk putting Democrats on the chopping block in November's midterms— suggests that we've hit a turning point in this particular political fracas.
If teachers are willing to risk major Democratic losses in November in order to stay out of the classroom, it shows that they're very serious about keeping schools closed.
And yes, they are serious:
[I]f it turns out that Democratic candidates pay a political price for unions' assertiveness, local labor officials do not consider it to be among their top concerns.
If periods of remote learning this winter hurt the Democratic Party, "that's a question for the consultants and the brain trusts to figure out," said Mr. Abeigon, the Newark union president. "But that it's the right thing to do? There's no question in my mind."
What we have here is pretty compelling proof that the teachers shutting down schools for fear of the coronavirus actually believe their own rhetoric on the matter.
That may seem hard to comprehend—that so many grown, well-educated men and women could feel justified in shutting down a huge chunk of the country because of a respiratory virus with a near-total survival rate for healthy individuals. But they do feel justified. They have fully absorbed the incomprehensible belief that this virus warrants essentially every mitigation measure that can possibly be thrown at it.
That's not good, and in fact it underscores just how deeply and pervasively the issue has infused itself into the U.S. education system, and how this particular problem may be with us for a long time. These teachers are not simply going to wake up one day and decide that the coronavirus is no big deal. They're in too deep.
It's worth noting that the issue here isn't the threat of a nationwide school shutdown—that's not likely to happen again, certainly not in the way it did in March of 2020. Rather, as the Times notes:
For many parents and teachers, the pandemic has become a slog of anxiety over the risk of infection, child care crises, the tedium of school-through-a-screen and, most of all, chronic instability.
"Chronic instability." That's what the U.S. education system is facing for at least the near future: Waves of shutdowns and closures and remote instruction rules, popping up at the whims of neurotic teachers' unions, disrupting local economies, constantly interfering with productive labor, putting huge swaths of schoolchildren significantly behind their peers both at home and abroad.
Decoupled from any real allegiance to Democrats, utterly convinced of the rightness of their own ridiculous position on COVID, the nation's teachers have realized the extent of the control they hold over the U.S. educational system. And they're exercising it.
What we're seeing play out in states across the country may very well be just the beginning of a new paradigm of education in the country, one in which we mark the school year less by how many days students are in school and more by how many they are not. It is not hard to imagine the fallout from such a system.
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