Teachers are once again under attack—and under pressure to compromise their own safety and that of their students—as they try to cope with the challenges of a resurgent coronavirus pandemic.
After the members of the Chicago Teachers Union voted by a large margin to only return to school remote until the omicron spike has abated or the district offers acceptable safety protocols, management called off classes entirely rather than go remote. That move came after the city failed to put in place mitigation measures the union had called for over break, and after the spectacular failure of a mail-in testing plan.
“To be clear: Educators of this city want to be in buildings with their students. We believe that classrooms are where our children should be,” the union said in a statement. “But as the results tonight show, Mayor Lightfoot and her CPS team have yet to provide safety for the overwhelming majority of schools.”
The test positivity rate in Chicago is at 23.6%, and the city is averaging 4,591 new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents. The district is not yet reporting absentee rates for the beginning of the week, but multiple school principals told Chalkbeat Chicago that student attendance was down in addition to problematic levels of teacher and staff absence. Some districts in the Chicago suburbs had closed schools, meanwhile, because of staffing shortages, highlighting the degree to which the Chicago Teachers Union is flagging an existing problem that cannot be wished away.
Chicago is not the only city struggling to find a way to educate its children safely. New York City saw a new one-day record for positive tests among school-aged children as the city urged teachers to return to school after five days even with mild symptoms. It’s okay for a teacher to be in the classroom with a “minimal cough” as long as they’re not “coughing up phlegm,” for instance. That pressure is coming because schools are facing serious staffing shortages: “At least one Brooklyn high school sent students to the auditorium. None of the 15 requests a Queens school made for substitute teachers were fulfilled, its principal said,” Chalkbeat New York reported. But “go to school still symptomatic with a highly infectious respiratory virus” is not actually the right district-level response to staffing shortages.
In Massachusetts, the day after teachers raised concerns about alleged KN95 masks the state was distributing to teachers and Republican Gov. Charlie Baker responded by insisting that the masks had been tested by MIT, the state admitted that, whoops, some of the masks in fact had not received that testing. Baker’s administration continues to pressure schools to stay open in person, even as they announced: “If the trend in COVID-19 cases continues in an upward direction in the coming days and weeks, we may reach a level of staff absences that compromises our ability to safely operate one or more schools,” according to one superintendent’s message to parents.
Washington, D.C., required students to submit COVID-19 test results by Wednesday—but the online portal for submitting the results crashed Tuesday. Many teachers there, too, are calling for a pause on in-person instruction until better safety measures can be put in place or the omicron surge abates.
Yet as cities and school districts provide inadequate testing and safety measures, teachers are under attack for expressing concerns. Yahoo News senior White House correspondent Alexander Nazaryan suggested that President Joe Biden should take Ronald Reagan’s 1981 breaking of the air traffic controllers’ strike as his model in dealing with teachers in this moment. This is allegedly an objective news reporter calling for the president to use authority he frankly doesn’t have to break unions that are simply arguing for schools to be made safe not just for their members but for students.
Such anti-union messaging proliferated in brazen defiance of the reality of what’s going on.
“We in public health fought for teachers to be prioritized for vaccines. Vaccines + boosters protect very well against severe illness to omicron. Wearing a high quality mask further protects you,” Dr. Leana Wen, a prominent commentator during the pandemic and a former president of Planned Parenthood (which didn’t go well at all), tweeted on Tuesday. “Teachers unions: Please stop the delays. We need all schools to be in-person, now.” Wen is a professor at George Washington University, which is currently remote.
Also remote are the schools in Atlanta, Georgia, which is not generally known as a hotbed of teacher union power. Newark, New Jersey, and Cleveland, Ohio, schools are remote as well, among others. And being in-person doesn’t mean that education goes on without disruption. School systems that are open are experiencing high enough absentee rates among both students and staff to create chaos as classes are reshuffled or combined or cancelled entirely even as school is officially open.
As journalist Julia Carrie Wong pointed out, the pressure on teachers to report for work in person at all costs—and the blaming of teachers’ unions when that doesn’t happen—comes in the context of New York City having recently had to close multiple subway lines due to omicron-related staffing shortages. There are staff shortages everywhere, but when it’s in schools, teachers are demonized. Beyond that, the top-down insistence that schools be open in person and without significant new safety measures even when the spread of COVID-19 is higher than it has been at any point is telling—telling about how the safety of both teachers and students is prioritized, and about a fundamental vision of education based more on kids’ bodies in classrooms than on anything about the learning that goes on in those classrooms.
In-person learning is better for kids, as every teachers’ union has repeatedly emphasized. But too many people, from political leaders to supposed public health experts to journalists, are missing some key points:
This discourse is so broken.
After the members of the Chicago Teachers Union voted by a large margin to only return to school remote until the omicron spike has abated or the district offers acceptable safety protocols, management called off classes entirely rather than go remote. That move came after the city failed to put in place mitigation measures the union had called for over break, and after the spectacular failure of a mail-in testing plan.
“To be clear: Educators of this city want to be in buildings with their students. We believe that classrooms are where our children should be,” the union said in a statement. “But as the results tonight show, Mayor Lightfoot and her CPS team have yet to provide safety for the overwhelming majority of schools.”
The test positivity rate in Chicago is at 23.6%, and the city is averaging 4,591 new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents. The district is not yet reporting absentee rates for the beginning of the week, but multiple school principals told Chalkbeat Chicago that student attendance was down in addition to problematic levels of teacher and staff absence. Some districts in the Chicago suburbs had closed schools, meanwhile, because of staffing shortages, highlighting the degree to which the Chicago Teachers Union is flagging an existing problem that cannot be wished away.
Chicago is not the only city struggling to find a way to educate its children safely. New York City saw a new one-day record for positive tests among school-aged children as the city urged teachers to return to school after five days even with mild symptoms. It’s okay for a teacher to be in the classroom with a “minimal cough” as long as they’re not “coughing up phlegm,” for instance. That pressure is coming because schools are facing serious staffing shortages: “At least one Brooklyn high school sent students to the auditorium. None of the 15 requests a Queens school made for substitute teachers were fulfilled, its principal said,” Chalkbeat New York reported. But “go to school still symptomatic with a highly infectious respiratory virus” is not actually the right district-level response to staffing shortages.
In Massachusetts, the day after teachers raised concerns about alleged KN95 masks the state was distributing to teachers and Republican Gov. Charlie Baker responded by insisting that the masks had been tested by MIT, the state admitted that, whoops, some of the masks in fact had not received that testing. Baker’s administration continues to pressure schools to stay open in person, even as they announced: “If the trend in COVID-19 cases continues in an upward direction in the coming days and weeks, we may reach a level of staff absences that compromises our ability to safely operate one or more schools,” according to one superintendent’s message to parents.
Washington, D.C., required students to submit COVID-19 test results by Wednesday—but the online portal for submitting the results crashed Tuesday. Many teachers there, too, are calling for a pause on in-person instruction until better safety measures can be put in place or the omicron surge abates.
Yet as cities and school districts provide inadequate testing and safety measures, teachers are under attack for expressing concerns. Yahoo News senior White House correspondent Alexander Nazaryan suggested that President Joe Biden should take Ronald Reagan’s 1981 breaking of the air traffic controllers’ strike as his model in dealing with teachers in this moment. This is allegedly an objective news reporter calling for the president to use authority he frankly doesn’t have to break unions that are simply arguing for schools to be made safe not just for their members but for students.
Such anti-union messaging proliferated in brazen defiance of the reality of what’s going on.
“We in public health fought for teachers to be prioritized for vaccines. Vaccines + boosters protect very well against severe illness to omicron. Wearing a high quality mask further protects you,” Dr. Leana Wen, a prominent commentator during the pandemic and a former president of Planned Parenthood (which didn’t go well at all), tweeted on Tuesday. “Teachers unions: Please stop the delays. We need all schools to be in-person, now.” Wen is a professor at George Washington University, which is currently remote.
Also remote are the schools in Atlanta, Georgia, which is not generally known as a hotbed of teacher union power. Newark, New Jersey, and Cleveland, Ohio, schools are remote as well, among others. And being in-person doesn’t mean that education goes on without disruption. School systems that are open are experiencing high enough absentee rates among both students and staff to create chaos as classes are reshuffled or combined or cancelled entirely even as school is officially open.
As journalist Julia Carrie Wong pointed out, the pressure on teachers to report for work in person at all costs—and the blaming of teachers’ unions when that doesn’t happen—comes in the context of New York City having recently had to close multiple subway lines due to omicron-related staffing shortages. There are staff shortages everywhere, but when it’s in schools, teachers are demonized. Beyond that, the top-down insistence that schools be open in person and without significant new safety measures even when the spread of COVID-19 is higher than it has been at any point is telling—telling about how the safety of both teachers and students is prioritized, and about a fundamental vision of education based more on kids’ bodies in classrooms than on anything about the learning that goes on in those classrooms.
In-person learning is better for kids, as every teachers’ union has repeatedly emphasized. But too many people, from political leaders to supposed public health experts to journalists, are missing some key points:
This discourse is so broken.