(Bloomberg Opinion) -- “The president couldn’t be clearer,” said Jeff Zients, the White House pandemic coordinator, at last week’s briefing from the Covid-19 response team. “Schools in this country should remain open.”
The second half of that statement is good to hear. As for the first part: Actually, President Joe Biden and his administration could be clearer about which side they’re on. The president should align himself not with the adults in the classroom, but with the children.
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona has been vocal about everything the federal government is doing to help districts keep their schools open and safe. In general, the administration has treated the controversy over school openings and policies as primarily a technical question to be solved with additional resources.
It certainly is — in part. But it’s also a political question, one which has been made far more difficult by the recalcitrance of teachers unions. And unlike his former boss, President Barack Obama, Biden has been reluctant to criticize teachers unions — which has, in turn, made things harder for mayors in liberal cities.
Of course, the federal government has almost nothing to do with the day-to-day operation of America’s public schools. But the presidential bully pulpit is an important tool, especially in disputes that play out in blue America. Even progressive mayors find themselves at odds with public-employee unions from time to time. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, for example, is currently at odds with teachers who refuse to return to the classroom after winter break. She and other mayors could use clear and unequivocal support from the White House.
The argument is not that America’s public-school teachers have it easy. They don’t. It is that — especially in the bluer parts of the country — they have protections from Covid that other kinds of in-person professionals and workers do not. That includes school closures, but also more prosaic things such as requirements in many jurisdictions that students eat lunch outside (in some places in silence) or strict (in some jurisdictions stricter than current CDC guidance) quarantines for students who have merely been in contact with someone with the virus.
Before vaccines were widely available, it made perfect sense to sympathize with teachers. Now that vaccines are widely available, however, the risk calculus has changed. If doctors, dental hygienists, bartenders, retail clerks and housekeepers can keep working without extraordinary measures, then so can teachers.
The vaccines aren’t perfect. But they are highly effective, and by now it’s clear that there’s not going to be a “Victory Day” when the pandemic suddenly “ends.” America (and the world) is simply going to have to learn to live with elevated risk of respiratory viruses for the indefinite future, and can’t put schooling on hold indefinitely.
What’s odd about the politics here is that, separated from the issue of the pandemic, “virtual learning” is a kind of right-wing fever dream.
If kids could be effectively taught through video lectures and online tools, then America’s enormous and expensive corps of teachers would be largely unnecessary. A handful of people working for a few small education technology companies could produce software to serve students at huge scale. Older students could do the work on their own. Younger students might need supervision, but that could be done by a low-paid workforce of babysitters rather than teachers with master’s degrees and pensions.
When I spoke to national teachers union leaders in the spring of 2020, they seemed to grasp the nature of the threat posed by school closures. They were keen to portray teachers as vital workers eager to return to their jobs. But over the next few months, the biggest local unions became hyper-responsive to their most recalcitrant members, and national union leaders followed suit.
The evidence is now clear that school closures caused massive learning loss. In a way, this bad news for America is good news for America’s teachers. It’s an object lesson in how critical their work is, and how worthy of investment they are.
Yet union leaders have been perversely hostile to the idea that their work actually matters — and the attitude predates Covid. The Obama administration’s efforts to encourage districts to identify and reward the most effective teachers, for example, were routinely characterized by unions as “anti-teacher” moves. When Washington, D.C., implemented a performance pay system that led to higher compensation across the board, it was excoriated by the local union.
Democrats have long wrestled with how to balance being the party of public services with being the party of public-service providers. Under Biden, that balance has been knocked off kilter. Democrats have been addressing the most superficial aspects of controversies over such issues as standardized testing and, yes, Covid protocols. Meanwhile, they are whistling past the fundamental question that Obama had and many Democratic mayors have to face head-on: Who is the school system for, and who makes the decisions?
Last spring, as part of unions’ overall war on assessment, they and their allies pushed the line that it was harmful to even attempt to measure learning loss attributable to the pandemic. San Francisco’s school board president said students were “just having different learning experiences” at home, not inferior to the ones in-person school could provide.
Biden and his team obviously don’t believe that, or many of the unions’ other extreme views. They clearly do take seriously the documented learning loss; Cardona has refused to give in to demands to indefinitely suspend standardized testing. And the administration really is pushing for schools to reopen.
Politically, however, it has stood with union leaders. This is not due to a progressive takeover of the Democratic Party — it’s because the moderate establishment itself has shifted. It was Terry McAuliffe, after all, the model of an establishment Democrat, who chose to campaign with a teachers union leader in the closing days of his ill-fated Virginia gubernatorial campaign. And while the Obama-era stimulus bill structured financial relief for school districts as incentive grants designed to encourage charter schools and teacher compensation reforms, Biden’s version was largely unrestricted money.
Some rebalancing away from the enthusiasm for frequent testing of the aughts was probably warranted, as exemplified by the bipartisan Every Student Succeeds Act that passed in 2015. But mainstream Democrats have now gone too far in their uncritical embrace of unions and their leadership.
Most Americans deeply respect teachers, and rightly so. But they are respected precisely because their work is so important — too important to be done without regard for their actual on-the-job performance. Successful Democrats have managed to oppose Republican school austerity while supporting parent- and child-centered educational practices. Biden needs to do the same.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. A co-founder and former columnist for Vox, he is also the author, most recently, of "One Billion Americans."
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