No one is opposed to school reopenings. Teachers hate remote teaching as much (or more) than families and children. Everyone wants to find a way to make schools work.

What people are opposed to is the idea that schools can safely reopen, WITH NO CHANGES.
The reality is that, even with a half-year of advance warning, many policymakers have made almost no effort to fund or explore ways to restructure K-12 education to be safer. So we entered the fall semester exactly where we were in the spring.
That's clearly untenable! Teachers are not soldiers, they didn't sign up to die in the line of fire. Even if you put aside the moral question of whether it's fair to ask teachers to take life-threatening risks, the reality is that most of them won't, just like anyone else.
If any other class of workers was broadly reluctant to return to the workplace absent abundant evidence of their own physical safety, liberals would have no trouble whatsoever understanding and sympathizing. But teachers are regarded as selfish for wanting the same guarantee.
What's happening here, though, is that elite commentators are using "Think of the children!" style rhetoric, and many years of right-wing propaganda casting teachers' unions as thuggish mafia organizations, to depict reasonable concerns as selfish.
In this frame, teachers are emergency room doctors or firefighters, and if they don't peacefully agree to go die in the achievement mines, well, they're shirking their duties and should be forced back in, for the greater good.
Here's the thing, though: even if you agree with that ridiculous frame, it still doesn't solve the problem, as a practical matter. We don't have a giant pool of replacement teachers who will volunteer to go get mowed down instead of the current set.
We're reaping the costs of our previous inaction. The only solution is going to be to find ways to make schools safe, and triage the highest need students, which will require major structural changes (and funding!).
What ISN'T going to do the trick is waving around some chart with half-baked statistics, or arguing that schools are magically immune to covid, or saying "Look, you're statistically no more likely to die than in other workplaces," as if that's supposed to set workers at ease.
You can follow @whstancil.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

Latest Threads Unrolled: