Hold the line, Mike
As Chicago, its hand forced by a hell-no teachers’ union, temporarily gives up on in-person schooling — despite nine out of 10 of its teachers being fully vaccinated and therefore well protected from getting seriously ill from COVID, and despite overwhelming evidence that remote learning is worse for students, and especially for disadvantaged kids — New York City’s teachers keep coming into work, with a teachers union that is for now resisting pressure from restive factions in its midst.
We say: Thank you, UFT President Mike Mulgrew, and please hold the line. The kids need their teachers.
New York’s public schools are far from COVIDfree; there is ample spread. With many more COVID safety measures in place than, say, in Chicago, and stepped-up testing detecting many cases, kids and adults are being sent home by the thousands with at-home diagnostic kits when they test positive or exposed to someone who does. This has yielded real disruptions. But a supermajority of the system’s million kids (around 700,000) are still getting educated because the school system is engaged in an elaborate effort to try to mitigate spread of a variant that, though extraordinarily contagious, hardly ever does serious harm to the fully vaccinated — or to children, even when they are unvaccinated.
In city schools, children are masked and increasingly have their shots. All adults working in school buildings are fully vaccinated. The fact that children are in school by the hundreds of thousands, is not producing any meaningful public health consequences.
Yet if schools were shuttered for a week or two or three until omicron blows over (or doesn’t), children would once again be subjected to many of the harms that hounded them over the last two academic years. That includes further backsliding in math and reading aptitude; social and emotional damage that comes from being isolated; and a search for child-care by their parents, including essential workers who can ill afford the additional turmoil.
Any honest cost-benefit analysis falls on the side of keeping kids in school.