School Closures Hurt Teachers, Too

In the second school year of the pandemic, nobody fought harder to bar the schoolhouse doors than did the teachers unions.

In the fall of 2020, the National Education Association launched a teacher COVID death tracker that was supposed to document how in-person schooling was a death sentence for educators. (Soon after the school year started, the tracker was shut down, presumably for lack of deaths.)

“I can’t teach from a coffin,” the union activists cried. At one union rally against schooling, the featured speaker declared, “Enough is enough . ... You will not sacrifice our lives, disrupt our communities, and endanger our students for what? Test scores? Or a few folks to get their free babysitters back?”

“There’s not going to be a great benefit to being in the classroom,” one protester from the union said in objecting to reopening in the spring of 2021, a full year after the schools closed and after teachers had a chance to be vaccinated.

These days, it is obvious that children suffered from the long-term closures. Learning loss, chronic absenteeism, and youth crime waves are the downstream effects. So now it’s teachers who are suffering.

Pew Research found in a recent survey that “about eight-in-ten teachers (among those who have been teaching for at least a year) say the lasting impact of the pandemic on students’ behavior, academic performance and emotional well-being has been very or somewhat negative.”

The “impact of the pandemic,” of course, really means the impact of school closures and the cancellation of youth sports seasons. Now half of all teachers say the academic performance of most students is fair or poor, and half say the same about most students’ behavior.

Of course, while some teachers

lived their best lives during the school closures, zooming in from the beach or taking up second jobs during the school day, many found remote teaching miserable.

It’s just another example of unions being at odds with the rank and file. It’s enough to make one say, hey, unions, leave those teachers alone.