COVID School Closures: A Defense of Teachers Unions
Critics are assailing teachers unions for the 2020-2021 school closures. I’m a union representative who supported those closures. While we can’t be sure our response to this confounding pandemic was 100% correct, one thing is clear – our actions were not unreasonable.
Consider the circumstances in the summer of 2020: COVID was surging — the U.S. led the world in cases — and the vaccine was a mere hope, not a reality.
When teachers unions’ balked at opening schools without proper safety precautions, President Trump demanded that we “Open the schools!” His administration should have used the six months between when COVID hit and the autumn when the school year normally starts to prepare safe protocols. Instead, he complained that implementing the Centers for Disease Control guidelines for safe schools would be “expensive,” while scapegoating teachers unions and threatening to cut off funding for schools that did not fully open.
The best example of the safety measures teachers were demanding were those put in place by the Los Angeles Unified School District for the 2021-2022 school year. Working with United Teachers Los Angeles, LAUSD kept schools open all year via a well-managed set of COVID precautions. These included: weekly testing of all students, teachers, and support staff, with test results returned in 24 to 48 hours; an app certifying individuals had a current, negative test result; proper ventilation and filters; masks; and contact tracing.
Classroom teachers expected these precautions to be a time-consuming hassle, and that we’d have to battle students over keeping their masks on. Neither problem materialized.
Critics like to say that teachers and their unions “sold out” our kids in the pandemic, leaving students out to dry. They insist that union leaders must be held accountable for the learning losses in children that have been documented during the pandemic. But the facts contradict the narrative that unions shut the schoolhouse door on protesting parents.
A year after COVID hit, two nationally representative polls found that between two-thirds and three-fourths of parents believed their children were receiving the proper type of instruction. Chalkbeat, an education-oriented news organization which analyzed the data, explained, “[P]arents’ preferences are varied, with the largest group wanting their child to learn from home fulltime.”
The organization noted that most parents wanted to continue with the type of instruction their children were then receiving — “an indication that schools nationwide have been responsive to families as they craft their instructional plans.”
In March of 2021, I conducted a written survey of my own students and learned that only 15% of their parents wanted them to return to school, which was consistent with these studies’ findings. Had schools opened in the face of this parental disapproval, many students would not have attended, and we’d have faced the disruptive chaos of classes split between in-school and athome learners.
Our critics also often assert that school closures were unnecessary because children are the “least likely” to suffer a severe reaction to COVID. They miss the point. A substantial percentage of students in major city public school districts live in low-income households. These students don’t have their own bedrooms in suburban houses. They often live with extended families in small apartments.
When these students get COVID, their entire families often pass it between them — I’ve seen this happen many times. Since 2020, over a dozen of my students’ parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents have died of COVID.
If schools are open, state law obliges educators to enforce attendance requirements. Teachers and schools would then be in the position of demanding that parents send students to school even though this endangered their families. It is disingenuous to lecture teachers over the learning loss attributed to school closures. Distance learning was not ideal, but teachers worked hard to retool lessons and adjust. We’re the ones most aware of and involved in our students’ struggles.
Yes, it is possible that someday history’s verdict will be that teachers unions did err and overreact. We don’t know and our critics don’t know either.
But at the time, in the face of enormous political pressure and great fear and uncertainty, teachers unions defended the safety of our students and their families. We owe an apology to no one.