Unions blocking Newsom’s attempts to reopen schools
The standoff over reopening California’s classrooms
— a mashup between teacher unions and Gov. Gavin Newsom — may send exhausted parents over the edge and further penalize their children. Labor’s hard-line stance, now insisting that all teachers first be vaccinated, ignores mounting medical evidence and success in reopening schools in other states.
As families struggle to stay afloat, their children suffering from nearly a year of lost learning, Newsom, for weeks, has cajoled teacher associations and big-city educators to restart classroom instruction.
But labor leaders are playing loose with science, ironically reminiscent of a recent U.S. president. In a barbed letter to the governor, E. Toby Boyd, head of the California Teachers Association, demands that schools remain shuttered until his members are fully vaccinated. Even then, “the full effect of the vaccine on infection and transmission is not yet clear,” Boyd claims.
Never mind that the nation’s two approved vaccines show about a 95% efficacy against the coronavirus and that young children rarely transmit the disease.
“Vaccination of teachers is not a prerequisite for safe reopening of schools,” Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control, said at the White House last week.
San Francisco — seeking to dodge labor opposition — sued its own school board recently to resume classroom education. City Attorney Dennis Herrera complained that “more than 54,000 school children … are being turned into Zoombies by online school. Enough is enough.”
Newsom’s recent olive branch promises $2 billion to school districts with sound plans for restarting classrooms, including steadily testing kids and teachers alike. This hefty carrot comes atop the governor’s 9% hike in per pupil spending, relative to his pre-pandemic budget, $4.4 billion in new funding for summer classes, and $7.1 billion in federal stimulus dollars now flowing to districts, says the state Legislature’s fiscal analyst.
But that’s not enough, says union leader Boyd. Newsom must deliver more to local bargaining tables to attack “poverty, racial inequality … and the chronic underfunding of California public schools,” Boyd said. One wonders whether labor’s intransigence will lift or erode future voter support for adequate education funding?
Newsom’s clumsy dance steps, to be sure, have dashed his romance with union leaders. He drew the ire of service workers last month, after moving up seniors, who are most likely to die from COVID-19, in the vaccine queue, delaying young teachers and front-line laborers, like janitors and airport skycaps. Their union’s political director, Sandra Diaz, said that Newsom is “putting us out to die.”
Labor invested handsomely in Newsom’s 2018 gubernatorial bid. Services workers gave $2.7 million, while two teacher associations dropped a cool $1.7 million for his campaign.
Now Newsom pays the price for showing courage on two fronts. First, he takes the science seriously. Second, to meet labor’s school-funding demands, he must shave back aid to young children, the jobless and disabled Californians.
Half the nation’s school districts have already reopened, at least moving to hybrid models where kids split days between home and regular classrooms. California’s preschools have remained open since last summer with few reports of contagion, as have scores of charter schools.
The CDC’s green light follows research in New York City showing rare COVID-19 infections originating from inside schools, especially relative to contagion rates seen in adjacent neighborhoods. Many children and adults are safer when returning to school. Moving from these findings and putting safety measures in place, Mayor Bill de Blasio joined with labor leaders to reopen pre-kindergarten and elementary schools.
Meanwhile, closed schools exacerbate inequality in education. Poor youngsters are less likely to engage online classes, and their failure rates are skyrocketing in many high schools. Children will require three years or more to catch up from their evaporating year of schooling, according to one estimate. Union leaders seem to ignore these worsening, racially arranged disparities.
Compromise could unlock this destructive stalemate — if negotiated from Sacramento. Bowing to labor’s preference to bargain locally ensures that schools remain closed. Newsom might jump start rural and suburban schools as infection rates continue to fall and vaccines arrive. State funding could then be delayed to districts that remain solely online — arguing that taxpayers should focus on high-quality in-person instruction, where children’s learning curves will surely rebound.
Yes, we must endeavor to minimize health risks for teachers. But we don’t require zero risk for the nurses, child care staff and grocery clerks that remain on the job. Rather than hanging blame on the governor, labor leaders might seek a balanced solution.
This is not a feel-good story.
Of course, it’s easy to see why it has been positioned as one. Certainly, it contains all the elements: vulnerable people, heart-rending need, someone going above and beyond.
But this is not a feelgood story.
Not to mock or cast aspersions on the noble thing that has brought Henry Darby to national attention in the past few days. For those who missed it, he is the principal of North Charleston High School in North Charleston, South Carolina, where the median household income is $45,000 against a national average of $68,000, and it is said that 90% of the student body lives below the poverty line.
As might be expected from those numbers, life is a struggle for many of Darby’s students. “I get a little emotional,” he told NBC’s “Today” show, “because when you’ve got children you’ve heard sleep under a bridge or a former student and her child that’s sleeping in a car or you go to a parent’s house because there’s problems, and you knock on the door, there are no curtains and you see a mattress on the floor. … And these people need, and I wasn’t going to say no.”
Darby was flagged to NBC’s attention by
Walmart. It seems the principal took a job at the local store, stocking shelves on the overnight shift — 10 to 7 — three nights a week, in order to make money to help his students and their families. All this, in addition to serving on the county council. The story has since been picked up by CNN, People and various newspapers and TV news outlets. A GoFundMe page set up on his behalf stands at $158,000 at this writing.
It’s a story that made CNN’s Anderson Cooper say, “Wow.” Which was surely apropos. NBC’s Craig Melvin called it “remarkable.”
And that, too, is fitting. Indeed, if your heartstrings aren’t tugged hard by this, you might want to see a cardiologist. Darby offers a stirring example of selflessness in action. He embodies the GrecoChristian ideal of agape love.
But no, this is not a feel-good story.
Because, what does it say about us as a country that he must go to such extraordinary lengths? What does it say about the priorities of the world’s richest nation that its teachers must routinely dip into their own purses and pockets to provide classroom necessities? What does it tell you about the importance we place on our children when government can always find money to give another tax cut to rich people and corporations, yet working-class people must march and protest to secure a living wage?
Before Ronald Reagan passed legislation that pushed mentally ill people into the streets and slashed federal affordable-housing subsidies, homelessness was a subject relegated to history-book chapters on the Great Depression.
Now, a high school principal finds that some of his students live under bridges and in cars and we celebrate his selflessness. Is anyone surprised or even much appalled at those conditions? No. Because that’s normal now.
What does that say about us?
It says that this is not a feel-good story. It’s a moral-failures story. It’s a wrong-nationalpriorities story. It’s an income-inequality-richgetting-richer story. And it’s a what-in-the-worldis-wrong-with-us story, too.
Henry Darby should be spending his nights sleeping. Yet he feels compelled to spend them instead stocking Walmart shelves so that his students have food to eat and roofs over their heads. This story should make us feel many things.
“Good” is not one of them.