Originally Posted by
luvdahops
You may some fair points, but also some shaky ones.
I am undoubtedly guilty of painting teachers unions with an overly broad brush. Some behaved much more honorably than others over the 2020-21 school year. And in those communities where children suffered the most, it is absolutely wrong to put this solely on teachers unions, instead of citing a collective failure among teachers, administrators, School Boards and politicians.
Let me try to clarify my views a bit better. My original comment was in response to the notion that only one side was guilty of politicizing things during the pandemic, with the other largely taking the high ground of "following the science" (or, more often in reality, following public health policy, especially federal; the distinction is not trivial).
Allow me to provide some background for full disclosure. I am not a healthcare professional, but it is the industry I focus on as a finance professional. I am on the Board of a fairly large health insurance company, so have been privy to developing industry views on the pandemic since inception. I also work with a number of behavioral health organizations, and closely followed COVID's impact on these businesses, and their patients by extension. Finally, my wife is actively involved in our local school district, and for the past year, has been part of a task force dedicated to researching and benchmarking back to school initiatives across Metro Chicago, as well as comparable districts in other regions of the country. So I am perhaps better informed on these issues than you may believe.
The basic, population-level risk stratification of COVID - by age group and health profile (pre-existing conditions, co-morbidities, etc.) - was pretty well established by June 2020. Pretty clear data around risk of spread by age group and type of activity was not far behind. Enough was known that the default assumption for last fall up through high school should have been full-time, in-person, with appropriate mitigation measures (e.g. masks) generally, and some accommodations for higher risk students and faculty members. And that was the case in some parts of the country, to generally good effect. But for a variety of reasons, including IMHO some political ones, it was not the default assumption in a number of large metro areas and districts, particularly in Blue States, and instead often derided as reckless and foolish. Despite the science - perhaps not the public health policy, but the actual science - suggesting otherwise.
The necessity of in-person schooling only became more obvious during the course of the year. By mid-fall, the negative impacts of remote and hybrid schooling on youth behavioral health, not to mention their educational experience, were abundantly clear. But districts in many of those Blue states were slow to respond, despite growing evidence and community pressure. And often it was the teachers unions who were the last ones to come around - as others have noted, waiting on vaccines, then moving the goalposts and essentially running out the clock on the 2020-21 school year.
I recognize that the vast majority of teachers now support going back to full-time, in-person in the fall. But that was not the case a year or even 6 months ago. Not making full-time, in-person the default assumption in the beginning opened a Pandora's box for all manner of stakeholders that made it that much more challenging to adjust during the year. And to me that was a tragic mistake. And an avoidable one. Some will argue that this is only obvious in hindsight, but I disagree. The evidence was already there, and kudos to those educational leaders who had sufficient courage and balance in their perspective to act on it.