A former teaching colleague in Los Angeles told me yesterday he’s going back to work April 12 — “after spring break,” of course. That amounts to more than 400 days since he was last in his classroom.
Part of this reason is the CDC decreased its recommended social distance between students from six feet to three Friday; the decision hopefully gets millions of children, long abused by teachers unions, back in class.
The CDC also confessed they “don’t really have the evidence that six feet is required in order to maintain low spread.” This travesty of misinformation cost money and lives.
The adjustment brings the CDC and U.S. in line with global medical researchers, most of the industrialized world, and even what current director Rochelle Walensky recommended last year.
All this is objectively good. Guess what special interest group still won’t cooperate?
“They are compromising the one enduring public health missive that we’ve gotten from the beginning of this pandemic in order to squeeze more kids into schools,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten ranted last week. “I think that is problematic until we have real evidence in these harder-to-open places about what the effect is.”
Problematic? Squeeze more kids? She’s nothing, if not cliché. Weingarten, a leftist tool who often gabs with the vice president at the White House, is finding new and absurd faux concerns as full-time schooling gets near.
Anti-science teachers union leaders are mostly fringe radicals who care about money and power, not students. They’re now even causing people to lash out at Ivy League professors who say parents should enjoy summer with their low-risk children.
Commonsensical parents recently welcomed an ally when Andrew Yang, the 2020 presidential candidate and 2021 New York City mayoral frontrunner, called out national teachers unions, saying, “I will confess to being a parent that has been frustrated by how slow our schools have been to open, and I do believe that the UFT has been a significant reason why our schools have been slow to open.”
There are no excuses left. Public Schools are flush with cash. As their employees get richer, they received another enormous, no-strings-attached gift from the federal government via the so-called “American Rescue Plan” this month.
The Department of Education transferred an astounding $122 billion from taxpayers to public schools via the so-called relief bill. As if that weren’t enough, President Joe Biden tossed an additional $10 billion in for COVID-19 testing. And surely there’s more to come!
Maybe spending over $10,000 per hour — $175 per minute — for “diversity consultants” to criticize white people is not the best use of school funds.
As I once wrote, our country spends nearly $20,000 per student annually from kindergarten through 12th grade. That is nearly double the global average of around $11,000. The average student in Singapore, however, is nearly four years ahead of their U.S. counterpart. Children in diverse countries from Canada and Estonia to Germany and New Zealand also consistently outperform the U.S., despite spending less per pupil.
Schools have long been extremely safe, and in much of the U.S., where corrupt unions aren’t as powerful, they reopened without incident.
Teachers received their bribes over and over. They’ve enjoyed a seemingly endless vacation. Like other American workers did long ago, please rejoin society; you’ll have another three months paid time off soon enough.
A.J. Kaufman
A.J. Kaufman is an Alpha News columnist. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, Florida Sun-Sentinel, Indianapolis Star, Israel National News, Orange County Register, St. Cloud Times, Star-Tribune, and across AIM Media Midwest and the Internet. Kaufman previously worked as a school teacher and military historian.
