Getting children back into the classroom is crucial for their health and wellbeing

 

  Getting children back into the classroom is crucial for their health and wellbeing

Getting children back into the classroom is crucial for their health and wellbeing, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says this can be done safely. But America's powerful teachers unions are putting up a fight—and making it political. Unions and progressive groups on Monday issued a list of demands, including a moratorium on voucher programs, that they expect before they'll return to work.The editorial board writes about their ploy.    Speaking of politicizing, former President Obama’s speech at Rep. John Lewis’s funeral pushed new Democratic priorities such as abolishing the filibuster and Puerto Rican statehood—sounding more progressive than he did as recently as 2018. Columnist Jason Riley writes that this is an election strategy.   School-Opening Extortion… Wall Street Journal Editorial Board   For most Americans the coronavirus is a scourge. But teachers unions seem to think it’s also an opportunity—to squeeze more money from taxpayers and put their private and public charter school competition out of business. That’s the only way to read the extraordinary effort by national and local union leaders to keep their members from returning to the classroom. Last week Randi Weingarten, leader of the powerful American Federation of Teachers, declared support for “safety strikes” if local unions deem insufficient the steps their school districts are taking to mitigate Covid-19. And on Monday an alliance of teachers unions and progressive groups sponsored what they called a “national day of resistance” around the country listing their demands before returning to the classroom. They include: “• Support for our communities and families, including canceling rents and mortgages, a moratorium on evictions/foreclosures, providing direct cash assistance to those not able to work or who are unemployed, and other critical social needs • Moratorium on new charter or voucher programs and standardized testing • Massive infusion of federal money to support the reopening funded by taxing billionaires and Wall Street” The phrase for this is political extortion. Rather than work to open schools safely, the unions are issuing ultimatums and threatening strikes until they are granted their ideological wish list. Children, who would have to endure more lost instruction, are their hostages. These public unions are also lobbying their political allies to keep public charter and private schools closed. On Friday the chief health officer for Maryland’s Montgomery County, Travis Gayles, ordered private schools to remain closed until Oct. 1. The order came in spite of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying that reopening schools with in-person instruction is a step toward improving public health—especially for low-income and minority children. The order was a slap to the many schools that are moving heaven and earth to reopen within the CDC guidelines. The good news is that Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan on Monday overruled the commissioner. In an amended emergency order, he limited the ability of local health officials to impose “blanket closure” mandates, emphasizing that Maryland’s plan is built on local flexibility. He also took a stand for equal opportunity: “Private and parochial schools deserve the same opportunity and flexibility to make reopening decisions based on public health guidelines.” This is a victory for common sense, but it’s also too rare. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy has said that if public schools are remote-only, private schools must be too. In Milwaukee, private schools planning to reopen were blindsided by a state order that no schools can do so until the city meets certain benchmarks. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has laid out new guidelines that will prevent private and public schools from reopening until the state declares they can. “It’s truly a tale of two worlds,” says the Center for Education Reform’s Jeanne Allen. “On the one hand the teachers unions are rallying their members in places like Massachusetts and Chicago to boycott school openings until their demands are met. On the other hand, there are hundreds of schools that each day are announcing their plans to reopen and the steps they are taking to get their kids learning again.” Public schools are funded whether they open or not. But private and religious schools, which rely on tuition and donations, don’t have that luxury. The Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom reckons that 107 private and religious schools have been shut down permanently at least partly due to Covid-19. New York’s Catholic archdiocese has announced the closure of 20 schools. The teachers unions have a cynical interest in forcing their competitors to shut down. What a humiliation it would be if charter and private schools reopen and demonstrate that in-person education can be done with the right risk mitigation. Or if parents unsatisfied with the public schools’ response to the coronavirus decide a private school would be better for their child. If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that Americans are getting a closer look at the true, self-interested character of today’s teachers unions. They are allies of the political left. And they wield monopoly power that they are now using to coerce parents and taxpayers to dance to their agenda if they want their children to learn. The proper political response should be to give taxpayer dollars to parents to decide where and how to educate their children. If parents want to use the money for private schools that are open, or for new forms of home instruction, they should have that right. No political force should have veto power over the education of America’s children. WSJ Opinion: The Case for Reopening Schools = The harm from lost instruction outweighs the Covid-19 risks.  Obama’s Progressive Pivot Is Meant to Push Biden Leftward Jason L. Riley It is often said that the Democratic Party has moved significantly to the left since the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, which might explain why Mr. Obama’s remarks at John Lewis’s funeral service last week sounded like an attempt to stay relevant. It wasn’t long ago that the former president was trying to steer Democrats in a more moderate direction. Back in 2018, amid calls for “sanctuary cities” and the abolition of immigration-enforcement agencies, Mr. Obama insisted that “national borders matter” and that “laws need to be followed.” He also urged fellow liberals to cool it with the identity politics. We have to “engage with people not only who look different but who hold different views,” he said. “And you can’t do this if you just out of hand disregard what your opponents have to say from the start. And you can’t do it if you insist that those who aren’t like you—because they’re white or because they’re male—that somehow . . . they lack standing to speak on certain matters.” Alas, we heard a very different Barack Obama last Thursday in Atlanta, where he turned a eulogy for a civil-rights hero into a stump speech and offered his blessing to any number of progressive causes. Among other things, he now wants the Senate to ditch the filibuster—which he supported and employed as a senator—and grant statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, two liberal bastions that could be counted on to elect more Democrats. And then there was Mr. Obama’s change of tone on racial controversies. “Bull Connor may be gone, but today we witness with our own eyes police officers kneeling on the necks of black Americans,” said Mr. Obama. “We may no longer have to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar in order to cast a ballot. But even as we sit here, there are those in power doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting—by closing polling locations, and targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision.” Mr. Obama was elected president twice in a county where blacks are only about 13% of the population, yet he invokes segregation-era figures like Connor, who was Birmingham, Ala.’s commissioner of public safety, to suggest that little has changed for blacks since the 1960s. Mr. Obama’s own accomplishments undermine his rhetoric, as does the fact that in Minneapolis, where George Floyd died in police custody earlier this year, the police chief is black. John McWhorter of Columbia University has documented that white suspects in police custody have died under similar circumstances. Those events don’t receive the media attention that Floyd’s death garnered because they don’t fit the prevailing racial narrative, which Mr. Obama is advancing. But absent any evidence that Floyd was killed because of his race, the responsible course would be to avoid such conjecture. And if Mr. Obama is concerned about the disproportionate number of blacks who die at the hands of law enforcement, he ought to be talking about the disproportionate amount of violent crime committed by blacks, not conjuring the spirit of Jim Crow to score political points. Mr. Obama’s claims that Republicans limit minority voting today “with surgical precision” could also use more scrutiny. The black voter-turnout rate began rising steadily in the 1990s, and in 2012 it exceeded the white rate, even as more states passed voter-ID laws that improve ballot integrity. Moreover, polls show that a majority of blacks support these voting requirements, which suggests that any decline in black voter turnout in 2016 had more to do with the Democratic nominee than with lack of access to the polls. A Census Bureau report on turnout in the 2018 midterm elections showed an increase from 2014 of about 27% among blacks and roughly 50% among Hispanics. If Republicans are trying to suppress the minority vote, their efforts are having the opposite effect. Whether Mr. Obama believes what he’s saying today or what he’s said in the past isn’t important. Politicians tend to be more interested in winning votes than in facts, logic and consistency. This is an election year, and the most popular Democrat in the country has determined that taking these progressive positions, and doing so in the tones we heard last week, will help his party prevail in November. Perhaps he’s right, but the strategy is not without risks. Joe Biden prevailed in the primaries not because he’s an ideologue like Bernie Sanders or a firebrand like Elizabeth Warren. He did so because he’s neither and has resisted—with mixed success—efforts to pull him further left. Mr. Obama’s new endorsement of progressive brass tacks will please the base, but it also makes it harder for Mr. Biden to appeal to the moderate and independent voters he’ll need on Election Day.