Many parents and educators have questioned the effectiveness of public education for decades. K-12 public schools spend an average of $12,624 per student per year. How much of that goes to inflated administrator salaries and lavish school structures like the Taj Mahal? Regardless, parents began to receive a glimpse into the school system in March 2020. Many people were dissatisfied with what they saw.
Parents have discovered that schooling is more about adults than children. While it’s easy to blame teacher unions for school closures and unreasonable demands, parents should no longer blame organized labor alone. As they fight toe-to-toe with public officials around the country, it’s the teachers who vote on legislation that endorse the union viewpoints. In numerous large cities, teacher unions are shutting down schools on their own, in defiance of government policy. It is the children who are being held captive.
In San Francisco and Oakland, teachers demand that school districts take more precautions amid the surge of Omicron, or they threaten to walk out on their students. The teacher union blames the cities saying they should keep kids and teachers safer. They claim they want more testing, but testing alone isn’t enough. This week, teachers signed a petition calling for a sickout.
Teacher unions claimed in the summer of 2020 that in order to get teachers back in the classroom, school districts would need to spend a lot of money updating classrooms by adding suitable HVAC and ventilation systems to address fears about COVID-19 spreading.
President Donald Trump signed the American Rescue Plan into law in March 2021. It gave $125 billion to K-12 schools to assist them reopen and catch up on what children missed while they were at home during the pandemic.
Furthermore, the CDC provided $10 billion to states to examine teachers, students, and staff in public schools. Congress passed another COVID-relief package in December 2020, allocating $54.3 billion to K-12 schools.
After New Year’s Day, teacher unions in Chicago shut down public schools. Teachers decided on Tuesday, January 4th, to not return to in-person teaching. Lori Lightfoot, the city’s Democratic mayor, said teachers took an illegal, unilateral move that put the city’s educational system into disarray.
