Democrats seem to have discovered schools are important again.
On Friday, White House chief of staff Ron Klain tweeted about the Build Back Better boondoggle, noting, “Just one provision in BBB: universal pre-school. For the first time in decades we are adding two years to universal education. Think about it. We are going from 12 to 14 years of free universal public education.”
Klain may not have noticed, but “free universal public education” is in free fall. The administration and its allies are failing the original 12 years; the idea of adding two more for everyone involved to bungle seems unwise.
Across the country, schools are closing. Sometimes for a day or two. Sometimes for more.
- In Detroit, schools will close for three Fridays next month “amid COVID concerns.”
- Schools in Kenosha went remote during the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.
- This month, Virginia Beach City Public Schools decided to end school two hours early on seven Wednesdays over the next three months due to fatigued teachers.
- More than 20 public school districts across the country will be tacking on “mental health days” to the Thanksgiving break.
What’s really happening is that the bar was set in 2020: School doesn’t matter. Kids don’t matter.
When teachers unions forced schools to close and the Biden administration allowed union leaders like Randi Weingarten to craft Centers for Disease Control and Prevention policy to make sure they stayed that way, some of us argued that treating schools as inconsequential would have consequences.
Kids are resilient, we were told. They’ll be fine. So what if they sat at home for a year staring at a screen with no interaction with their peers? And so what if they were forced to do this when all the science said they should be in actual school? They’d bounce right back when Weingarten finally gave the OK for school to resume. It would be just that easy.
But it turns out the people who have been wrong about everything else were wrong about this too.
Kids are truly damaged from a year of sitting at home. The education website Chalkbeat reported in late September, “Schools across the country say they’re seeing an uptick in disruptive behaviors. Some are obvious and visible, like students trashing bathrooms, fighting over social-media posts or running out of classrooms. Others are quieter calls for help, like students putting their head down and refusing to talk.”
Vandalism is off the charts. My sons’ public elementary school in Brooklyn emailed that some kids are “engaging in more mischief than usual,” like locking all the bathroom stalls and crushing chalk.
Schools nationwide are reporting kids participating in a “TikTok challenge” that involves them destroying school bathrooms, ripping down soap containers and partitions.
It gets worse. Last week, police in Fresno, Calif., said a 12-year-old boy is facing felony charges after making threatening phone calls to two schools. Pennsylvania’s Woodland Hills High School went back to virtual learning twice due to “credible threats” and fighting among students.
There’s been a sharp rise in aggressive behavior. Fighting is rampant. Denver Public Schools reports a 21 percent increase in fights since pre-pandemic times. The National Association of School Resource Officers charts more than three times as many gun-related incidents in schools than in the same three-month period in 2019.
Where is the resilience we were promised?
We’ve treated kids like mini-robots who can be turned off for social settings and then on again, and they have sustained real damage from 20 months of being managed as an afterthought.
Sure, teachers are exhausted, but the blame for that should lie with the people who didn’t think schools were essential and kept them closed despite all evidence showing they should be open. We should stop listening to these people.
The stress kids are under is not because of the pandemic, it’s because of our response to the pandemic. Our leaders, doing the teachers unions’ bidding, disregarded all science showing kids were low-risk.
We continue to do that with the insane masking policies in places like New York City, where adults are constantly in close quarters with large numbers of people, but a kindergartner is forced to mask outdoors.
Randi Weingarten and her American Federation of Teachers, as well as the other unions that pushed for schools to stay remote and for continued masking, own this national tragedy. They should apologize to every child they harmed, every teacher who is feeling the consequences of their terrible actions and exit the stage. We’ll be OK without them. We’re resilient.
Twitter: @Karol