OPINION:
Teacher union bosses, woke Democrat politicians, and other assorted radicals overwhelmingly support a racist system. This was true about the government-run education system before COVID-19, and it has gotten far worse over the past two years.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot called on teachers to return to the classroom more than a year ago. She warned that students in her city —particularly minority children — stood to lose the most by not being in school. The union bosses said no.
A Chicago Teachers Union executive board member, Sarah Chambers, sent out a tweet to rally special education teachers not to return to work in the classroom because it was not safe. In the category of “you can’t make this stuff up,” she posted a picture on Instagram a few hours earlier of her by a pool in Puerto Rico talking about going to Old San Juan.
This level of hypocrisy is on par with Stacey Abrams (who has yet to make a formal concession in the 2018 Governor’s race in Georgia) sitting maskless last week with young children who were forced to wear masks in the classroom. It would be bad enough if it just exposed their hypocrisy, but the situation is far worse than that — particularly for low-income and minority children.
As Mayor Lightfoot warned, the data shows that closing schools have been very bad for, as she said, black and brown children who look like her. A new study from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) showed that school districts in Wisconsin with a higher percentage of African American students were more likely to remain closed in fall 2020. The report notes that the higher the percentage of African American students in a district, the more likely that district was to remain shut down for in-person learning.
In turn, school districts with a higher percentage of economically disadvantaged students saw larger declines in performance. A district with 100% low-income students would be expected to have proficiency declines of more than 6% in math and 7% in English/Language Arts relative to a school with no low-income students independent of closure status.
Overall, the WILL report showed that Wisconsin schools closed for in-person learning to start the 2020-21 school year saw significant performance declines in math and English. Math proficiency was approximately 4.8% lower in districts closed for in-person learning in the fall of 2020. English/Language Arts proficiency was 1.6% lower in districts that were closed for learning in the classroom for the fall of 2020.
More than 257,000 students spent at least part of the school year without being in the classroom. That represents about 30% of all the students in the state. Worst of all, these closures occurred in districts with large numbers of African American and low-income students. These are the children who can least afford another set back.
Before the pandemic, nearly 60% of Wisconsin students could not read or write at grade level. They were already behind. Being away from school during the pandemic made it much worse.
In Wisconsin and across the country, union bosses flexed their political muscles. They even got the Biden Administration and the National School Board Association to buy into the false narrative that frustrated parents speaking up at local school board meetings were “domestic terrorists.”
The real damage, however, did not come from concerned citizens. It came from teachers’ union bosses, their weak, woke Democrat allies, and radicals like Tony Fauci, who kept moving the goalposts even when the science overwhelmingly showed that children were safe in school.
Intentional or not, this power-hungry mob seriously damaged our young people.
The answer to this crisis is to put parents back in charge. Give them more input on the curriculum. Let them give a chance to be heard. Put them on the school board.
At the same time, give them the tools to make the right choice for their children. We started a parental school choice program in Milwaukee more than 30 years ago. When I was Governor, we expanded the use of vouchers across the state, and we included middle class and low-income families in the program.
Students at St. Marcus Lutheran School, the Hope Schools, and others in the heart of the city are doing exceptionally well. These educators will not accept the soft bigotry of low expectations. They demand better from and for the students and families they serve.
One of the few bright spots of the past two years is that parents now can see what is being taught (or not taught) by their kid’s teachers. They want to have a greater say in the education of their children. Unlike the union bosses, woke politicians, and other radicals, they are right — because I trust parents.
• Scott Walker is the president of Young America’s Foundation and served as the 45th governor of Wisconsin from 2011 to 2019.
For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.
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