A Reckoning for Teachers Unions

In early March 2020, I woke each morning to a flood of calls from reporters asking about school closures even as my wife and I anxiously speculated about whether our kindergartener’s school would be open that day. Every parent remembers that feeling of confusion and helplessness.

It was a lost-at-sea moment. No one knew how dangerous COVID-19 was, how it spread, or what kind of mitigation was needed. School leaders were caught in a Catch-22. As I noted on March 9, 2020, community discussions were already rife with “complaints about the idiocy of school leaders. When schools close, critics fume that it’s an irresponsible overreaction. When schools don’t close, it’s a failure to take the crisis seriously.” 

Since we didn’t know much about COVID-19, I argued that it made sense to extend grace to education leaders confronting novel challenges. And Americans proved to be remarkably accepting when schools closed their doors. At the same time, I cautioned that grace must not be mistaken for “a call to take it easy on school leaders. They’ve chosen this work and should be responsible for their decisions.” 

Well, that was early March. Before long, it became clear that grace had been interpreted as indulgence. 

By late March, every state had closed its schools. Three weeks after schools started closing, the Center on Reinventing Public Education reported that most districts still weren’t “providing any instruction.” They’d essentially gone dark. Indeed, our local school district, Virginia’s wealthy Arlington Public Schools, ponderously explained it wouldn’t teach any new material that spring “as part of our commitment to ensuring equity of access to new learning for all students.” 

Arlington was far from alone. Washington State’s 25,000-student Northshore School District initially planned a robust distance-learning model, acquiring 4,000 devices to help it serve low-income students. But district leaders then hit pause because they “risked running afoul of state and federal mandates for providing equitable services.” The Oregon Department of Education ordered all schools (including virtual schools!) to pause learning in March 2020. Philadelphia demonstrated its commitment to equity by instructing teachers not to teach, take attendance, or evaluate student work, so as to ensure some students didn’t learn more than others.

In Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest school system, the union and district negotiated a deal stipulating that teachers would receive full pay but only have to work half-time. They wouldn’t have to teach live video-conference classes and couldn’t even be required to work during school hours! The district could have simply required teachers to work a standard day, teaching their regular course schedule on Zoom, mentoring students virtually, and communicating with families. But LA, like most districts, opted not to pursue this commonsense approach. 

Meanwhile, as district officials worried that their shuttered schools might lose students, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Oregon barred families from enrolling in virtual charter schools. Yup. They did this as parents sought alternatives to district schools that weren’t doing their job. After all, even as the school year wound down in June, three months after schools had closed, just one in three districts expected all teachers to deliver instruction. Oh, and families scrambling to organize learning pods were impugned for perpetuating “white supremacy” by the likes of NPR and the New York Times because they sought to give their children the education that schools weren’t delivering.

At schools that did provide online instruction, the offerings were grim. “Asynchronous” learning days, during which students watched videos or did online assignments on their own, gave every impression that a “full day” of class typically required two hours or less—raising a slew of uncomfortable questions about what students had been doing all day at school.

By summer 2020, it was increasingly clear that kids weren’t at risk and weren’t major sources of spread. And yet, when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos called to reopen schools, she was lambasted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for “messing with the health of our children.” When Missouri Governor Mike Parson called in July for his state’s schools to open, the Missouri Democratic Party slammed his call as “despicable and morally reprehensible.” Such vitriol was routine when teachers unions or the mainstream media discussed governors, like Ron DeSantis or Brian Kemp, who insisted that schools open that fall. Then, of course, there were the school boards that ridiculed parents who wanted schools reopened, dismissing them as whiners who just wanted “their babysitters back.”

In fall 2020, teachers were taking to outlets like Education Week and CNN to decry the “coronavirus-deniers” who wanted schools to reopen, arguing “I love my students” but “don’t want to die.” There was the oft-heard claim that the push to reopen schools was, well, racist (as with the teacher who asked “Are We Going to Let ‘Nice White Parents’ Kill Black and Brown Families?”). The Chicago Teachers Union flatly explained that “the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.”

For their part, education leaders insisted that they would reopen if only they had more money. This tactic played neatly into school leaders’ propensity for insisting that schools are perpetually starved for funds. (New York City’s chancellor lamented, “We are cutting the bone. There is no fat to cut, no meat to cut.” At the time, his was one of the nation’s highest-spending districts, with a district bureaucracy that cost $5 billion a year, to which he’d added 340 central-office positions the prior year.) In the meantime, district leaders were left to assert that virtual learning was a decent-enough alternative, proclaiming: “For those who say we need to get back to school, we say SCHOOL IS IN SESSION. Teachers are teaching their hearts out during live virtual instruction every day.” Parents felt gaslit.

Communities were dotted with signs urging local officials to “Reopen Our Schools.” By Christmas 2020, even the New York Times and Washington Post editorial boards were calling for schools to reopen, while Mike Bloomberg, former New York City mayor and Democratic presidential hopeful, insisted, “There’s just no reason not to have the schools open.” Yet teachers unions energetically resisted reopening, with members out protesting using fake body bags, caskets, and tombstones as props. Second-graders were asking parents why people were trying to kill their teachers. The Chicago Teachers Union (representing the nation’s best-paid teachers) had started the 2020–21 school year by releasing a laundry list of conditions for reopening, including the insistence that Chicago not resume in-person schooling until the federal government enacted Medicare-for-All. 

By early 2021, the medical rationale for school closures had dissipated. It was clear that schools were not a significant source of community spread; that students were generally not at risk; and that school closures were having devastating effects on youth learning, well-being, and mental health. By that point, the international data had illuminated the costs of closure and limited risks of reopening, while studies out of Tulane, Michigan State, and the CDC made clear that responsible reopening was safe. Even Anthony Fauci, the patron saint of pandemic hypercaution, noted, “The spread among children and from children is not really very big at all.”

Yet union and district leaders kept moving the goalposts on reopening. When President Biden took office, the unions quietly leaned on the new administration to keep schools closed. Indeed, in early 2021, nearly a year after schools first closed their doors, most children were still not back in classrooms. 

In early 2021, the teachers union president in Fairfax County, Virginia complained about plans to open the coming fall and insisted that schools shouldn’t reopen until every student was vaccinated—meaning, since youth vaccination was still a ways off, schools would remain closed for at least another year. Even before the massive spring 2021 vaccination push had started, with educators given priority status, union and district officials in cities like Chicago, Boston, and San Antonio were saying that a full reopening for the following fall (seven or eight months hence) was unduly ambitious. 

At the schools that did reopen, the experience was far from optimal. Fearful of angering faculty and staff, superintendents tolerated extraordinary rates of employee absenteeism and frequently re-shuttered schools on a moment’s notice. One unlovely innovation was the aptly nicknamed “Zoom in a room.” Students would sit in silent, masked, socially-distanced rows while watching their teacher deliver an online lecture from home. It’s as if schools were seeking to alienate students and dehumanize learning. It didn’t help that teachers and staff had little training on education technology or experience using it. Meanwhile, school leaders defaulted to sending whole classrooms of students home for ten days if a single student tested positive for COVID, despite the limited rates of in-school spread and the frequency of false positives. Parents and students learned they couldn’t count on “open” schools to actually be open. 

As schools emerged from the pandemic, researchers reported that students had lost between one-third and one-half of a year in reading, and between a half-year and a full year in math—with the largest losses associated with more remote learning. 

The experience scarred communities across the land. It broke the longstanding compact between schools and families. Even beyond the grim consequences of closure, the pandemic revealed ugly truths about self-serving adult interests and bureaucratic inertia. Over the decades, parents have learned to regard schools as reliable custodians of their kids. If the bus shows up on time each morning, there aren’t too many snow days, the school seems safe, and kids make friends, most parents have tended to defer to the teachers on curriculum and instruction. Coupled with a lack of visibility into classrooms, that meant that parents defaulted to trusting schools. 

The pandemic upended that relationship. It taught millions of parents that distrust should be the norm. That’s why masking and vaccine mandates became so contentious. It’s why examples of DEI excess and videos of irate parents upbraiding school boards went viral. For wary parents wondering if their trust had been misplaced, each new example served as confirmation. 

The pandemic offered parents new visibility into schools. During that time, the thing I heard most frequently from parents was: “I had no idea.” No idea how little their child actually learned in a school day. No idea how politicized the history instruction had become. No idea how little their child knew about parts of speech. Parents tend to be walled off from classrooms. When given this unexpected window into their schools, many parents found the view disorienting. 

By early 2025, Gallup was reporting that public confidence in schools had reached a historic low. Just 24 percent of adults said they were satisfied with public education, the lowest figure since the question was first asked in 2001. In fact, the public was more dissatisfied with public education than they were with taxes or the affordability of healthcare. 

What should we learn from all of this? There are at least three important takeaways that can help us to understand both the current moment and the road ahead.

Equity-minded regulations proved mindlessly destructive. Rather than catalyzing efforts to ensure that all kids were well-served, the latticework of rules led to hesitancy, risk aversion, and the conclusion that refusing to educate kids was the most equitable response to the pandemic. In retrospect, the ferocious backlash against educational “equity” that followed the pandemic is not so surprising. It highlights a larger point about education bureaucracy. Most of the time, education policymaking favors bureaucratic expansion. When isolated instances of malfeasance emerge, it’s easy for advocates to make the case for new rules that will “fix” them. It’s tough, in the face of malfeasance or failure, to explain why this mandate or that restriction is problematic. Concerns about rigidity or bureaucratic bloat can sound callous or abstract. Well, the pandemic upended that dynamic. Suddenly, scrappy learning pods and quick-to-reopen private schools looked pretty good, while the paralysis caused by blunderbuss rules became all too clear. The experience served as a compelling advertisement for the merits of educational deregulation. 

In education, as in healthcare, science was weaponized. In spring 2020, 1,200 health professionals issued an open letter endorsing “anti-racist” protests, after months spent hectoring Americans to stay indoors, even if it meant missing funerals of loved ones. That hypocrisy proved corrosive. Over time, in education as in healthcare, many Americans concluded that “science” was being wielded for political ends. After all, respect for science seemed highly contingent. Evidence of learning loss? Met with vague expressions of concern. Evidence that masking young children impeded their development? Brushed aside. Evidence that schools could be safely reopened? Denounced as misinformation. Meanwhile, dubious teachers-union claims of mortal peril were treated as gospel. They were offered to justify school closures, extravagant masking theater, and social-distancing regimes that got in the way of learning and human interaction. It’s no great surprise that trust in schools and education experts has plunged or that parents are demanding more say over their children’s education.

Finally, the pandemic made it brutally clear whose needs are prioritized by the system—and it’s not the kids. It’s organized adult interests. The pandemic posed some existential questions: Are schools essential or not? Was it imperative that, by hook or by crook, schools be there for their students and families? Were educators like the ambulance drivers, sanitation workers, and firefighters who showed up for work each day to provide a vital service? The answer in each case was: No. It was clear that neither union leaders nor district officials understood their work in that way. Instead, education officials seemed content to regard their districts as nonessential purveyors of online content. Parents and policymakers saw that. They have responded accordingly. That helps explain the explosion of chronic absenteeism we’ve witnessed since the pandemic and—more hopefully—why every year since 2021 has turned into “The Year of School Choice.”

There’s no way to sugarcoat this. During the pandemic, America’s schools failed our students and families. Pandemic-era schooling was a study in putting self-serving adult interests first and the needs of students second. The political forces upending education today are a direct consequence of that ugly, instructive experience.

Frederick M. Hess is a senior fellow, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and an affiliate of AEI’s James Q. Wilson Program in K–12 Education Studies, where he works on K–12 and higher education issues. He’s the author of Education Week’s iconic blog “Rick Hess Straight Up” and Education Next’s popular “Old School with Rick Hess.” Dr. Hess is also an executive editor of Education Next and a contributing editor to National Review. He is the founder and chairman of AEI’s Conservative Education Reform Network. An educator, political scientist, and author, Dr. Hess has published in several scholarly outlets, such as American Politics Quarterly, Harvard Education Review, Social Science Quarterly, Teachers College Record, and Urban Affairs Review. His work has also appeared in popular outlets including the Atlantic, National Affairs, the Dispatch, Fox News, the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

Reprinted with Permission from AEI.org – By Frederick M. Hess

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