March-April2021

New NHEG Heights Magazine Educational | March - April Group 2021
www.NewHeightsEducation.org
“We need a Marshall Plan for our schools,” went the headline on a Washington Post op-ed co-bylined two weeks ago by the superintendents of
the (closed) Los Angeles, (closed) Chicago, and (mostly closed) New York school districts. “And we need it now.” And no, the $82 billion in the
recently enacted COVID relief omnibus is not nearly enough.
Chances are, they’ll get at least one more big bailout from a newly union-friendly White House. Unless the public gears up the same kind of
backlash that de Blasio and New York teachers union officials faced from wrathful parents when they shuttered all public schools in mid-November
based on an arbitrarily low community testing rate for the whole city. Do they really want us to reward their bad management? To
increase funding while they voluntarily decrease service?
Public schools have, or should have, literally just one job: teaching students. We’ve known since at least early July, based on observation and
data worldwide, that group settings of young kids are disproportionately safe (at least until/unless the newer strains behave differently). Yet
in an overabundance of both caution and political muscle, unions and their allies have made America a global outlier in keeping schools shut,
driving parents away from the systems, and some cities, in droves.
We have seen previously what happens to school systems and cities alike when swaths of parents flee. It ain’t pretty. And in the ultimate of
ironies, the same guilds that have such a concentrated amount of power are soon going to find themselves having to explain to the rank and
file just why there aren’t as many jobs anymore.
As Teachers Unions and Bureaucrats Battle, Families
Choose Alternative Schools
By J.D. Tuccille
Making it easier for families to fund
their preferred education options will
be a lot more effective than throwing
a big bribe to teachers unions.
We gave them a great business model. And they treated us like captives.
Source: Reason Foundation
https://reason.com/
12.29.2020
As part of his big-bucks pandemic relief package, President Joe Biden proposes $130 billion dollars to reopen public K-12 schools. It’s an
impressive figure when you consider that annual federal funds to government schools in recent years has been around $60 billion, with the
vast majority of school money coming from state and local sources. But much opposition to opening schools for in-person instruction comes
from teachers unions fighting to draw pay while kids languish with substandard remote offerings. That makes the money look like a bribe to
the administration-linked labor bloc to get it to live up to the example of competing education options.
This School Choice Week, let’s compare the government schools with those alternatives.
“The COVID-19 pandemic created unprecedented challenges for K-12 schools and institutions of higher education, and the students and parents
they serve,” Biden argued in his American Rescue Plan, released before his inauguration. “The president-elect’s plan will provide $130
billion to support schools in safely reopening,” it added, leading into a list of potential purchases with the truly vast sum of money.
But the offer to make schools safer comes months after data from Europe and the United States indicates that schools aren’t hot beds of infection.
“Two new international studies show no consistent relationship between in-person K-12 schooling and the spread of the coronavirus,”
Anya Kamenetz noted for NPR last October.
“The best available data suggests that infection rates in schools simply mirror the prevalence of covid-19 in the surrounding community,”
Emily Oster, a Brown University economics professor, wrote in November.
“The default position should be to try as best as possible within reason to keep the children in school or to get them back to school,” Anthony
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, commented on November 29. While Fauci has flip-flopped on this
issue, he repeatedly returns to the idea that schools should be open to teach children.
Nevertheless, many government schools across the country remain closed or only intermittently open. That’s largely a result of opposition by
teachers unions, who raise bogus safety fears. Even now, unions in Minneapolis and St. Paul resist reopening and the union in Chicago plans
to strike over the issue.
92 92 93
93