How To Tell Dems Are Feeling The Pressure?
Here's how. Just read the heading for this story at Fox:
Randi Weingarten, teachers union president, calls for full reopening of schools next academic year
With government teachers in the three biggest school districts in the country--NY, LA, and CG--still resisting, um, actual teaching, there's no possible way that Randi Weingarten made this statement except under extreme political duress. And there's only one possible source for political duress when you're talking about government teachers unions.
Revelations of government teachers pressuring the Zhou regime and the CDC to allow them to not teach while getting paid--while private school teachers teach without risk--obviously made a strongly negative impression on the public. Recent disastrous interviews and appearances by Randi Weingarten didn't help.
As of early May, Florida and Iowa are the only states in the country that have all of their schoolchildren back in classrooms, while every other state is still offering varying degrees of in-person and online instruction, the data shows.
It remains to see whether the powerful locals will buckle. There is strong support from government teachers for not teaching.
There's a good overview of the CA situation this morning:
Despite the reopening happy talk, more than half of all California’s K-12 students remain in distance learning .
Read the whole thing. Excerpts:
While schools in California have reopened, a study by EdSource reveals that 55 percent of all public school students in the Golden State have not returned to their physical classroom. And just 13 percent of all students in state have resumed school in a traditional way. All this despite the fact that every teacher has now had the ability to be vaccinated for COVID-19, and that children are anything but “super-spreaders.”
While some parents still harbor an irrational fear of COVID, much of the resistance to returning to government schools is a distrust/dislike of any form of distance learning. The situation is especially noxious in Los Angeles where a great number of children are subjected to the “Zoom in a Room” regimen. ...
...
It’s worth noting that while 13 percent of public school kids are back full time in California, 61 percent of private school students have resumed in-person learning. The difference is that that private school parents have a voice in their kids’ education. ... Parents’ wishes, you see, come a distant third after the government education bureaucracy and the teachers’ unions stake their ground.
At the same time, the teachers’ unions fight tooth-and-nail to minimize real education, a New York Post exposé reveals that the American Federation of Teachers lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on—and even proposed language for—the agency’s school-reopening guidance ...
AFT senior director for health issues Kelly Trautner went so far as to describe the union as the CDC’s “thought partner” in a February email. AFT president Randi “Follow the Science” Weingarten shrugged the story off, saying in a tweet, “Once again the @NYPost has a hit piece out on AFT—this time that is trying to make every day advocacy look nefarious.” ...
Randi Weingarten isn't shrugging it off now, presumably since Dem polling has shown what a disaster this is. Hopefully parents won't forget this any time soon.
The real question is, What use will the GOP make of this?