![]() ![]() had issued its own reopening plan in late April calling for adequate personal protective equipment, new cleaning and sanitization regimens in school buildings, a temporary suspension of formal teacher performance evaluations, a limit on student testing, a cancellation of student-loan debt and a $750 billion federal aid package to help schools prepare to reopen safely and facilitate ‘‘a real recovery for all our communities.’’ As my colleague Jonathan Mahler writes in a new story in the Times Magazine: Instead, Covid became an opportunity for her union, the American Federation of Teachers, to push for broader policy changes that it had long favored. Safety measures were not enough to reopen them, she argued. In 2020, the pandemic’s first full year, Weingarten came down strongly on the side of keeping schools closed. Teachers and parents feared that reopening schools before vaccines were available would spark Covid outbreaks, illness and death. On the other side of the ledger, however, was the worst pandemic in a century. Without public schools, their defenders argued, society would come apart. It was where low-income children received subsidized meals. ![]() School was where children learned academic and social skills. ![]() During the early months of the Covid pandemic, Randi Weingarten and the teachers’ union she leads faced a vexing question: When should schools reopen?įor years, advocates of public education like Weingarten had argued that schools played an irreplaceable role. ![]()
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