Studies Counter Accusations Against Weingarten, Teachers Unions over COVID Policies

In the wake of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten’s highly publicized departure from the Democratic National Committee, conservatives are attacking her, the AFT, and teachers unions as a whole over the COVID policies we advocated.

For example, conservative writer Zachary Faria recently called Weingarten “one of the architects of the school closures across the country” who made “unreasonable demands in exchange for schools reopening.” Education advocate Erika Sanzi of Parents Defending Education calls Weingarten a "union boss" who "lobbied for extended school closures." American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Christine Rosen cites the “malevolence of the teachers’ unions” and warns of a “reckoning”, where “someone must answer” for what “was done to others” during COVID.

It is an article of faith for conservatives that the school closures were wrong and that teachers unions were to blame. However, common sense dictates that the COVID lockdowns as a whole and school closures in particular would reduce the spread of COVID, and a considerable body of research confirms this.

For example, the study “Estimating the impact of school closures on the COVID-19 dynamics in 74 countries” found that school closures “reduced peak hospital occupancy pressure in nearly all countries, with 72 out of 74 countries (97%) showing a positive median estimated effect.”

The study, published in PLOS Medicine, a peer-reviewed medical journal from the Public Library of Science, also found that while results of school closures varied from country to country, “school closures achieved moderate to significant [COVID] reductions in most settings over the period 2020 to 2022.”

Similarly, the study ”School closures during COVID-19: an overview of systematic reviews,” published in the British Medical Association’s BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, found both “school closures and in-school mitigations were associated with reduced COVID-19 transmission, morbidity and mortality in the community.”

Critics of school closures have repeatedly asserted that they were unnecessary because children were unlikely to die from COVID. Rosen quotes American journalist David Zweig, who says "children likely were less contagious than adults” and that school closure advocates incorrectly asserted that “children were at great risk.”

Now, as then, critics miss the point. In March 2020, I had at first been a little slow to recognize the magnitude of the threat COVID posed, and expressed my annoyance that, only six weeks away from the AP US Government exam, the Los Angeles Unified School District was considering closing all schools. In front of the class, one of my best students set me straight. He said:

“We’re not like you. We don’t have a few people living in a house–we have a lot of people living in a small apartment, next to other small apartments with a lot of people living in them. We live with our grandparents and sometimes great-grandparents. The disease would spread like wildfire in our communities. What about us?”

I didn’t enjoy being scolded by a 17-year-old. However, since a substantial percentage of students in major city public school districts live in low-income households, particularly in LAUSD, he was absolutely correct.

At that time, teachers unions argued that if public school students got COVID, they would often pass it to their families, even if the students themselves were asymptomatic. One study cited by United Teachers Los Angeles showed that even if children are 1/3 as susceptible to infection as adults, opening schools increases the risk similarly because children have three times as many contacts as adults. The researchers estimated that closing schools would reduce the pandemic surge by 40-60%.

Zweig, by contrast, argues that school closure advocates already knew that “children likely were less contagious than adults” and were "wrongly impli[ing] that schools, and children in particular, were the primary source of transmission.”

However, a cohort study of over 165,000 American households containing both adults and children confirms the teachers unions’ assessment, finding that among all “household transmissions…70.4% started with a pediatric index case.” The authors of the study, published in the American Medical Association’s JAMA Network, conclude:

“We discerned an important role for children in the spread of viral infection within households during the COVID-19 pandemic, heightened when schools were in session, supporting a role for school attendance in COVID-19 spread.”

The study “Effectiveness of social distancing measures and lockdowns for reducing transmission of COVID-19” examined SDMs as a whole, of which school closures were arguably the most important part. It concluded, “The studies included in this review suggested that the combination of measures was successful in slowing or even stopping the spread of COVID-19.”

The authors cite one study conducted in New York, which examined the events of May of 2020 and “estimated that if the interventions were implemented a week earlier, the total number of COVID-19 cases would have reduced by nearly 162,000.”

Critics of lockdowns have often cited their negative economic impact. The authors of the study “Lockdown Without Loss? A Natural Experiment of Net Payoffs from COVID-19 Lockdowns” examined the medical benefits of lockdowns in relation to their economic cost. They note, “considering new infections on April 30, 2020, states that implemented lockdowns had 56% fewer infections compared with states that did not implement lockdowns,” and that in areas where lockdowns were delayed, people “incurred a steep cost for delays in lockdowns in terms of higher disease incidence.”

The authors estimate that the “average cost of reducing the number of cases by one new infection was about $28,000 in lower gross domestic product.” This is a substantial economic loss, though not much compared to a human life. However, the study's authors make the important point that “COVID-19 had the potential for severe economic disruption on top of high mortality if left uncontrolled.” The economic cost of the lockdowns was considerable, as was students' learning loss, but, with or without the lockdowns, COVID was going to have far-reaching negative consequences.

There is another major problem with conservatives’ attacks on teachers unions over COVID school closures–their depiction of the battle as being between advocates of opening the schools and the teachers unions seeking to close them. This is a false dichotomy–after the initial closures in March of 2020, the fight between the teachers unions and government leaders generally was not over whether to close schools, but instead over getting the government to commit the resources needed to make it safe to have schools open.

Soon after the pandemic hit in 2020, Weingarten and the AFT began advancing proposals for safely reopening schools. However, that July, when teachers unions balked at opening schools without proper safety precautions, somehow President Trump was surprised.

Instead of using the six months between when COVID hit and when the school year normally starts to prepare safe protocols, Trump responded to teachers unions’ and school districts’ safety demands by repeatedly threatening to cut off funding for schools that do not fully open. He complained that implementing the Centers for Disease Control guidelines for safe schools would be “expensive”, and blamed opposition to reopening on “Democrats and the radical left.”

Trump cited successful school reopenings in four European countries, yet in July 2020, the countries he cited had significantly fewer cases, including Germany, Denmark, and Norway. At that time, the US led the world in new cases, and had over 70 times as many new cases as Germany, which had 1/4th of our population.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos suggested diverting money away from public schools that don’t reopen towards private school vouchers, and refused to say that schools should follow basic CDC reopening guidelines.

DeVos’ indifference was so egregious that she even angered some of her staunchest allies. Keri Rodrigues, the president of the National Parents Union–a pro-charter school group that has had a very contentious relationship with teachers unions–complained:

“It’s as if the Trump administration gave her one sentence that she was supposed to stick to: Open the economy by any means necessary…every move…[is] scrutinized through a political lens…the people who are going to be hurt by this are our children.”

LAUSD, working with UTLA, was one of the few districts that implemented the necessary COVID safety precautions. These included:

• All students and staff were tested every week and got their results back quickly. Anyone who didn’t have a negative test result wasn’t allowed into school.
• When there was a positive test result, administrators were notified, and the student was isolated.
• LAUSD encouraged and provided vaccinations for students, in addition to masking and contact tracing.
• LAUSD provided proper ventilation and filters for classrooms

A McMaster University study found that these types of protocols had been effective, explaining that the spread of the virus had been “low within school settings when appropriate Infection Prevention and Control measures [were] implemented” and that “mitigation strategies, particularly mask-wearing, test-to-stay policies, and vaccination, [were] important in reducing transmission in schools and daycares.”

Yet many teachers unions, including the Chicago Teachers Union, were vilified for demanding these types of measures–measures which were much less than what LAUSD had successfully implemented for the 2021-2022 school year.

There certainly is a debate to be had over the efficacy and consequences of the COVID policies advocated by Weingarten, the AFT, UTLA, CTU, and others. However, given the circumstances and expert recommendations of the time--including that of Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield, who on July 14, 2020, warned, “[T]he fall and the winter of 2020 and 2021 are probably going to be one of the most difficult times that we’ve experienced in American public health”--what teachers unions sought was not unreasonable.

We acted to protect our students, their families, and their communities, and we acted in good faith. The endless, vociferous attacks on teachers unions’ actions, of which this is just the latest round, are not merited.