Teachers protest in the streets yet claim they are afraid to go back to school

The question of whether kids should go back to school or not has met a partisan divide where those on the right end of the political spectrum are advocating fully for children to return to school while those on the left claim they are too terrified of coronavirus calamity to allow them to return to school.

Teachers claim that they fear the hordes of children who will rush into schools and bring the coronavirus along with them. They say they are worried that they will get sick. When evidence is brought up to show that children are not the vectors of COVID-19 as they are with many other communicable diseases, those studies themselves are called into question.

It would be fair to assume that, given this pearl-clutching, breathless hysteria, teachers are hiding out in their homes, terrified and fearful that they will get sick. But they aren't. It turns out that many of them are out expressing their first amendment free speech rights by marching around with the violent protestors that the media insists are peaceful, demanding change in the name of social justice.

The Secretary at Large for the Denver Public School system, Tay Anderson, has been out protesting in his home state.

Despite his own activities of attending protests with masses of other people who may or may not be sick, Anderson has stated that schools should not reopen in September.

The Denver Teachers' Union agrees with Anderson. "We need to prioritize people’s lives and focus on quality instruction," said Tiffany Choi, union president, "instead of scrambling to open before the community and the schools are ready. Extending remote learning allows more time to collaborate around meticulous plans for in-person reopenings."

Anderson is not the only one. The Daily Wire reports that teachers showed up to protest in Portland, where nightly violence has been going on for over two months. In that city, they are so accustomed to heading out into the streets with throngs of other that they've given themselves the name "Teachers Against Tyrants." Oregon students may not go back to school at all.

In Washington, DC, teachers staged a protest showing that they were concerned that they would all end up dead if they went back to school. DC has not yet announced their reopening plan. Teachers in DC have been protesting, however, along with thousands of other people in the area.

Teachers' Unions, however, are fighting against reopening. But it's not necessarily because they are worried about illness, but because they want progressive educational reforms. As Nicole Russell wrote in The Post Millennial, "teachers unions are ramping up their strategy to avoid physically reopening schools in order to enforce their partisan demands."

Perhaps this is why teachers aren't afraid to protest, because they're not really afraid of coronavirus at all, just standard educational practices. This moment is being used to hold education hostage.

For Anderson, when conservatives in Colorado began advocating for parental access to other educational options, he claimed it was a power play to defund Colorado schools and push private schooling.

Progressive, leftist educators want to use coronavirus to implement their own educational ideologies and systems. Reopening is not delayed due to fears that children will make everyone sick, but over the terms of education. Yet when others who do not subscribe to a progressive ideology make their ideas known, they are not welcomed to the conversation.

While teachers rage in the streets and foment rebellion through unions and leftist school boards, children are the ones who will suffer without an education this fall.