Where's Outrage From Top Dems As CTU Strike Defies 'Science'?

Mark Konkol
Updated ·5 min read
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CHICAGO —Hundreds of thousands of city public school kids have been locked out of classrooms since Chicago Teachers Union members voted to walk out on in-person learning without district permission, against public-health guidance and possibly in violation of a state law.

The union's "work action" was the third time in 27 months that public school teachers have refused to show up to work in person. That's what Chicagoans have learned to expect from the taxpayer-funded, socialist-led political operation also known as CTU.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the whole thing feels like "Groundhog Day," a reference to the Bill Murray movie about a self-centered weatherman who lives the same day over and over again.

Really, it's worse than that.

The real-life standoff between CTU and City Hall doesn't just defy logic and science, which we'll get to later. It also is evidence Illinois' status-quo political class places more value in the support and financial backing of a public employee union over what public health officials and "science and data" say is best for children at this moment in the coronavirus crisis.

In a state where pandemic policies allegedly are based on "science and data," Chicago teachers union leaders have staged a district-wide walkout that defies both those things.

Where's the outrage from the state's most powerful pro-science Democrats?

Earlier in the week, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said he thinks it's best if students remain in school and had no plans to order statewide remote learning during the current surge in coronavirus cases.

But Pritzker — who last year signed legislation that gave CTU the right to bargain over almost any issue, including in-person learning — didn't chime in about CTU's switch to remote learning without approval from Chicago's public health department, which is required by the state's disaster proclamation on remote learning.

We didn't hear from House Speaker Emanuel "Chris" Welch, either.

Welch — who accepted a $59,000 maximum campaign donation from CTU last year as the union successfully lobbied the legislature for an elected school board — had better things to focus on.

He tweeted congratulations to Chakena Perry, the wife of a Pritzker politico the governor appointed to the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District board. And he humbly bragged about being included in a suburban Maywood websites' 2021 "people of the year" list.

Meanwhile, 330,000 students in Chicago, most of them poor Black and Latino kids, were being kept from classrooms by union bosses peddling fear and misinformation like they're at a Trump rally.

On Wednesday morning, for instance, CTU boss Jesse Sharkey cited the city's 24-percent coronavirus test positivity rate as an example of why it's not safe for students to be in schools until at least Jan. 18.

Here's something to consider regarding the significance of coronavirus positivity rates, according to a Harvard epidemiologist.

All the talk about test positivity rates is "a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder, focusing back on the early stages of the pandemic," William Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health told New York Magazine last month.

“Virtually nowhere is doing this random testing of people on the street," Hanage said. “And as a result of that, the test positivity statistic is almost meaningless in isolation from other things.”

Even coronavirus case counts have lost relevance, University of California Irvine public health professor Andrew Noymer told the Associated Press.

"Hospitalizations are where the rubber meets the road," he said. "It's a more objective measure."

On Tuesday, Chicago's public health commissioner, Dr. Allison Arwady, said in a city of about 550,000 children, Chicago is averaging just seven coronavirus hospitalizations a day right now for children aged zero to 17.”

“It really is concerning to me that we’re pretending like it’s February 2020, at the beginning of all of this,” Arwady said.

Some things have changed since April, the last time CTU members refused to return to high schools until school officials agreed to a safety plan that earmark vaccinations for union members.

Now, 90 percent of CPS staff is vaccinated, according to district data. Public health officials everywhere say having up-to-date vaccinations is the best protection against severe coronavirus complications.

Study after study shows that schools are not coronavirus superspreaders.

In Chicago, the spike in coronavirus hospitalizations overwhelmingly has been driven by unvaccinated people.

What hasn't changed is the Chicago Teacher's Union's desire to use the pandemic to wrestle away control of public schools from Mayor Lori Lightfoot in a show of political might.

CTU bosses say they want students, staff and teachers to produce a negative coronavirus tested within 48 hours of returning to in-person learning, which hasn't happened at many districts in the country.

CTU's demands also include reinstating the early-pandemic thresholds that were to triggered remote learning last school year. That includes a 10-percent citywide coronavirus test positivity rate.

That's right, CTU bosses don't care what data and studies, scientists and doctors recommend.

They would feel safer if the "almost meaningless" stand-alone metric — that the COVID Tracking Project "emphatically recommend against" over-relying on to justify policy changes — was used to determine when it's safe to return to classrooms.

The ridiculous dispute has made national news. President Joe Biden's press secretary Jen Psaki even commented on what should be happening at CPS.

America is "more than equipped to ensure schools are open" and to "ensure that children are not enduring the mental health impact of not being in school, that there are not gaps in learning," she said. "This includes schools everywhere, including in Chicago."

But none of the powerful Illinois politicians up for re–election next year who were quick to support shut down schools, restaurants and businesses statewide early in the coronavirus crisis have much to say about the CTU's ridiculous argument for remote learning that goes against science, data and public health guidance.

No matter when kids go are allowed back into schools, that's a political win for CTU.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docuseries on CNN and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary "16 Shots."

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This article originally appeared on the Chicago Patch