ONE CAN HOPE: More COVID-19 School Closures Spell the End of Teachers Unions Empire.

Chicago—where union leaders effectively just voted to strike—is the third largest school district in the country, enrolling more than 340,000 students and spending over $27,000 per student, per year. Just 23% of Chicago public school students can read proficiently. Meanwhile, average Chicago private school tuition is only about $11,000 per student each year.

Detroit Public Schools (reading proficiency rate a staggering 6%) have shuttered in-person classes from at least Jan. 3–5 due to “COVID-19 spread placing employees, students, and families at risk along with excessive staff shortages.” The kicker? The district informed families there would be no in-person nor online learning available: “We simply cannot go online districtwide… because all of our students do not have laptops.”

One has to wonder what the district did with the additional $1.3 billion in federal COVID-19 relief funding it received last year—equivalent to $26,400 per student—according to the Mackinac Center.

In Massachusetts, the head of the state affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers is pushing for a return to remote instruction, wrongly arguing that returning to school for in-person learning “will inevitably make the [COVID-19] crisis much worse.”

According to a school tracker maintained by Burbio, as of early December, just 336 schools were closed. That figure now stands at over 3,200.

It would be much easier to keep believing in public education if our public educators did.