IN 2020, TEACHERS UNIONS AND POLICE UNIONS SHOWED THEIR TRUE COLORS: IT'S TIME FOR THE LEFT AND THE RIGHT TO TAKE A HARD LOOK AT THEIR FAVORITE PUBLIC-SECTOR UNIONS.

• Author: Suderman, Peter

FROM THE SPREAD of COVID-19 and the wave of state-imposed closures that followed to the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the unrest that ensued, 2020 was a year in which American institutions flailed and failed. And few failures were bigger or more apparent than those of public-sector unions.

By pushing to keep schools closed even as evidence mounted that in-person classes were relatively low-risk and remote learning was ineffective, teachers unions failed students and parents. By pushing to protect bad cops in the wake of multiple scandals, police unions failed the public they were sworn to protect. And in the process, America got a glimpse of what public-sector unions, regardless of the profession they represent, really do.

Unions that represent government employees seek to maintain an image of themselves as protectors of common institutions that can be relied upon to serve the public interest. But the upheavals of2020 made clear that the priority for public-sector unions is the opposite: to protect the interests of taxpayer-funded employees, especially when those interests diverge from those of the public they nominally serve.

Yet the politics of public-sector unions have left reforms in limbo. Culturally and politically, police have long been linked with the American right. Teachers, in contrast, are a core constituency of the Democratic Party and some of its loudest supporters and biggest donors.

Public-sector union reform should be a bipartisan issue. Instead, it has stalled or inched along, with each side protecting its own.

TEACHERS VS. CHILDREN AND PARENTS

OF ALL THE missteps and public policy failures of2020, few were more egregious than the failure to reopen public schools for young children. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools were shuttered across the nation out of fear that they would become vectors of viral spread. But by mid-summer, evidence from other countries that had reopened their schools, combined with data on how often and how severely children contract the disease, pointed to a clear conclusion: Schools--especially for younger students--were relatively safe. "School districts should prioritize reopening schools full time, especially for grades K-5 and students with special needs," declared a press release describing a July report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Some states, many with Republican governors, chose to bring children back to classrooms in some fashion. But others did not, preferring hastily cobbled-together forms of virtual education. According to one tracker, 62 percent of public schools began the fall semester online only. The dire effects were plain to see. Young children of all demographics fared badly in virtual school, unable to focus effectively on screen-based education from home. The negative effects were most pronounced among poor and minority students, who often lacked consistent access to computers or internet connections and whose chaotic home lives often made learning even more difficult.

A November report from the NWEA, a nonprofit education research organization, examined test scores from more than 4.4 million students and found that kids in third to eighth grade performed 5-10 points worse, on average, than a year prior. Black and Hispanic students, as well as those who attended schools in low-income areas, saw significant declines in reading test scores. The analysis concluded that "the impacts of COVID-19 on achievement for the most vulnerable students may be underestimated."

The decision to close schools also hurt the careers of working mothers. By September 2020, about 1.1 million adults had dropped out of the U.S. workforce; 865,000 were women, according to the National Women's Law Center.

There was little good-faith dispute about the merits of in-person instruction, the consequences of closure, and the safety of reopening. Although many prominent public health experts initially were cautious, by fall even they had come around. "The default position should be to try as best as possible, within reason, to keep the children in school, to get them back to school," said Anthony Fauci, a White House health adviser and the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in November.

The decision to keep so many schools closed was egregious because it was avoidable. It was egregious because its consequences were easy to predict. And it was egregious because it was largely the product of an organized fear campaign by a self-righteous, self-interested political faction that has for years been pursuing its own interests in direct opposition to the betterment of the families and children it is supposed to serve.

Across the country, teachers unions did everything they could to stop reopening. In July, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten threatened "protests," "grievances or lawsuits," and even "safety strikes." The following month in Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot reversed a plan to partially reopen schools two days after the Chicago Teachers Union--which went on strike in 2019--marched against resuming in-person instruction.

The unions' rhetoric emphasized the question of whether reopening schools was safe. Teachers in Washington, D.C., lined up body bags outside school system offices. Weingarten's opposition was premised on teacher and student safety. During the summer, the Florida Education Association filed a lawsuit seeking to block the state's reopening plan on the grounds that it "arbitrarily disregards safety."

But there was little sound reason to believe that schools were particularly unsafe. Children represented a tiny fraction of recorded COVID-19 cases, even in areas with significant outbreaks, and an even tinier share of deaths from the disease. Research in other countries found that virus transmission among schoolchildren, or between them and staff, was rare.

In New York City, where reopening was especially chaotic, labor representatives negotiated an agreement with Mayor Bill de Blasio to close schools if the city's COVID-19 test positivity rate reached a seven-day...