MEDIUM: Why are we so willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of educators?
By Moira O’Neil
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we asked grandparents to sacrifice themselves for the economic wellbeing of their grandchildren. For example, Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick explained that grandparents should be “willing to die to save the economy for their grandkids.” Now the Trump administration is asking teachers to put their lives at risk because, as they say, our nation’s economic recovery depends on schools re-opening.
Photo by Allison Shelley for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action.
Trump criticized the CDC guidelines for how schools might open safely for being overly cautious and impossible to implement and even threatened to cut off federal funding to schools should they fail to re-open for in-person instruction. In an attempt to assuage parents fears about their children’s safety, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos repeatedly cites statistics about the low infection and mortality rates among children and young people, but fails to address potential risks to teachers and others. Her choice of which statistics to put forward sent a clear message: the administration cares about your children’s health, but not about teachers and other adults who make schools run.
Why are so many of us so comfortable asking teachers to work in unsafe conditions at great sacrifice to their own well-being even as they make demands that they return to a safe workplace? Part of the answer is how we think about teaching in this country.