Chicago Teachers Stay Home, Fail the Children

DR. ASHISH JHA: So first of all, remote learning has been a disaster for America’s kids, and I think we have to acknowledge that and we have to do everything we can to minimize any further remote learning. Look, I understand teachers’ frustration. A lot of school districts did not put in — did not use the billions of dollars that they had gotten to put in improvements in ventilation and other upgrades.

So the question is can you still have school in the middle of a surge, and the answer is you can. Teachers should be vaccinated teachers should be vaccinated and boosted if people wear high quality masks. Even without those other upgrades which I’d like to see, it still is safe for kids and teachers to be back in school. So I think at this point there’s really no good explanation for having remote schools.

BUCK: No explanation. That was Dr. Ashish Jha there. He’s one of these guys who goes on a lot of the cable news. He’s on MSNBC, CNN, though, not somebody that you would think necessarily is gonna ever call out the Fauciites nonsense. But right now what we’re talking about is this issue of schools because the city of Chicago has 350,000 children who are for the fourth day all of school — and you would say, “Hold on a second. Why is that going on?” We all know why, right?

Teachers unions have artillery power, and they know that they get paid. If you run a small business or you’re an employee of a company that has bills to pay and you say, “Yeah, I know that it’s fine and a lot of other people and yada yada and I’m vaccinated and boosted, but I’m just not going to work,” that’s a problem. That’s not gonna work out so well.

But if you’re getting paid by the taxpayer and you have Democrat politicians in your pocket — because you’re the teachers union and you raise money for them and you’re essentially a Marxist public sector union — you can get away with this kind of stuff. And this is so interesting. This was actually the head of the Chicago Teachers Union speaking out on this. Just listen to him here. What he says.

JESSE SHARKEY: Hey, everyone’s making a hard choice, right, in — in — in — in the context of this. People are making a hard choice about whether to go to the grocery store or not.

BUCK: No, actually, not true. This is not a hard choice. The rest of the country not only has schools open, Clay, but there have been schools that were open that did fine before there was even a vaccine. Private and parochial schools across the country even here in New York City stayed open prevaccination, have been ol’ the whole time there’s a vaccine — obviously not in the summertime. There is no good-faith argument for this. And the fact that Biden won’t just come out and say, “This is nonsense, knock it off,” just goes to show you these libs don’t care about kids.

CLAY: To me, this is the biggest failure of all the covid failures, because you are talking about the city of Chicago, where every bar is open, where every sports arena is open — you can go sit, 20,000 people can, and watch the Chicago Bulls play a basketball game or watch the Chicago Blackhawks play a home game — and yet your kids aren’t allowed to be in public school.

It’s an unmitigated disaster that we could be here, and it is a fundamental failure of Joe Biden’s leadership that he doesn’t just come out and say, “Every kid in every school has to be back,” and I don’t know how this situation revolves itself, Buck, because we’re talking about four days now where the teachers unions are refusing to go back and where Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is actually trying to hold them accountable but doesn’t have any real ability to do so.

How does this situation resolve itself? I don’t even really know the answer. This is a monstrous out number of people and this is why I said — and I’ll continue to say it — January 6th was a disaster the way that Democrats tried to honor it with the singing of a song from Hamilton and the candle lit vigil on the steps and Dick Cheney is suddenly a hero of the left wing of this country.

Everybody is trying to get their picture taken with him after they wanted him charged with war crimes during the Iraq war fallout. All of that took place, and yet no one is really speaking out about Chicago in the Democratic Party at all. You’ve got a Democratic governor. You’ve got all Democrats who are running the city of Chicago. You’ve certainly got, in the nation, an apparatus that is very pro-teachers union. And right now, they are effectively kicking Joe Biden in the teeth and saying, “We’re not gonna open.”

And, by the way, this is important because it’s also spread. My understanding is, Atlanta area kids are not in school, some of them are remote. Milwaukee area kids. A lot of kids. My kids went back, we had some snow days, went to back to public school today for a return to normal class. But there are a lot of schools that are coming back either this week or next weekend MLK Day some start the day after, this is a big mess and there are many school districts in particular all over this country, blue city and often blue state locations where kids — two years after 15 days to slow the spread — are still not gonna be back in-person school.

BUCK: When you listen to the arguments of the Chicago Teachers Union — and to be fair — and we do that here. We are fair. We make these real arguments, or, rather, we present you with the real arguments from the other side and we call out good behavior and good comments no matter who it comes from. You know, we give high fives where deserved. Even Lori Lightfoot is like, “What the heck are you guys doing in the teachers union.”

The mayor, the very left wing and not very competent mayor of Chicago is saying, “You guys gotta get your butts back in the classroom. This is crazy,” because if you take them at their word that this is really just about fear of the virus at this point think about what that means. They’re talking about adults who are all vaccinated and boosted who are going to be exposed to children who have never been at high risk nor a likely source of spread to adults.

And they’ve never even really understood why that is. The theory is that young immune systems may clear it so quickly and have such a small viral load. Maybe they also, you know, have less droplets in the air when they breathe. Whatever, the point is, kids don’t spread it to adults very readily. If they’re not willing to go into work at a time, Clay, when grocery store workers and postal workers and carpenters and contractors — name somebody, right?

Bar owners. If they’re not willing to go to work when everybody else is, when are they willing to go to work? I think there’s some part of them that they maintain this fantasy of they least want to have the option for, quote, “remote learning,” which means really no learning, whenever they want for as long as they want, because otherwise, what’s the end of this? When everybody has high-speed filters installed in every public school in Chicago. Give me a break. Good luck with that.

CLAY: And we also have to remember — and, again, I want to reiterate. We know we have tons of listeners of this show — teachers, principals, vice principals, administrators — that are also agreeing with us. So I don’t want to paint with a broad brush with idea ’cause many teachers out there — for instance, my public school kids’ teachers — have been back in school for forever now.

But the precedent that we set, Buck, was in March of 2020 we basically let teachers just walk off, and we paid their full salaries. And they, effectively, got months of vacation with no responsibility really to speak of. I’m talking about March until the end of the school year. There was almost no remote learning that went on March, April, May, June of 2020.

And then the remote learning started because we were in the middle of the presidential cycle and because we failed as a country for many people in August and September. But we set the precedent, unfortunately, with teachers that it’s unsafe for you to go back in the classrooms, and we will pay your full salary if you don’t do it. I’ve said from the get-go we should look at the percentage of efficacy when it comes to remote learning.

And it is massively lower, and we should undercut every teacher’s salary by let’s say 40% and say, “Hey, if you want to teach remotely, we’ll give you 60% of your salary but the other 40% goes back to the taxpayer.” I bet almost every teacher — if you said that — would say, “Oh, no! I want to go back to the classroom,” right?

BUCK: What do you think about my hidden camera theory that of all these — and, by the way, this is the Chicago teachers unions we’re talking about, to Clay’s point. I know there have been my Jesuit High School here in New York City, they’ve been open in fall of 2020. They’ve been open for a long time.

Plenty of schools, thousands and thousands of them across the country and teachers have been showing up, a lot of them have gotten covid, they’re fine. Anyway, I think if you followed around the teachers union president with a hidden camera what you’d find is he’s really scared of covid from kids in the classroom or maybe he doesn’t even teach, right, but some of his members — and they’re at packed bars in downtown Chicago watching the football games, Mr. Travis, enjoying themselves.

CLAY: It is a great point. It reminds me back in the day when you have had have somebody claim that they had a major injury for a traffic accident or whatever and you would hire an insurance adjuster if you were a lawyer and you would follow that person around and be like, “Well, you know, you were able to go to the gym. I got pictures here of you.”

BUCK: I got a picture of you on the water slide. It didn’t seem to make a difference.

CLAY: Yeah. And when you were out dancing at the bar and like everything else. I mean, I love that idea. And you know what’s happened is do you remember I think it was the Chicago-area teachers union head, wasn’t it, who got popped on her vacation to Puerto Rico?

BUCK: I kind of remember this. I think that’s right. We have to fact check that one.

CLAY: It was definitely a teachers union. We need to look up during the break but one of them was at Puerto Rico. They weren’t even smart enough not to post their vacations going out of country when they were supposedly too afraid to teach.

BUCK: I just want to know: Did AOC, who has covid now, folks. Did she stop taking the virus cereals? Did she let her guard down too soon? Notice how it’s always a moral failing of anyone the left doesn’t like when they get covid. Meanwhile, I’ve had covid; you’ve had covid. It’s all over the place. So many people listening, probably about three quarters of people listening to this have had covid already. But notice she goes to down to Florida. I guess she’s not so scared of Ron DeSantis’ Florida after all, Clay. Oh, what a shock.

CLAY: No doubt, Buck. And, by the way, the number of people that I’m hearing now who have covid, whole families that aren’t even in the data, right, like everybody tests positive so it’s all home tests or whoever so we’re talking a million official cases or whatever it is. It might be two or three times that with people who know they have it that are staying at home. This is crazy.