Of Course, Just Blame the Teachers.
After the Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe lost in Virginia’s hotly contested gubernatorial race, the political punditry stumbled on a new explanation: it’s the teachers’ fault.
The day after an election is always a frenetic time for political journalists. It’s a period to perform an autopsy of sorts. What happened in this election? Why did this candidate win? How did each demographic group vote? What was the most pressing issue for voters? Answering these questions barely twenty-four hours after an election is a fool’s errand. Collecting and analyzing voting data takes time. But alas, we live in a nonstop news cycle and we want answers. Immediately. As a result, we get poor political analyses that are presented as irrefutable facts. Enter, the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race.
The Virginia gubernatorial race was arguably the most-watched election on Tuesday. The media depicted this race as both a referendum on Biden’s presidency and a preview of what will happen in the 2022 midterm elections. On the surface, this analysis somewhat makes sense. After all, Virginia overwhelming voted for Biden in 2020 by a ten-point margin. Virginia’s Democratic candidate for governor, Terry McAuliffe, should have easily sailed to victory, right? Not so fast. In the days leading up to the election, McAuliffe and Youngkin were neck-in-neck in the polls. Many interpreted this to be a reflection of Biden’s sinking poll numbers. It was anybody’s guess who would win.
Unless, of course, anyone bothered to address how off-year elections typically work.
Republicans have an advantage in off-year elections. Why? Because Republican voters, who are generally white and older, are more likely to vote in off-year elections. The demographic groups that lean more Democratic, young folks and people of color, are less likely to vote in off-year elections. Furthermore, the current-president’s party ordinarily loses the Virginia gubernatorial race. Josh Huder, a Senior Fellow at the Government Affairs Institute, explains “Off-year elections, like midterms, are normally bad for the sitting-president’s party. This was the eleventh time in the last twelve elections that the president’s party lost the Virginia gubernatorial race.”
It is not surprising that the Youngkin won. However, what did surprise me were some of the explanations for McAuliffe’s loss. For instance, blaming the state’s teachers and education system. Yesterday, Zachary Carter, of The Atlantic, published an article entitled “The Democratic Unraveling Began With Schools”, in which he specifically points to school closures and teachers’ support of it as the reason McAuliffe lost.
In his article, Carter runs through all of the negative outcomes of school closures: increased levels of depression and anxiety among children, learning regression, and mothers leaving the workforce in droves. According to Carter, the blame for this can be placed squarely on teachers and their unions who, “pretty consistently supported keeping the schools closed in the name of public health.” Carter even attributes a decline in public school attendance to school closures.
Over the past two years, I’ve written extensively on teachers and the COVID-19 pandemic. During the summer, I interviewed fifty American teachers about their experiences during the pandemic and published a four-part series on the data I collected. To say that Carter’s article infuriated me would be an understatement.
American public school teachers have worked tirelessly to educate your children throughout the worst public health crisis in living memory. Did many teachers object to returning to in-person learning? Yes. This was not because they were lazy or unwilling to do their jobs, but because a deadly virus was running unchecked throughout the country and they didn’t want to die. Were there negative consequences to closing school buildings? Absolutely. However, this does not mean that we should have just rolled the dice with the lives of teachers, school faculty, and students.
In my series on teachers and the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers explained the dangerous working conditions that they were forced to endure upon returning to the classroom. I’ll quickly run through some of the more disturbing findings: approximately 40 percent of respondents did not have access to PPE or cleaning supplies, 40 percent were not quarantined if they were exposed to a sick student, and over 60 percent did not have access to a COVID-19 test. Still think teachers were unreasonable to object to in-person learning, Mr. Carter?
If nothing else, Carter’s article succinctly demonstrates how American society has, once again, turned against its teachers. Remember back in March 2020, when schools first closed and teachers were heralded as heaven-sent angels? That didn’t last long, did it? During my interviews with teachers this past summer, I asked them how it felt to be praised and then quickly villainized by the public. Many teachers were upset and angry, but others felt it was just business as usual. As one teacher explained, “For most of us it was back to what we are used to; dangerous conditions and disrespect.”
Teachers are accustomed to being blamed for just about everything, but losing an election? That’s a new one. Carter goes on to caution that Virginia could be a bellwether for future elections in other states: “Whether the Virginia results translate to other states will depend on how schools in those states reacted to the spread of COVID-19, and whether a major national issue can take the place of these local frustrations in voters’ minds.” In other words, if your state’s Democratic governor or mayor kept schools closed too long, angry parents will soon vote them out.
If that theory was true, then why did California Governor Gavin Newsom easily win the gubernatorial recall election? Leading up to the election, many suggested that the recall efforts were a referendum on Newsom’s COVID policies, which were some of the strictest in the nation. According to Carter’s theory, as the governor of a state in which many districts remained closed for part of the 2020–2021 school year, Newsom should have been overwhelmingly voted out. I guess that theory doesn’t hold up as well as he thought.
I don’t know what Mr. Carter wanted to achieve with this article. Encourage anti-teacher sentiments? Fuel divisions between teachers and parents? Warn other elected officials to ignore their teachers, lest they lose reelection? Whatever the reason, Mr. Carter’s anger towards public school teachers is palpable. Sadly, he’s not alone.
At some point during the pandemic, teachers became an easy target on which to place all of our societal problems. We need to reverse course here. Quickly. Teachers are leaving the profession en masse. Since Mr. Carter believes teachers were so unreasonable in their demands for workplace safety, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind covering a few classes. There is a national shortage of substitute teachers. Let me know how safe you find the classroom the first time a student vomits on their desk or sneezes directly in your face. I’m sure many teachers will be anxiously waiting to hear how easy you find their profession.
