Democrats holding victims of lockdowns hostage to their agenda

 Bethany Mandel:

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Given the choice between helping suffering families and playing chicken trying to pass a pork-filled bill, Pelosi chose the latter.

Then there’s the glaring gap between the rhetoric of women’s rights and economic empowerment and the reality.

In September alone, 1 million women left the workforce. It’s not a mystery why: With schools closed or running on an abbreviated in-person schedule since the spring, America’s mothers are stretched too thin. While teachers unions across the country have held their districts hostage, parents have had to step into the gap. Parents of school-aged children are responsible for all of their children’s needs at every moment of the day: physical, emotional, and educational. Mothers able to work from home did so the majority of the spring and summer, with the hope that life would return to a semblance of normal in the fall. They held out hope that they could begin working full-time again without distractions, even if it was still at home. But come September, that hope was dashed. Of course, the mothers who left the workforce were those who could afford to do so, those with a partner able to pick up the slack financially. And once again, liberals remained silent. As women left the workforce in droves and single and lower-income mothers faced an impossible situation, there was nary an outcry against the unions that have worked relentlessly not for the well-being and best interests of their students and their families, but for the right of their teachers to work remotely indefinitely.

Women were already bearing a lot of the economic brunt of the pandemic itself. “Female-dominated industries, including healthcare, education, elder care, service, and hospitality, have been among the hardest hit by the COVID-induced recession,” Time reported in October. “When the pandemic first overwhelmed the U.S. in March and April, hospitals began furloughing nurses and medical assistants who primarily worked on elective procedures. Daycares, struggling with plummeting enrollment and skyrocketing overhead costs, laid off 250,000-plus workers. By April, 72% of housekeepers had reported being abandoned by all their clients. Restaurants, which lost all their dine-in business overnight, laid off their servers — 70% of which are women.”

But job loss is only part of it. “Many women are leaving the workforce not because their jobs have vanished but because their support systems have,” the article continued, pointing to remote schooling and the closure of daycare centers.

That leads us to the unequal effect this arrangement has on less-well-off children and teenagers.

Whereas the children of the middle and upper classes have parents building pods and working around the clock to supplement insufficient remote education, the less fortunate are falling behind. In September, ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis published a chilling report about the failures of remote learning, profiling a child, Shemar, living in Baltimore with unstable adults and spotty access to the internet. MacGillis painstakingly lays out the minimal risk of infection and spread in schools and highlights how unions have, in the face of the clear science regarding school safety, nevertheless worked against reopenings, in part just because President Trump advocated for them. Given the choice between proving the president right and serving disadvantaged minority students, unions chose the latter. MacGillis closes with this devastating picture:

For the foreseeable future, Shemar would be spending his days as he had spent the spring and the summer: in a dark room, in front of a screen, with virtually no direct interaction with kids anywhere close to his own age. Sometimes the screen would hold Minecraft and Fortnite; sometimes, if he got the hang of the log-ins, it would hold Zoom.

Schools in cities such as Baltimore, though deeply imperfect, had long given children a break from such isolation — the key, as the supporters of 19th-century charity schools argued, was to get disadvantaged children out of the home and into school, every day. For the time being, in Baltimore and many other American cities, that function was on hold.

I kept thinking of something Karen Ngosso had told me about Shemar. “His story, it could be any number of kids,” she said. “There’s thousands of him. There’s millions of him.”

Not only are liberals silent in the face of this clear abuse and neglect by our society of millions of disadvantaged children, but one of the largest and most powerful arms of progressivism, the teachers unions, has actively fought against them. Perhaps most galling at this moment of educational neglect, Joe Biden has announced his intention to appoint a number of teachers union leaders to top spots at the Department of Education.

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There is more.

This is a good essay that explains how Pelosi is trying to use the virus as an excuse for unviable Democrat programs while people suffer from the real effects of lockdowns. 

The fact is that some kids do better with homeschooling than others and the poor are more likely to need the support systems of in-person education.  The teachers' unions are also using the virus to get political advantage despite the fact that children are the least likely people to spread the disease.