Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will tout their education policies to the nation this week at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Walz, a former teacher married to a former teacher, speaks often about his time in the classroom. But anyone curious about the future of education under a Harris-Walz presidency would learn more by looking outside the convention than inside it.
Chicago schools will be almost completely empty this week. That is by design: This year, district leaders pushed the usual start of the school year back by a week to help the city “accommodate an estimated influx of 75,000 visitors” and “[allow] time for students to attend, volunteer, and participate in the civic process of hosting the Convention.”
That’s right: 320,000 students are being kept out of school so they can watch a political party talk about the importance of education. Teachers are still expected to report to work for professional development days, and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is busing teachers to Soldier Field on Thursday night to watch Harris’ acceptance speech on the big screen.
It is hard to imagine that Chicago Public Schools (CPS) or the CTU would have been quite so accommodating for any other party. Plus, such concern over a 75,000-visitor event seems suspect when the school district has no such concern over the city’s annual St. Patrick’s Day festivities, which attract hundreds of thousands of revelers.
This is far from the first time Chicago students have been kept out of school for political reasons. The city’s public schools did not completely reopen from COVID-19 until late August 2021, a full year after many other districts had successfully brought students back into classrooms. The CTU, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, called reopening efforts “rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny” in a since-deleted tweet.
Even if schools were in session this week, one wouldn’t have to look far to see the failures of union-controlled schooling. …