Federalist Senior Editor Christopher Bedford said that when it comes to school reopenings, the nation is not united, no matter what political or media messaging suggests.
“We’ve heard from the beginning that we’re all in the together. It’s becoming increasingly clear that’s not the case. Some people are ahead of others,” Bedford said on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom” on Thursday morning.
While teachers in Montgomery County hold anti-school-reopening parades and President Joe Biden gave his ear to the pleas of a young teacher who asked how educators could return to classrooms without being vaccinated against COVID-19, Bedford explained that plenty of other Americans returned to in-person work months ago.
“To those people, I want to say, I don’t know, why don’t you ask the people who were around me today in the studio, or the bartenders, or the cab drivers, or the carpenters, the mechanics — all of the people across this country who have been going back to work,” Bedford explained. “It shows that there’s a real divide here.”
Instead of accepting the science and data suggesting a safe return to classrooms can happen now, Bedford said, teachers unions are “demanding ransoms from communities” by manipulating the pandemic circumstances, families, and school districts to get what they want.
“A lot of the teachers unions are pushing back, saying, ‘We don’t care about the test scores, we don’t care about being your babysitter,’ and they are demanding ransoms from communities like in California, where [the state] awarded them $6.6 billion in order to return to jobs,” Bedford said. “Most of the country has” returned to work.
Bedford said public school teachers are exploring their political connections to stay at home while many private school teachers and other essential workers around the nation went back to work before they were vaccinated.
“There are private school teachers who are putting themselves through this who aren’t at the front of the line for the vaccination. All of the people who work at the grocery stores aren’t at the front of the line for vaccination. Why should the teachers who refuse to go back to work be at the front of the line, except for their political connections?” he concluded.
Read more of Bedford’s work on teachers unions and school closures here.
