Music and the Death of Shared Spaces

I play in a town band (or at least, I do in years without pandemics) that has been around since 1856. I've dug into the history (actually wrote a book about it) which has just extended my lifelong interest in popular music and culture, and if you trace all of that history, I think you can see how we ended up where we are, both politically and in the education world.

As the 19th century turned into the 20th, music was almost exclusively a rare, shared experience. You could only listen to music that was live. If you had a piano and someone who could play it, maybe you could listen at home (a hit song was one that sold lots of sheet music), but for anything more complex, you had to wait for a band or orchestra performance. As an audience member you had zero control of what you listened to, nor could you pick the where or when. 

Pre-1920, the majority of Americans lived in small towns, so entertainment resources were limited. The period of 1880-1920 was the peak for town bands--if you wanted live music, you got some folks together and sis it yourself. There were parallels. In our area, for instance, there was a single amusement park, a destination park owned and run by the trolley company. On major holidays, everyone was there--all the towns, all the members of the family. Opportunities were few, and technology didn't favor personally choosing, so everyone shared the few chances over which they had little control or choice.

In the 1920s, things change. Our local amusement park died, killed by the automobile, a piece of technology that let people decide when and where they wanted to go. Meanwhile, recorded music finally become commercially viable. Suddenly, you can buy a pressed recording of a song that you like and listen to it any time you want in the comfort of your own home. 

The next few decades gave us improved record technology and better automobiles, which expanded personal control and choice. They also saw the rise of radio, which pulled in the opposite direction--you could only listen to what was being broadcast and only when it was being broadcast. Likewise, going to the movies meant moving into shared spaces on a schedule out of your own control.

The trend for the century has been overwhelmingly toward personal choice and control and away from shared spaces. I think, for instance, of the band bus--the transportation for high school bands traveling to away games. When I was just starting out as a student, music on the bus was simply whatever the driver could pick up on the radio--you got what you got. Then some buses had cassette players, and students could have what they could collectively agree upon (and chaperones would allow). By the time I had been an assistant band director for a few years, students had Walkmans, and instead of a boisterous shared space, students separated into smaller, self-contained spaces. Ipods accelerated the change--now you aren't even bound by the sequence of songs on the tape, but can instantly shift to whatever you want to hear at this particular moment. 

That trend has been mirrored across the culture. You can watch what you want when and where you want to watch it. You can go online and build a personal bubble, and even though some companies have tried to create large shared spaces, some folks are now threatening to leave for spaces like Parler, where they only have to share space with like-minded people. 

100 years ago, most folks in this country spent most of their time in shared spaces. When we talk about how schools of those earlier times taught people to be citizens, we're talking about helping young people learn to occupy shared spaces with other people. Private, unshared space was a luxury, a sign that you had entered a higher class--a private office, a private school, a home designed to preserve your privacy. 

Now here we are today, able to control, curate, schedule, design so much of our environment. We listen to what we want when we want to. We watch what we want when we want to. If we have enough money, we move to a neighborhood that's populated with the kind of people we want to live with.

We treat everything as a consumer transaction. Health care. Education. Heck, churches in some cases. We expect to have control and choice, to extend that personal control over our lives. 

Increasingly, as a sort of subliminal hum, comes the message that shared spaces are for poor people, people who can't do better. And because we are all consumers, and every time we spend money it's a transaction in which we expect to control what we get, there's an awful lot of tension about paying taxes to maintain shared spaces that are used primarily by Those People (And Not Us). 

So "let me choose a carefully curated school that will teach my child exactly what I want them to learn and nothing else" becomes a driving force in education reform. Education is a consumer good--you "buy" it in order to get yourself more advantages in curating the rest of your personal, private space life (including your job and your income). And everything about schools that seems like a shared space needs to be excised, cut away. "You aren't giving me the exact services I want, and my child is having to spend time with Those Peoples' Children, so just give me my money back and let me go shop on my own." The education of society's children in a shared space that prepares them for living in a world of shared spaces--that's no longer a desirable thing for some folks.

The pandemic has really ramped up the issues of the death of shared space. Who is an essential worker? A person who makes it possible for you to curate your life in your private space. And because we're not used to living in shared spaces, well, I want to pick and choose my personal response to the virus, based on what works for me. And other people can just choose what works best for them. That's fair, right? Just don't start telling me that the choices I make affect other peoples' choices. Liberty, man!

In iPod world, we pay for every piece of our carefully curated private space. Shared spaces are carved up into pieces for the customers, and people who can't afford to curate a vast private space just have to make do with the leftover (steadily shrinking) public spaces. When it comes to school, some folks are trying to market this process as choice for everyone. 

It's every person for him- or her-self, and just over the horizon, a vision of a society that is not so much a society as a country of people living their private personal lives, sharing nothing and celebrating the "liberty" that allows them to never think about anyone else. When Thoreau wrote about everyone marching to the beat of their own drum, I don't think this is exactly what he had in mind. 

Donors Choose Monday: The Extra Screen

 Every Monday, I'm making a donation to someone on Donors Choose, a well-rated charity site that lets folks offer financial support to teachers across the country. No, we shouldn't have to do this. Yes, some of the requests might raise an eyebrow (is that something you really need, really?) But we are where we are in the world right now, and this is a small way to help support individual classrooms in a concrete way.

This week I'm looking at a request for a second screen. Actually, there are many such requests on the site. If you have never had a second screen, well-- it's heaven. Two or three windows open at once, able to work on this without having to minimize that. And in the age of the zoom meeting (or Google Meet or whatever software you're using during the pandemess), a second screen can be one of those things that just makes life a bunch easier. It's exactly the kind of thing that a teacher can really benefit from and administration would label an unnecessary luxury.

So I'm donating to a teacher at the Young Women's Leadership School in the Bronx. The dollar amount on this one is low because it is one of many items marked for matching funds, in this case from Con Ed. 

If this one is finished by the time you get there, or it's not quite your thing, then donate to someone else. I don't know about you, but mostly cooped up at home, I get this general feeling of helplessness, and this is one thing I can do that helps a little bit. Join me in helping actual classroom teachers do their thing, and then join your local advocates in getting your school district to make these kinds of charitable appeals unnecessary. 

ICYMI: Counting Is Hard Edition (11/15)

 Who knew that math would be such a big deal, or that counting would have such deep political issues? Just let me know when he's gone, or at least moved on to his next big grift. In the meantime, lots to read about this week. Remember, the stuff you like you should share. 

What Happens When Ed Tech Forgets   

Audrey Watters has some thoughts about how we keep putting failed ed tech enterprises in the memory hole and letting the architects of these failures carry on with freshly scrubbed reputations. Also, Proctorio sucks.

Merchants of Doubt

Bruce Baker guests to talk about how conservative thinky tank the Hoover Institution helped spread the idea that investing in public education was pointless and fruitless.

Axios Deep Dive on Race and Education in America  

A batch of articles working through different aspects of the topic, with a good side of data. You're probably not going to buy all of this, but there are some good places to start talking here.

These Stanford students are racing to get laptops to kids  

A pair of Stanford students have launched a small business is getting refurbished laptops to students in need. It's a small story, but an encouraging one.

Houston-area high school requiring failing students to return to in-person education   

So here's one more variation on pandemic schooling. Not sure how I feel about this one. 

Why the 1776 Commission is a bad idea   

Diane Ravitch is at The Hill explaining why this Trumpian idea is a bad one. Yes,. I know this version of it is likely dead now, but let's just drive a stake through it to be sure, okay.

Top Biden aid talks to EWA about education stuff  

I've referenced this piece elsewhere, but you may want to read the whole account of what top aid Stef Feldman had to say about the full range of ed policy topics. Currently it's the most direct statement we have about what Biden has in mind.

The truth about returning to school? There's no easy answer.

Many's the time I've objected to what Morgan Polikoff had to say, but his summation of the l;ousy place we're stuck in right now is as good as any I've read. At Hechinger Report.

Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.  

This interview with sociologist Jessica Calarco in Culture Study is pretty powerful stuff. And her suggestion about thinking sociologically is needed at the moment when so many teachers are beating themselves up for not being able to handle the pandemess perfectly.

Teacher Demoralization Isn't the Same as Teacher Burnout   

At EdWeek, Doris Santoro, who wrote a book about this stuff, explains how the current pandemess is keeping teachers from "reaping the moral rewards" they are used to getting from the work. And more. Another useful "Oh, this is what I'm feeling" article.

Teachers forced to MacGyver their own tech solutions

At Hechinger Report, in  an article that will surprise roughly zero teachers, a look at how teachers are having to bridge the tech gaps themselves. 

There's Only One Reason Districts Should Be Doing Teacher Evaluations This Year

Word keeps popping up on line from here and there that some schools are going ahead with teacher evaluations this year, even this fall. 

Which is nuts. Teachers are reeling, scrambling, doing their damnedest to stay upright on constantly shifting ground, trying to maintain some semblance of education in the midst of chaos and uncertainty that is marked by a widespread lack of leadership and direction on all levels. Even in schools that are open for face-to-face, teachers work wondering at what instant things will change. And of course, underneath all the rest, anxiety about the possibility of debilitating illness and death.

But sure-- now is an awesome time to make sure that teachers are checking off all the items on the Madeline Hunter checklist and are keeping their classroom spic and span. The Big Standardized Test, previously almost completely useless for truly measuring teacher performance, will be double-plus-useless this year. The whole standard array of teacher evaluation techniques will be pointless this year, like judging a round of Dancing with the Stars on the deck of a ship knocked to and fro on rough seas in a high wind while seals run back and forth across the dance floor. 

However, there is one method of teacher evaluation that could--even should--be used this year.

It starts with an administrator who says, "I know you're juggling a host of challenges in this most abnormal year. I'd like to stop by and give you a second set of eyeballs to watch what's going on and see if there's anything I can offer that might help you get on top of this mess." It ends with an administrator who says, "I just have some thoughts about some techniques and tools that might help you with what I saw today. I also want to let you know about some things that are working really well." And the final part of the process--that's when the administrator says, "That's what I saw. Now, what can I do to help you?"

An administrator's job is to create the conditions and provide the support necessary for every member of her staff to do their best work. Right now even the most seasoned of educators can use a pair of fresh eyes to help them see what's going well and what's not, and to help provide the resources needed to do better. 

There's no use in an evaluation centered on giving teachers a rank or rating, but something that helps a teacher dial their work in a little better is useful at this point. There is no other reason to be doing teacher evaluations this year. Kudos to all the administrators who are getting this right.

Charter Fans Dislike This Part of Biden's Plan

 The charter advocacy Twitterverse is unhappy about this part of the Biden plan, as described here by Biden staffer Stef Feldman talking to the Education Writers Association:

And we’ll require every charter school, including online schools, to be authorized and held accountable by democratically-elected bodies like school boards and also held to the same standards of transparency and accountability as all public schools. That means things like regular public board meetings and meeting all the same civil rights, employment, health, labor, safety and educator requirements that public schools must.

In Twitterland yesterday, that quote prompted some conversations like this one

Why? Is it to make sure that charter schools are made better? Or is it a way to hamstring them with pointless regulation, so they are too paralyzed to work effectively? https://t.co/0WG05cEy4v

— laura mckenna (@laura11D) November 12, 2020

Yes, Laura. And more. This is the standard union line that the NEA and AFT have been using since charters began. It goes like this:

"We like charters...
As long as they are like all other public schools.
Controlled by us (who control school boards)."

States - Game on! https://t.co/5ThUD2E7UY

— Jeanne Allen (@JeanneAllen) November 12, 2020

But one has to ask (and one did, but Twitter being Twitter I haven't heard an answer yet)-- exactly how does having an elected board "hamstring" a charter school? How does a requirement for transparency and accountability "paralyze" a charter school?

The mantra for charter schools has been the idea of trading autonomy for accountability. Did charter fans really mean to say "accountability, but only in the ways we choose to the people we choose?" 

After all, a major criticism of public schools in the modern reform era is that they are not held accountable enough, hence the need for state standards backed up by Big Standardized Tests, the results of which are supposed to be used in a very public way to hold the schools accountable. When teachers push back against measures like the BS Tests and VAM as inaccurate, invalid, and unfair, reformsters charge that teachers just don't want to be held accountable. 

So what is the issue here? Part of it likely comes down ownership. Public schools are owned by the public, therefor it makes sense for members of the taxpaying public be elected as stewards of this public resource. Charter schools are privately owned and operated, but publicly financed. If I put a swimming pool in my own back yard, I'm not keen on the idea of the neighborhood electing a board to run it. But if I am collecting money from my neighbors to pay the costs of owning and operating the pool, now the issue becomes fuzzier. 

Some public education supporters are going to be quick to call out charter supporters as anti-democracy, and that's not wrong, exactly, but I don't think it's an ideological thing so much as a business thing. The ideal model of charter operation remains the business run by the visionary CEO, a model we've loved in this country since the days of Carnegie and Frick. One brilliant leader, unfettered by government regulations or union rules, a Gulliver-sized master unrestrained by any Lilliputian army--that's the dream. Elected boards just get in the way.

Critics will, as Allen perpetually does, claim that school boards aren't really democratic because they are controlled by the teachers union. In big cities, both unions are well-heeled charter fans are spending tons of money (witness the incredibly expensive LAUSD election that just wrapped up), and the rich folks often win. Yet teachers unions do not regularly call for the abolition of elected boards. Union "control" of elected school boards is grossly over-diagnosed, and in much of the country is not remotely an issue. But for the visionary CEO, a board that listens to the teachers or their union at all is listening too much.

The other part of the charter argument is that they have huge accountability due to market forces. No oversight or accountability of a traditional sort is required, they argue, because families can vote with their feet. This hasn't worked, and isn't going to work any time soon. Charter schools only need to capture a small sliver of the market, which means that if a few families vote with their feet, the sensible thing for the charter to do is not to sit down and have a soul-searching discussion about their direction, but instead to start sifting through the tens of thousands of potential families to replace the leavers. And the beauty of schools is that thousands of new "customers" enter the "market" every year. So go ask someone like Eva Moskowitz how many times she has reconsidered her approach to Success Academy because an angry parent threatened to pull their child out. On top of all that, the cost of pulling your child out of a school mid-year is considerably greater than, say, changing which food truck you buy lunch from, so parents face another barrier to that foot voting. 

Do public schools always get the accountability piece right? Nope. But the presence of the legal requirement means that parents have some leverage. Parents of charter school students in many states have no leverage at all, with charters even winning court cases to "protect" their private business information. 

Biden's proposal is not a radically earth-shattering one. Many states already have similar requirements; in PA, if you want to set up a charter school, you need authorization from the local public school board, aka the elected representatives of the taxpayers who will have to finance your charter school. Is there anything unreasonable or unfair about that? The requirements vary from state to state, but note that Biden's rep said "same standards of transparency and accountability as public schools." If that requirement is a real, serious problem for charter schools, why should public schools be hit with it? And if it's not a hardship for public schools, then why shouldn't charter schools meet the same standards?

For eons, the argument has been made that since public schools use taxpayer dollars, the taxpayers are entitled to know how that money is spent, and I have never disagreed. It doesn't seem radical to extend that same level of accountability to charter schools. This is one thing that the Biden education plan absolutely gets right. If charter fans don't like it, they'll need to explain why the taxpayers shouldn't be able to demand accountability from them. 

 

Schooling For Democracy (Or What Is Education For)

I just read a piece that doesn't necessarily say anything new, but puts it all in a useful frame. Let me show you the first paragraph:

There’s no such thing as a “good school” in the abstract. Every school serves a particular community, in a particular time and place, with its own needs and desires. A good school in rural Montana might not be a good school in Midtown Manhattan, just as a good school in 1920 might not be a good school today. This doesn’t mean that we can’t define school quality. It does, however, mean that we can’t define quality without first considering the needs of a school’s time and place.

This is from the Phi Delta Kappan, a publication I don't always trust (hell, they give a platform to William Bennett), written by Jon Valant, a fellow at the Brooking Institution, a place that often demonstrates why economists should stay the heck away from education policy. "Good schools for a troubled democracy" has the hallmark of Brookings writings, a sort of odd atonality tied to the sensation that perhaps within Brookings they never actually read any of the mountains of prose about education policy. 

Valant's thesis is that "the school system we have today in the United States--and our conception of a good school--is mismatched to the needs of our time." This will make more sense if you don't think of yourself as included in "we" and "our." His basic framing of modern education history is what makes this piece worthwhile. 

Valant focuses on the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, the infamous Reagan era hit job on public education. While Valant notes that the report did mention the needs for education to create better citizens, "the rhetoric of economic ruin and international competition drowned out the message." 

According to the logic of the times, the nation’s most pressing need — and, consequently, the most urgent task for our public schools — was to strengthen the workforce.

Valant isn't going to get into a discussion of whether the report's analysis was correct or not. He just wants to point to how this formulation affected our ideas about which schools were good or not. Standards and test-based accountability would be the policy solutions that "had an elegance to their logic and at least the appearance of rigor." The system was "fueled by numbers," and before long, "those numbers begat more numbers." Valant muses on how the school rating systems "rely heavily on students' test scores" and his musings are those of a man who is unaware that there's a cottage industry of folks who have already examined, dissected, and written about said system. Well, that's not entirely fair--he cites Daniel Koretz at one point and refers to another issue as "well known." But there's a certain freshness to his approach, and it still gets us to the conclusion we already know--

A good system of measurement and evaluation can be a powerful tool for school improvement. However, we built a bad one, which is worse than having no system at all.

And he wants to make a point that brings us back to the question of good schools:

Our test-based accountability system limits what we, as a nation, believe schools can and should do. The machinery of standardized testing is so impressive, having such a powerful aura of objective truth, that it can trick us into believing that schools are only capable of teaching that which we can readily measure. Let’s call it the wrongheaded idea that “what isn’t measurable isn’t doable.” Testing whether students know how to multiply fractions is easy. Testing whether students are assembling the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that will allow them to listen and respond carefully to each other’s ideas, or to identify and reject propaganda 15 years after they graduate, is hard. That can give the impression that the former is teachable and the latter is not. But that’s not the case. We just aren’t as good at measuring some types of learning as others — and that’s OK. If we fail to appreciate this point, we risk thinking too narrowly about schools’ capabilities.

Well, yes. He's skipping some other critical issues here, like, for instance, the possibility that some folks intend to deliberately narrow our ideas about school's capabilities, the better to monetize and McDonald-ize the whole business. 

He has a particular destination in mind. The Nation At Risk/NCLB framing of school has reduced the idea of Good Schools to narrow vocational prep, a producer of firewood to fuel the engines of the economy. We've dumped all the things that are hard to measure, and that's bad news because that very stuff is what we should be teaching now.

Now, I'm going to pause for a moment, because Valant has just kind of glossed over a major issue here, by accepting as a given that the narrow, test-centered, meat widget-producing education that reformnsters have been trying to implement for the past 37 years was, at that particular time, a legitimate definition of Good Schools. Whereas a few million folks, many of them actual education professionals, have been arguing vociferously that this was never, ever a good model. 

His description of the shift, while in some ways accurate, has some gappage:

As David Labaree (1997, 2018) has described, Americans have, over the long term, changed how they’ve thought about education. The country built its public school system to mold virtuous citizens, but our focus has shifted toward preparing students to be capable workers. Now, he argues, we tend to see education as a private good (benefiting the individual student) more than a public good (benefiting the community at large). We think of schools as existing mainly to provide credentials, which young people rely upon as they attempt to outcompete each other for a limited number of desirable college and career opportunities.

This isn't wrong, but it describes the shift as something that just kind of happened, rather than a shift that has been aggressively pushed by billionaires and politicians, privatizers and profiteers. Some folks do think of schools in this new, narrow way--but let's not pretend it occurred through some natural societal shift. This view has been sold, and sold hard, and it should be noted, sold hard by wealthy, powerful people who would never for one second accept that narrow definition for their own children. 

Valant notes that parents say they expect good schools to develop things like strong moral character. But, he goes on to note, they evaluate schools based on student test scores. He believes that we've accepted the notion that good schools are distinguished by their ability to provide academic preparation for college and career (and here he skips over the question of whether test scores even measure that meagre goal-- spoiler alert: they do not). 

His point, however, is that beyond all of this, these narrow skills are not what we need. We are enmeshed in the problems of democracy, propaganda, conspiracy baloney and 70 million people who can live through four years of a Trump presidency and not notice anything terribly wrong. Valant writes a hell of a paragraph here:

The most severe threats we face as a country, now and in the foreseeable future, aren’t about workforce training. They aren’t threats that can be neutralized with better literacy and numeracy, or even by helping more students make a successful transition to college (though those things may help). The problem isn’t that we’re unprepared for our 21st-century economy; it’s that we’re unprepared for our 21st-century democracy.

Valant wants you to know that this is not your father's political landscape or your mother's society. There's a whole batch of 21st Century skills that we need, and he lists some examples, but he's not here to lay out the full picture of exactly what a modern Good School would look like. Mostly he just wants to make the argument that Good Schools should "serve democratic and social goals, not just economic goals."

Valant says little that hasn't been said before, and often, but he says it well. This is one of those articles that is good for sharing with your friend who doesn't really pay much attention to that education stuff but gets the sense that some people are upset about something. It cuts a great many corners and has some massive gaps, but what's there is true. We had schools that tried to teach the whole child and create better citizens. Some folks decided to redefine schools as "college and career" vocational prep test-centered operations. We need to change the idea of Good Schools back again. It's worth your time to read the whole thing.

 

Anti-Union Activists Want To "Speak Out For Teachers"

 Among the folks pushing the narrative that schools are shut down because of the Evil Teachers Unions, we find this sparkly website--  Speak Out For Teachers. Here's their pitch:

Are you one of the millions of teachers eager to return to safe, in-person learning — only to find a teachers’ union is fighting to keep schools closed and students at home? Share your story below. It might even air on national television!

"It's time to speak out for teachers," they declare, as they invite you to hear some teacher stories they have already collected. There are three so far.

One is Catherine Barrett from Phoenix, who a few years back was part of #RedforEd until she became a GOP political operative for Doug Ducey, attacking the #REdforEd movement. She also turned up as chair of a group pushing a Classroom Code of Ethics in Arizona, proposed gag rule for teachers in the wake of #RedforEd; that proposal turned out not be an Arizona thing, but an anti-teacher move cooked up by activist David Horowitz and pushed out across the country. 

Another is Bruce Aster. Aster was a legislative assistant in DC before becoming a teacher, and he has never been a union fan. His profile is listed on For Kids and Country, the website of anti-union activist Rebecca Friedrichs. They have more in common than a hard-right anti-union stance; when Friedrichs' SCOTUS case stalled because of Justice Scalia's death, Aster agreed to be one of the faces of a new lawsuit against the California union over the issue of fair share fees. 

“I think tenure, as currently practiced, protects those few ‘deadwood teachers’ with no incentive to excel in their craft, and the lack of any merit element in pay is a disincentive to excellence,” Aster said in a statement provided by his attorney. “I strongly favor charter schools, vouchers, and more choice for parents about schools.”

Janus got there first, but Aster was part of that crowd.

Speak Out For Teachers is brought to us by the folks at Center for Union Facts, an organization that is heavily anti-union (not just teachers, but unions of all shapes and sizes). Their website doesn't tell you much about who they are. The answer to the FAQ question "So who are you guys, really?" is " The Center for Union Facts is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization supported by foundations, businesses, union members, and the general public. We are dedicated to showing Americans the truth about today's union leadership." So, they aren't saying who they are.

That's okay, because other people have been doing the research.

The CUF is part of the constellation of conservative dark money activist groups run by Richard Berman. Berman has been at this for years; he's been profiled by a variety of outlets, and you can spend a good afternoon studying up on line. He started out in the food and drink industry, opposing minimum wage laws and forming Beverage Retailers Against Drunk Driving, a group created to counter MADD. He's proud of a "win ugly" approach of personal attacks, and promises his donors anonymity by running their money through his many various groups. One of his groups ran a full-page ad in USA Today against teachers and in support of the Vergara lawsuit. Right after Janus, CUF set up a website, promoted by billboards, that referred folks to My Pay My Say, the Mackinac Center's initiative to try to get people to leave the union. You can catch more of his exploits at Sourcewatch, but the bottom line is that this is a guy who fights hard for the bosses and will try just about anything to trash unions. 

This frickin' guy.

So, Speak Out For Teachers is the same old song and dance-- some rich folks trying to convince teachers that the evil unions are misrepresenting teachers, and here are a couple of anti-union teachers to help make the point. 

It's unfortunate that they decided to attach this baloney to an actual serious problem. Whether or not to open schools is a hard scary call, and most of the choices available in most parts of the country are all bad. The science is not clear, the leadership is barely there, and people are looking for the solution that, for them, will suck least. None of this is easy.

These folks can claim all day that it's the evil unions trying to move to virtual school (for some reason, never clearly specified, because "teachers don't want to work" seems stupid and "teachers don't want to die" seems obvious), but in fact there are districts that opened school buildings, and the families stayed away. There is virtual schooling going on in places where the union barely exists, and there are charter schools with no organized labor force at all who have also closed their doors and fired up the internet (Success Academy will now be remote learning through March). But I guess when your main goal is to slam the unions, you just take whatever opening you can get. I have to conclude that Speak Out For Teachers doesn't, and not only can it be ignored, but it should be ignored.