Choosing Democracy: Bretón Vs. the Sacramento TeachersBretón Vs. the Sacramento Teachers
Sacramento Bee opinionnaire Marcos Bretón offers up one of his frequent attacks on the Sacramento teachers’ union in today’s Bee https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/article249152435.html.
It is the usual anti union diatribe filled with paragraphs cut and pasted from prior columns. He purposes to deal with the issue of opening schools in Sacramento. If you ignore all the hyperbole, you get down to the dividing issue – when should Sacramento City Unified re open schools.
There is substantive agreement between the district administration and the union except for one issue.
Should teachers be given vaccines prior to returning to work. That is the issue.
Bretón has one side; the union argues teachers should have vaccines first. That's all. The remainder in innuendo and name calling.
Below is an alternate view- with data citations.
Re: Opening schools
David Dayen, The American Prospect Feb.15, 2021
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Last Friday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finally released a long-awaited set of guidelines for how to safely reopen schools. It really says what the data has said for a while: schools are generally safe when community transmission is low, less safe when transmission is high, and only really safe when following mitigation guidelines, which include masking, social distancing, frequent hand washing and things like not coughing out loud without covering your mouth, sanitation, ventilation, quarantine and isolation for the sick, and contact tracing.
Many observers have put the lack of school reopening on teachers and particularly teachers unions, but the polling shows a different story, which plays directly into the above paragraph. If you ask parents whether they want to return their kids to in-person instruction, you see a significant disparity cut by race and class. In general terms, whiter, richer parents are more likely to want to return their kids to school; poorer parents and parents of color do not. And the difference is that, for the whiter and richer parents, their communities have not been as ravaged by COVID, and their schools can actually undertake the mitigation measures.
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Black and Latino communities have seen a disproportionate level of death and suffering during the pandemic. Whether community transmission is high right now or not in their area, the accumulated impact makes it feel high. (In truth, community transmission has been high pretty much everywhere in the country since late fall, and only now is coming CONTINUE READING: Choosing Democracy: Bretón Vs. the Sacramento Teachers |
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