Chicago Teachers Union

The recent standoff between the Chicago Teachers Union and the city government has been interesting. The teachers refused to return to work after the holiday break. They claimed that not enough was being done to manage the virus as the Omicron variant raged.

The mayor insisted that the teachers return to their physical classrooms without delay. The reasons cited are illustrative.

Was academic progress the chief concern? Not really, as that could have been addressed via remote learning.

The big reason was that parents needed to be able to go to work. Many people don’t have jobs that can be done remotely. They can’t work if they have to stay home and watch their kids, and if they don’t work, they might lose their jobs and eventually be evicted.

The second reason cited was food insecurity. Many students depend on the school system for meals.

Let’s think about this critically. It appears that primary function of school is not education but caretaking. Watch the kids so the parents can go to work, and feed the kids, because the jobs that employ the parents don’t pay enough for them to make sure that their children are fed.

If this is really true, that’s a bleak assessment especially in a country as prosperous as the United States. In a country where the wealthiest people have so much money they’ve started their own private space race, working people don’t make enough money to feed their children, instead relying on the public school system to keep the kids fed.

Looking at this through a political lens, this illustrates why President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda is so important. The primary function of schools should be education, not child care and food service. The country needs to invest in affordable child care and in jobs that pay a living wage. And lest we convince ourselves such investment is too expensive, remember that Congress gave billionaires a $2 trillion tax break in 2017. Remember that the defense budget is nearly a trillion dollars PER YEAR, and most of that money goes to defense contractors. Remember the trillions of dollars that were dumped into Afghanistan over twenty years of conflict.

There’s an old saying: “If you want to know someone’s values, look how they spend their money.” The US has always been a place where the wealthy get the lion’s share of the spoils. Build Back Better would take one small step toward helping working people for a change. That’s why the forces of conservatism (read: greed) have pushed back against it so forcefully.