Anonymous wrote:The key is avoiding politicization.

What drives me a little crazy is that when I talk to parents in DCPS, they mostly want similar things. They're mostly reasonable. Most parents are keeping their kids home, and those who are sending them into school have a higher risk tolerance and support older or at-risk teachers staying home.

And both groups are very very happy teachers are being vaccinated. The people who are most pushing back against the WTU are, in my world, the media and in-person, hardcore political partisans.

We don't want that! We want this de-politicized. But if you want to depoliticize it, we have to understand first who is politicizing it, and why. Once I read these articles a lot more about school reopenings became clear to me.

Anonymous wrote:there aren’t a meaningful number of Rs here. to me this reads as the union poisoning the well.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:there aren’t a meaningful number of Rs here.

There are many conservatives who post here.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yeah I don’t think the debate we are seeing here is from the local Republicans taking over the date. There are like 10 of them here.

Maybe this framing is useful for the debate in like Wisconsin or somewhere with a real political divide, but I am not convinced at all that this article accounts for what we are seeing in DC

Yeah, I don't think the details of DC / MCPS school openings are being driven primarily by a political divide.

But I do think the national media discussion *is* driven by conservative talkers, and that eventually filters down into other places too.

A lot of our national political discussion is driven by the right.

I hear less of the anti-union "force schools open" discussion from actual real-life DC parents and much more of it on the internet.

Anonymous wrote:Yeah I don’t think the debate we are seeing here is from the local Republicans taking over the date. There are like 10 of them here.

Maybe this framing is useful for the debate in like Wisconsin or somewhere with a real political divide, but I am not convinced at all that this article accounts for what we are seeing in DC

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:there aren’t a meaningful number of Rs here.

There are many conservatives who post here.

Anonymous wrote:there aren’t a meaningful number of Rs here.

Anonymous wrote:The key is avoiding politicization.

What drives me a little crazy is that when I talk to parents in DCPS, they mostly want similar things. They're mostly reasonable. Most parents are keeping their kids home, and those who are sending them into school have a higher risk tolerance and support older or at-risk teachers staying home.

And both groups are very very happy teachers are being vaccinated. The people who are most pushing back against the WTU are, in my world, the media and in-person, hardcore political partisans.

We don't want that! We want this de-politicized. But if you want to depoliticize it, we have to understand first who is politicizing it, and why. Once I read these articles a lot more about school reopenings became clear to me.

In recent days, Republicans have tried to project confidence that they’ve found a killer attack line on President Biden: They can use the increasing anger of parents over the failure of schools to reopen to win back the suburban voters they’ve lost.

As Republicans describe this, it’s a twofer: They can channel the genuine hardships this has imposed on countless Americans to their advantage while also tarring Democrats as in the pocket of teachers unions, casting them as tools of their special interests.

when covid-19 is tamed sufficiently, and when normal life resumes, including kids returning to school — it will be in no small part because of solutions implemented on Democrats’ watch, which Republicans are already resisting.

When I asked Maloney to respond to GOP confidence in this attack line, he pointed out that we’re at the beginning of a long process, noting that Biden’s first big package hasn’t even been passed into law yet. Meanwhile, Republicans are largely opposing it.

GOP lawmakers, while offering no commitment to meaningfully engage on policy proposals, have responded to continued school closures by striking hard at Biden and Democrats, with more Republicans each week accusing the administration of scaling back their ambitious goals on everything from testing to school reopenings.

“The science says that the schools should open, but instead of listening to the science, the Biden administration is caving in to Democrat special interest groups,” RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel told POLITICO. “As a result, the education of our children is suffering and hundreds of thousands of working moms are being forced out of the workforce.”

...

“Their proposal buys into the myth from Big Labor that schools should stay shut a lot longer,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said last week of Biden’s “rescue” package.

...

[ex-president] had frequently called for schools to be reopened without conditioning his remarks on safety measures. Candidates across the country were also dealing with surges of the virus that overwhelmed local hospitals.

“The [ex-]president’s messaging was so toxic to your average suburban voter that we didn't feel like we were getting anywhere with it,” said one GOP strategist who worked on the races in 2020. “What we needed and wanted was somebody who was saying ‘the risks are low. Let’s reopen schools safely with proper precautions.’ He wasn’t capable of saying anything that nuanced.”

“But,” the person added, “if you asked people, ‘do you think we should safely reopen schools?’ the numbers were better.’”