#New York’s teachers union decides education isn’t really essential — just the paychecks

Enlarge Image

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers.
AP

United Federation of Teachers chief Mike Mulgrew has apparently decided that his members aren’t essential workers after all: He doesn’t want them going back to work this fall without impossible safety guarantees.

That makes teachers a lot less necessary than all the cops, firefighters, sanitation workers and others who kept on showing up all through the lockdowns — not to mention the health care heroes.

Ah, but teachers can do their job remotely, you say? Maybe they can, at least for higher grades — but the UFT wouldn’t allow principals to require teachers to do anything much when it came to online teaching during the spring. Will it bend at all in the fall?

And, for younger students especially, the experts — the American Academy of Pediatrics; the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — all insist that in-person instruction is vital even as the risks of COVID-19 transmission are small.

Yet Mulgrew is promising a court fight to keep his members from having to show up. He says 3,000 teachers have already filed for medical exemptions for the fall, with many more expected. In all, he insists, “a minimum of 60 percent [of instruction] will be done remotely.”

Again, that’s all about teachers’ preferences. The pediatricians and other experts say continued remote learning is a disaster for kids’ social-emotional well-being.

In a rational world, teachers who refuse to show up to teach — with proper social distance and other precautions — would be replaced. At the very least, teachers who won’t show even for online classes would lose their jobs.

If the UFT can’t agree to any of that, it’s proving that it doesn’t really care about education, or the children, at all.