> The virus barely affects children

Even if that was true, it's not true of adults, including the ones that work in schools, or the ones that have children in the household.

They said "to protect the children" instead of "to protect the teachers". They lied. People don't have to come with that rebuttal every time someone corrects the lie that we do this to protect the children.

This is what's becoming worrisome to me. It would be horrible to lose so many of our elders. But is that as bad as wrecking our young? Someone from LessWrong needs to step in and run the cold-hearted utilitarian calculus on this.

There may have been some political angles being played, too. But who are we to judge.

Are all people either children or the elderly?

Youngish adults don't need protection.

Mostly it's driven by the teacher's unions. If we wanted to we could find ways to open the schools. It's just the people who feel the effects of the policy making are not the ones with a voice.

> Mostly it's driven by the teacher's unions. If we wanted to we could find ways to open the schools. It's just the people who feel the effects of the policy making are not the ones with a voice.

No, the problem you are complaining of here is that the people that feel the effects of the policy making have too much of a voice.

I mean, unless you are have a convincing argument that teachers are somehow unaffected by policy regarding the manner in which teaching is conducted.

Teachers unions represent the best interests of teachers, not students or parents. That’s just a fact, but people often defer to the teachers’ unions on “what’s best.” An excellent bit of marketing on the part of the unions.

<X> unions represent the best interests of <X>

A common teacher complaint, IME, is an expectation that they should be ready and willing to sacrifice anything because of their love of the students. Teachers have every right to have their own interests represented.

Much as I'd like to see our schools re-open, I wouldn't sign up to be the school nurse for anything. Every single kid with every slight Covid symptom is going to come to my office with their poorly fitting badly worn masks. What a nightmare.

There is some initial evidence that teacher unions may influence school openings. From the abstract:

Using data on the reopening decisions of 835 public school districts in the United States, we find that school districts in locations with stronger teachers’ unions are less likely to reopen in person even after we control semi-parametrically for differences in local demographic characteristics. These results are robust to four measures of union strength, various potential confounding characteristics, and a further disaggregation to the county level. We also do not find evidence to suggest that measures of COVID-19 risk are correlated with school reopening decisions.

http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3684867

All those other countries that have way better educational outcomes than the USA also have teacher's unions, and their teacher's unions are at least as strong.

If unions were really the fundamental problem it would be hard to explain why those other educational systems can be so much better than the USA's.

The problem is every time the teachers Union is fighting for something they say “it’s for the kids” when it’s really not.

Teachers unions on COVID have not been shy about citing their members health and safety as a central concern.