After teachers’ unions did everything possible to keep schools shut down, the torrent of parental anger finally forced even the Democrat political machine that the unions had bought and paid for a long time to actually reopen schools.

The Democrats and their media suddenly reversed course and insisted that they always wanted to reopen schools. Hilariously, even Randi Weingarten, and the nation’s worst and most parasitic union class, insisted that it always wanted in-person education.

Except that now the system is back to closing schools to give teachers “mental health days”.

Mental health days are a pretty unique innovation because no other category of employees get to announce that they can’t come in for a day or two a week because they all need time for “self-care”.

A Bloomberg editorial correctly blasts this corrupt scam.

Instead, some districts, from Bellevue, Washington, to Brevard County, Florida, have done the opposite. Citing staffing shortages related to teacher exhaustion, among other excuses, schools have been adding last-minute vacation days, often with little notice for parents. Leading the mental-health relief trend, officials in Detroit announced that schools would conduct in-person instruction only four days a week during December, with Fridays all remote.

Reducing in-person class time is not just a disaster for students — it’s also a betrayal of public trust. Congress has passed three separate relief packages, across two administrations, with funds intended to help districts stay open. But tens of billions of dollars apparently remain unspent.

Policy makers should require districts to demonstrate that they’re using these funds to keep schools open. At a minimum, the practice of adding unplanned vacation days should be halted. 

What the editorial doesn’t do is address the ‘why’.

And the ‘why’ is pretty obvious. The pandemic divided workers into classes, “essential” and “non-essential”, and those who had to work in-person and those who didn’t. The more professional classes were more likely to be able to work remotely. And the teaching establishment where graduate degrees have unfortunately become routine, believes that it is a member of the professional remote work class.

Everything else is just an excuse.

I have friends and family who are teachers, who go into work, and do their jobs well, so this certainly doesn’t apply across the board. But it is what’s behind the war against in-person education.

Class remains the unaddressed issue of the pandemic. No one provides grocery workers or janitors with mental health days. The self-care scam which moved from people who actually needed it (people suffering through traumatic experiences, caregivers, veterans) to every woke hipster college student who uses it to turn their narcissistic laziness into a moral entitlement. Those same people have become teachers, they dominate the educational infrastructure, set the agenda, and they’re destroying education for millions of students.

But they also turned Virginia red.