If you have school-age children, you may be wondering if they’ll ever get an education. On Tuesday the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest education union, threatened “safety strikes” if reopening plans aren’t to its liking. Some state and local governments are insisting that public K-12 schooling this fall be conducted online three to five days a week and imposing stringent conditions on those students who actually make it to the classroom.

Yet there are three reasons to be optimistic about the future of education. First, many parents will be more prepared to home-school their kids than they were in the spring. They or their hired teachers will do a better job of educating children, in many cases, than the public schools.

These are the opening paragraphs of my op/ed “The Virus May Strike Teachers Unions.” Wall Street Journal, July 29 (July 30 print edition.)

I’ll post the whole thing 30 days from now.

Actually the title the Journal gave it is a little misleading. My focus in the op/ed is not so much on teachers’ unions as it is on idea that a lot of parents will find that the private educational options they choose for their children are superior to mediocre government schools. Therefore, I argue, when the pandemic ends, there will be a substantially larger home school sector and more push for charter schools.

Postscript:

There was an unusually high percentage of good comments on my op/ed on the WSJ site. Here’s one I just noticed:

In Michigan, our Governor ordered auto insurance companies to issue rebates – due to folks driving less I guess.

But amazingly, our Governor who is owned by the teachers union, gave no such order  to rebate the portion of property taxes that go toward public schools. Even though there is no way teachers, who stopped in school teaching in March, provided the same level of service.

This needs to change.

Indeed!