In most cases, particularly a John Wayne movie, you gut it out, reach deep inside and get the job done. Do or die, there is no try.
But another part of our life has taken a different view of "failure is not an option" and that would be public education. They long ago embraced "no failure" by dispensing with F's, and retention. Really, does anyone fail a course, or heaven forbid, a grade anymore? Not for some decades. In reaching this education nirvana they fully embraced the process of "when all else fails, lower our standards."
This was fine in before times of Woebegone where every parent believed their kid, their teachers and their schools were all above average. In those times grade inflation was blindly accepted while simultaneously never speaking its name. Until pandemic. Shutdowns. Re-openings. But not schools, at least not here in DeKalb. Why? Lots of reasons. Teachers, at least those most outspoken, seem to be of the mind that their paycheck, perhaps their job is guaranteed without regard to what they do or how well they do it. They are leveraging the "lower our standards" to insist that teaching from the basement is more than adequate, students are learning, even flourishing though some still admit that F2F is "better." The problem is that an effective ban on cameras in the classroom (who really wants a stakeholder parent to observe their child's class) has been replaced with a parent in the virtual classroom. The "adequacy" is being questioned. Furthermore, some parents work outside the home, many drive around seeing shops and restaurants open, private schools holding class and wonder why they are getting the shaft.
But teachers are pushing back. In Chicago the union called a sick-out forcing re-negotiations on remote teachers. They are advancing the notion that schools, who issues the paychecks, are essential, but that teachers' presence at those schools is not. Unsurprisingly they expect, with each advance of political will to open schools, with each rollout of vaccine, with each scientific study to move the goalposts. They are even beginning to say, out loud, that there will be no F2F in the 2021-2022 school year, perhaps never.
Some are fighting back. Broward County, where there is a real teachers' union, has issued back-to-work orders and won a battle in court to do just that. The media battle was less civilized. The district did a quick survey of social media, finding many "remote working" teachers posting beach-blanket-bingo parties, destination weddings, nights out on the town, all flouting CoVid protocols, while at the same time insisting the pandemic is just too out of control for a return-to-work. Here's the real kicker: these teachers accused the district of spying. That's right, you post something on public social media and someone sees it and holds it against you and all of a sudden that's spying. At least if you're a teacher living la vida loca. Turns out it was not spying, it was evidence that may well have won the day in court.
Will the teachers prevail in their all-pay, no-work campaign? Probably not. The NYT op-eds are calling for kids and therefore teachers in the classroom. Immediately. Papa Joe, who you might expect to do whatever the teachers' unions (or any other union for that matter) tell him to do is actually calling for K-8 back on campus in the first 100 days of his administration. Closer to home parents and taxpayers have to be questioning the very existence of public schools. While you may take a dim opinion of teacher-remote classes even considering it little better than nothing, you really need to ask and answer: is it really that much less than DeKalb Schools in the before times?
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