Finally, someone said it: Long-term public school closures were a terrible mistake for the Democratic Party.
“Democrats Need an Education Reset,” suggested Rahm Emanuel for the Wall Street Journal on October 1, 2025. “Covid closings deservedly hurt our reputation. To regain public trust, we need to embrace reform.”
And with that, Mr. Emanuel said what few prominent Democrats have been willing to admit over the past five years:
“Few things are more important than ensuring every American student can read by third grade and do basic math by eighth. Republicans would rather privatize than fix our public education system, and Democrats must realize that if money alone could solve the problem, every American student would be a National Merit Scholar. We’ve written too many blank checks — particularly following Covid — without ensuring results or accountability for the investment.”
“We’ve spent the past five years debating pronouns without noticing that too many students can’t tell you what a pronoun is. The U.S. has been more focused on whether a school is named for Abraham Lincoln than whether students can tell you why he is an American giant. We’ve become so obsessed with bathroom access that we’ve ignored classroom excellence. America has lost the plot. Democrats need to refocus on the fundamentals in the elementary years — when it comes to high school, we need to be pursuing fundamental reform.”
“For decades, when pollsters asked voters which party they trusted more on education, Democrats maintained, on average, a 14-point advantage. More recently that gap closed, then flipped to favor Republicans. That’s in part because we made the grave error of refusing to reopen schools during the pandemic, even when the evidence suggested it was safe.”
Mr. Emanuel was absolutely correct, though he was apparently too polite to call out the problem by name.
There was a reason public schools in impoverished districts like some of the ones in Chicago stayed closed so long, semester after semester, even as private schools reopened safely, public schools in other U.S. school districts reopened safely, and public schools around the world reopened (or in some cases, stayed open) to in-person learning — safely.
There was a reason public schools in Chicago stayed stubbornly closed, long after it became obvious to pretty much everyone that phoned-in “virtual learning” wasn’t working for anyone — but most especially not working for impoverished students, students with special needs, and students in working-class, predominantly minority neighborhoods generationally beset by chronically underperforming schools in the first place.
Teachers Unions.
The correlation couldn’t be more clear. In school districts like Chicago’s, where the Chicago Teachers’ Union is an ultra-powerful political machine capable of throwing a Mayoral race, public schools stayed closed the longest.
In cities and municipalities with weak teachers’ unions, students were back in class after a short disruption in the spring of 2020.
And yet, despite this colossally unfair failure, despite being the public face of long-term school closures, despite the truly indefensible position that public school teachers (unlike fast-food delivery drivers and liquor store clerks) were nonessential employees and thus could stay home indefinitely, U.S. teachers union leadership remains unchanged.
Randi Weingarten is currently on a rather odd book tour, weighing in on important topics that could potentially impact millions of U.S. public school children, including falling test scores, a crisis of chronic absenteeism, and declining public school enrollment rates.
Oh, wait: Scratch that. Weingarten isn’t discussing any of those things. She is instead using her bully pulpit to decry U.S. President Donald Trump as a Nazi and cast dispersions on Israel.
Sensible Democrats, like Rahm Emanuel and other prominent Democrats who are brave enough to call a spade a spade — i.e. admit school closures were disastrous for U.S. schoolchildren and the Democratic Party — should also call for a change in leadership from the Teachers Unions.
Long-term public school closures past 2020 were a terrible mistake. Five years on, we are looking at a perfect storm of crisis in education:
- Devastating learning loss as evidenced by declining test scores — falling hardest in school districts that stayed closed to in-person learning the longest.
- Chronic absenteeism in classrooms in heavily Democratic Party-voting districts in particular.
- A shocking rise in juvenile crime in these same areas.
There is a clear culprit — but this isn’t a science experiment. It isn’t repeatable. There is no way to recreate the circumstances under which public schools closed in 2020, some for weeks, some for months…some for years. So there will be voices that shout “correlation doesn’t equal causation.”
But that is disingenuous, at best. And we all know it.
Closing public schools was a mistake, full stop. Plenty of informed voices have been saying so all along, even as they faced cancelation, firing, and ostracization since 2020.
But Rahm Emanuel is right. The Democratic Party owns long-term public school closures in Chicago school districts — and plenty of others.
Until the party and progressives in the media admit what everyone knows to be true, it will be hard for many parents of public-school-age children to move forward with trusting the Democratic Party.
(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)