When the COVID lockdowns began and our schools closed down, “In effect, officials steered a car off the road, threw a cinder block on the accelerator, then jumped out of the vehicle with passengers still in the back,” says journalist David Zweig.

Ben Austin, founding director of Education Civil Rights Now, writes that United Teachers Los Angeles “wielded its considerable power” to “trap” students and keep them home “indefinitely.” And Corey DeAngelis of the CATO Institute says teachers' unions “def[ied] evidence” on the virus, instead “prioritizing union demands over kids.”

Listening to critics of teachers' unions, you’d never guess that all we were trying to do during COVID was protect our students and their families.

That the COVID school closures were wrong and that teachers' unions were to blame is now a fundamental tenet of modern conservatism. Yet a considerable body of research has emerged that supports the basic contentions teachers' unions have been making all along.

Critics’ principal assertion is that closing schools was unnecessary because children were at little risk of serious harm from COVID. Teachers' unions asserted that, because students in large public school districts are disproportionately low-income, they often live in apartments with extended families and multiple generations, leaving these........

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