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Eh, schools were most likely going to close regardless of what people wanted. Staffing shortages were happening nationwide during COVID. Without enough bus drivers, you can't get kids to school. Without the teachers, they just sit in the auditorium on their phones after being shuffled around from overpacked classrooms (real story I remember reading in like mid 2021). Without the cafeteria workers, they can't make enough lunch. Not enough maintenance workers means things breaking. Etc etc.
Staff shortages were so bad that some school districts were going back to remote learning at least as late as Jan 2022. And even in Mar 2022, multiple states were deploying the national guard to work as substitutes. Some areas were even taking police officers off the beat in order to work as substitutes.
It's easy to say in retrospect "we should have opened the schools" but it wasn't easy at the time. Even the schools and states that were trying to reopen kept having to fall back to remote or fail somehow else.
The things you identify would be a change in US culture. And particular blue state third-worldism. Florida reopened their schools in the fall. I agree closing the schools for the spring semester probably had to happen. Too many older teachers and figuring out how to give some people an out. The staff shortages are just the same issues blue states always have. They fail at providing public goods.
Nobody is saying in “retrospect”. Many states did reopen. Many people said as it was happening that we should open the schools. Or at a minimum some form of hybrid to accommodate some staff with immune issues.
Greg Abbott had created a task force specifically about their staff shortages in Texas in 2022. In Oklahoma, they used employees across various state agencies as substitutes.. In Iowa many schools have moved to (and many are still at!) four day school weeks. And here's a story from 2024 about Florida still dealing with staff shortages of teachers, bus drivers and substitutes.
In specifically Florida, the shortages were so bad that they had to draw substitutes from non traditional sources. One district even emailed the parents asking for them to step in as substitute workers. Some shortages are still ongoing! Like last year some parents were dealing with delays in school bus pickups due to shortages of workers
Honestly the school week probably should be 3-4 days a week like college. It’s more efficient.
Those areas did open
Do you even read your own links? Florida is quoted as paying $10-13 an hour for substitutes. Or just google a bunch of links for staff shortages? If this was important they could hike pay. You can make double walking into a Chipotle.
Florida schools perform fine so it’s probably not a real issue. Though the demographic adjusted stats don’t account for Flordia Hispanics being white Europeans while California is filled with Amerindians.
Yes that's basic economics. Having to raise your pay in a shortage is the default thing expected in a shortage. Supply goes down but demand stays the same = price goes up. That doesn't change that supply went down.
This was about pandemic caused shortages of labor. Not states refusing to hire workers.
Your articles come closer to proving my point by Bayesian logic. You went google searching for “teacher shortage” and the best articles you could find were school districts offering wages 50% of no-skill wages which is essentially no different than just deciding not to hire.
It’s like saying I want a Ferrari and my bid is $15k. I don’t actually want a Ferrari.
If workers currently cost X part of the budget, and then a supply shock causes them to cost 1.5x the budget in order to maintain the same quantity of workers, then it is a problem of shortages. Price is the result of supply and demand. Yes you can pay more to help make up for the shortage and get new supply, but that you have to pay more is because of a supply shock.
The same way if you were to buy cheese every week for 2 dollars and then suddenly a disease spread through the cows and less cheese could be made this year and it now cost 4 dollars. Yes you can pay more to get the same amount of cheese for yourself. There is still a cheese shortage.
Wages going up were not a result of the pandemic. They are still up. It’s government handouts. Military disability. Food stamps. Etc. but $13 an hour for someone with a bachelor degree was never a serious attempt to get workers.
Same story in everything run by Dems. Why can’t we build housing? Regulations. But nuclear is too expensive. Why is that? It’s creating a problem and then complaining we can not doing that thing after you created the problem.
We spend 225 billion a year now on military disability. Honestly I was stupid not joining the military. Spend 4 years and get $5k for life. 15% of the working age population is now on food stamps.
It sounds like you're just ranting about tangential issues here instead. Supply and demand is a rather ironclad economic law.
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