The erasure of teachers from these considerations of school safety is all the more striking given how present teachers become when the finger-pointing begins. “Teachers unions: Please stop the delays,” Wen tweeted, on Tuesday. “We need all schools to be in-person, now.” For many of the most emphatic critics of school closures, it is teachers, not the Omicron variant of covid-19, who have thrown schools into this latest round of upheaval; teachers, not a governmental failure to address matters ranging from classroom sizes to H.V.A.C. maintenance to the distribution of tests and masks, who have wrenched a public-health crisis into the shape of an ugly labor dispute. Prior to the fall of 2020, in an effort to reopen school buildings, some school districts formally classified teachers as “essential workers,” that emblematic label of the pandemic, which at once valorizes the individual while stripping her of any agency: the essential worker simply must go to work. That label has largely been applied to low-wage workers, who are disproportionately women and people of color. Unlike many essential workers, however, teachers have a union, and all the possibilities of self-determination that go with it. They have been able to insist on different conditions for their work, and to force negotiations over those conditions. As a country, we have grown less used to such conflicts.

The United States, in the twenty-first century, is not good at providing public services, or at acknowledging the diversity of the needs of its public. There are teachers and children whose loved ones endured awful, solitary deaths in the first covid waves, who are traumatized by those memories and who are not reassured by reports that Omicron is a mostly harmless variant. There are teachers and children who are immunocompromised, or who live with immunocompromised people, with similar misgivings. There are also children who rely on the free breakfast and lunch provided at school as their only guaranteed meals of the day. There are children who are legally entitled to special-education services through the public-school system and who cannot meaningfully access those supports across a Zoom link, or who can’t access them at all because they don’t have a reliable home Wi-Fi connection. There are teachers who, if schools go remote, will somehow have to instruct their students and facilitate their children’s learning at the same time. There are students who suffered terribly due to the social isolation and learning loss induced by as much as a year and a half of remote learning. And there are teachers who have been pushed to their limits—mentally, emotionally, and physically—by the apparently intractable “reality” of school understaffing, which forces them to teach enormous groups of children, or outside their specialty areas, or all day without a break, as their colleagues recover from covid at home.