Another feckless insider. Yes, union bosses need to strike a careful balance — in this case between causing teachers to flat-out panic and saying things the public can digest, despite having been trained to blame and abuse teachers. But, seriously, this is like a miners’ union boss taking a balanced approach to sending workers into a collapsing mine. Public discussion of schools has been dominated by a ridiculous set-piece image of isolated tableaus: “kids in class,” “kids at lunch,” etc. That’s not even close to what it is or how it works: huge parts of it are an ever-changing mix of coming, going, congregating, gossiping, horseplay, and plain-old rule-breaking. Add to that how many kids have seen parents under serious stress, and their own talk about how f-d this is and seeing their own future go up in smoke — and what you get will be a LOT of acting-out, including harassment, bullying, and all the rest. And add to THAT the fact that, last I saw, something like half the kids in the country ride busses to and from school — a bespoke environment for infection, with a probability that drivers’s infection rates will climb toward 100%. If schools are ESSENTIAL for ‘the economy,’ then teachers’ unions have the country by the short and curlies and they can drive necessary change. And, over the past few years, striking teachers have been wildly successful, and in ways that reveal how strong public sympathies really are. Take a look at this and ask whether Weingarten, the most prominent teachers’ advocate in the country, is saying what needs to be said.