Detroit kept every school open while 775,000 NFL Draft fans flooded their city.
Pittsburgh's teachers unions just proved they learned nothing from that.
And the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers – the same union that kept these kids home during COVID longer than almost any district in Allegheny County – just made sure history repeated itself.
Pittsburgh Closed Schools for Three Days. Detroit Never Had To.
The 2026 NFL Draft comes to Pittsburgh April 23–25, with up to 700,000 fans expected.
Union bosses with the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers and district leadership have already made their call: all 20,000 students go remote April 22–24. The city knew this event was coming for nearly two years and still arrived at the same answer unions always arrive at.
Detroit arrived at a different one.
Detroit hosted the 2024 NFL Draft with a record 775,000 fans in attendance – more than Pittsburgh is even projecting. Schools stayed open. Detroit did not declare a transportation emergency. Detroit showed up for its kids.
Superintendent Wayne Walters called the closure a matter of "maintaining continuity of learning while recognizing the extraordinary circumstances." The extraordinary circumstances are a football event every other host city survived without shutting down their classrooms.
Only one Pittsburgh school sits downtown near the Draft venue. The rest are scattered miles away – including Taylor Allderdice High School in Squirrel Hill, seven miles from where the action is.
A parent of a student there put it plainly: "Our kids need to be in school. We've seen the long-term impact remote learning has had, and it isn't good."
Pittsburgh journalist Salena Zito noted on X exactly what district leadership couldn't figure out in 24 months of planning: there is one school in the downtown core. One.
This isn't a logistics problem. The Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers has run this play before – their president publicly fought the school board when it tried to make masks optional in 2022, and PPS was among the last districts in Allegheny County to return to in-person learning after COVID.
The union knows how to keep buildings closed. They've had years of practice.
Pittsburgh Students Are Still Paying for COVID Learning Loss
Special education students in Pittsburgh are still owed more than 600,000 hours of therapy and instruction the district failed to deliver during COVID closures.
Third-grade reading proficiency sits at 44% – down from 46% the year before. Math proficiency is 41%. Chronic absenteeism hit 34% last year, up from 32%, a rate the RAND Corporation classifies as "extreme."
These numbers are getting worse right now, in 2026, while the district sends 20,000 kids home to complete worksheets on their own schedule.
The 34% absenteeism rate is the most damning number in this story. When a school district – backed by its unions – treats its own buildings as optional, parents and students start to agree.
AEI's chronic absenteeism research makes the connection explicit: cities where school closures became habitual during COVID are the same cities still fighting the attendance crisis today.
Congress examined the academic wreckage in detail. Districts that kept kids in classrooms through 2021 lost roughly 44% of a year's math progress. Districts that went remote lost 60% – nearly half again as much.
Remote learning didn't narrow the gap. It made it permanent. Pittsburgh's unions watched that happen, collected federal COVID bailout money for the damage they caused, and kept the remote-learning machinery ready for the next convenient excuse.
Teachers Unions Are Closing Schools Across the Country
Pittsburgh isn't running an isolated play. Minneapolis closed schools during ICE operations in January, then offered remote learning for a full month claiming "safety concerns."
Northern Virginia and Maryland schools shut down for over a week when 6 to 8 inches of snow fell in February. San Francisco teachers staged a strike that sent 50,000 students home, with another work stoppage threatening Los Angeles this month.
In every case the mechanism is the same: unions learned during COVID that schools could close whenever the inconvenience threshold was crossed, and nobody would make them pay a political price for it.
School districts that stayed open through the pandemic got better at staying open. School districts that practiced being closed got comfortable closing. Pittsburgh has been practicing for six years.
The NFL Draft will come and go in April. The 44% of Pittsburgh third-graders who can't read at grade level will still be there in May. The 34% of students missing school regularly will still be there in June.
And the unions that decided football traffic was an extraordinary circumstance – but illiteracy is not – will still be drawing their paychecks.
Sources:
- Salena Zito, "Pittsburgh Schools Earn Poor Marks for NFL Draft Closure," Washington Examiner, March 24, 2026.
- Mary Katharine Ham, "Teachers' Unions Use the NFL Draft to Keep Students Home," Daily Wire, March 23, 2026.
- Nat Malkus, "Chronic Absenteeism Still a Struggle in 2024–2025," RAND Corporation, November 2025.
- "Generational Learning Loss: How Pandemic School Closures Hurt Students," Congressional Hearing Record, U.S. House of Representatives.