[ If the Trump administration is willing to spend trillions to
bail out corporations, banks, and airlines, why is it not willing to
put up the $400-500 billion necessary to ensure the safety of our
nation’s schools, children, and educators?] [[link removed]]

HOW TRUMP POLITICIZED SCHOOLS REOPENING, REGARDLESS OF SAFETY  
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Diane Ravitch
July 30, 2020
The New York Review of Books
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_ If the Trump administration is willing to spend trillions to bail
out corporations, banks, and airlines, why is it not willing to put up
the $400-500 billion necessary to ensure the safety of our nation’s
schools, children, and educators? _

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos attending President Trump’s
Coronavirus Task Force daily briefing, Washington, D.C., March 27,
2020, Drew Angerer/Getty Images // The New York Review of Books

 

One of the most difficult issues of the pandemic is when and how
schools should reopen. Parents and teachers are eager for them to
reopen, but only if the schools are safe and protected from the
disease that is ravaging so much of the nation. Parents want their
children back in school. They are tired of pretending to be teachers,
organizing their children’s time every day. Teachers are eager to
resume in-person instruction, but not at risk of their lives. Even
students are eager to return to school, to see their friends, to
engage in class discussions, to participate in school activities.

School has resumed in other nations like Denmark, Finland, and South
Korea. Those countries that have reopened their schools have added
daily temperature checks, reduced class sizes, and provided whatever
personnel and equipment was needed to protect the health of students
and staff.

US states could follow suit, but for school to resume safely here, two
necessities must be in place. First, the pandemic must be under
control. Infection rates must be low and dropping. Nations that have
successfully opened their schools tamed the coronavirus first. Second,
the schools must be able to provide safe conditions, meaning small
class sizes, extra nurses, disinfected and active ventilation systems,
additional cleaning staff, and personal protective equipment for
children and adults. Since every state’s tax revenues have been
diminished by the economic effects of the pandemic, school budgets are
being slashed at the very moment when they need more resources.

In the United States, the pandemic is surging in the South and in
parts of the West. In the absence of federal leadership, each state
has been free to write its own rules for behavior, and governors in
Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and several other states have followed
the lead of President Trump by refusing to mandate the obvious
requirements for public health and safety, such as wearing a mask and
maintaining a safe distance from others to avoid the spread of the
disease. Even states that have managed to contain the virus, like New
York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, remain vulnerable to new outbreaks
because of tourism and travel.

Amid this uncertainty and anxiety, President Trump has decided that
the reopening of schools is essential to his prospects for reelection.
He wants to bring back the strong economy for which he claims credit,
but which collapsed as the pandemic spread. He wants stores to open,
factories to resume production, and commerce to pick up again. He
wants this economic revival to occur without following the guidelines
laid out by his own administration’s scientists and medical experts.
Until recent weeks, Trump has refused to wear a mask in public and has
tried to maintain the pretense that all is well and, as he puts it,
the virus will magically “disappear” one day. His supporters have
followed his example and have demonstrated at state capitols in
opposition to mask-wearing mandates and any other restrictions on
their normal activity.

In mid-July, Trump demanded that schools across the nation reopen on
time for in-person instruction, so that life and the economy could
return to normal. He did this without regard to the upsurge in the
coronavirus and without any assurance that federal money would be
available to protect students and staff. Secretary of Education Betsy
DeVos, notable for her belief that public schools are a “dead end
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reiterated Trump’s demands and threatened to cut the funding of
schools that continued to use remote learning instead of in-person
instruction. The federal funds over which she exercises a measure of
control—only a small proportion of schools’ budgets, whose funding
comes mainly from states—is dedicated to supporting poor children
and students with disabilities. Vice President Mike Pence quickly
added his support for the rapid reopening of schools, despite
conditions that made them unsafe.

School leaders complained that they should not open schools that did
not comply with the guidelines released by the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC), which specifically recommended social
distancing, masks, testing, and other protocols. The initial CDC
guidelines, released in May, said that
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full reopening would pose the “highest risk” to students and staff
unless all precautions were taken to protect them. The “lowest
risk,” said the CDC at that time, was “virtual-only classes,
activities, and events.”

Trump, DeVos, and Pence declared that the CDC guidelines were too
rigorous and too expensive and that the agency would soon lower its
standards. Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, said
that
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should not stand in the way” of reopening schools fully, as the
Trump administration wished.

By late July, the Trump administration was pressuring governors and
mayors to reopen schools, claiming the social and psychological costs
to children of staying home would be worse than the virus. And, as
Trump had earlier predicted, the CDC bent to White House demands and
revised its guidelines to reflect the views of the president and
secretary of education. Its new guidelines, released July 23, were
titled
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Importance of Reopening America’s Schools this Fall.” The newly
revised guidance emphasized the social, emotional, and educational
benefits of in-person instruction, as well as the low incidence of
virus transmission among young children. The CDC’s shameful
capitulation to political pressure not only compromised the health and
safety of the nation’s children and educators but also eroded the
agency’s scientific reputation.

While Trump was successful in pressuring the CDC to comply with his
wishes, he could do nothing to dissuade the virus from spreading
across California, Florida, Texas, Arizona, and other states. In
California, where the rate of infections has soared, the two biggest
school districts—Los Angeles and San Diego—announced on July 13
that they would continue with online instruction this fall. The
largest teachers’ union in Florida filed a lawsuit on July 20 to
block Governor Ron DeSantis’s order to open all schools for
full-time instruction in the midst of the pandemic. Even districts
like New York City where the pandemic has subsided are hesitant to
reopen schools fully, both because they lack the resources to do it
safely and because teachers and parents are fearful of unsafe
conditions in the schools.

At no point have Trump or DeVos offered any plans or guidance or
resources to school districts. The school leaders have been left on
their own to figure out how to open safely without the funds to do so.
Many are floundering, trying to cobble together distance learning;
staggered schedules; some classes online, with others in-person;
starting with young children or starting with older students. In the
absence of definitive guidance from the CDC or any other authoritative
agency, school leaders are trapped between parents who want schools to
open, parents who don’t want schools to open, teachers who are
fearful for their safety, and acute financial shortfalls.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer Laurie Garrett recently
reviewed
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available studies and concluded that a nationwide reopening of
schools, as Trump demands, should be out of the question. While it is
accurate that children under ten are less likely to get or transmit
the virus, they are nonetheless not immune to it. A large study of
children in South Korea found that
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over ten transmit the virus as often as adults. Closing the schools in
the spring did limit the spread of the virus in the US; reopening them
too soon may be harmful to families and to the adults who work in
schools. A safe reopening requires small classes, clean air, and other
changes that are costly.

“What’s clear,” Garrett writes, “is that smaller classes with
better air filter systems cost money. Fairness quickly becomes an
issue: wealthy districts are more likely to have the resources to make
such changes—and to pay for additional staff
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accommodate more classes of fewer students. Communities with lower
property tax bases are far less likely to have the money to adapt in
this way to Covid-19.”

When journalists point out that other nations have managed to reopen
their schools, they don’t always mention that they reopened after
coronavirus infections were brought down to negligible numbers, and
that not all reopenings have been successful. South Korea reopened its
schools in May when it appeared to be safe to do so; then closed
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of its 20,000 schools only a few days later after a resurgence of the
virus. Israel reopened its schools after a two-month lockdown, when
the numbers of infections were in decline, but then it spiraled out of
control again, and epidemiologists concluded that
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reopening of the schools had happened too soon.

Among the ironies of the situation is that parents who are sick of
distance learning are now willing to bear it as long as necessary to
keep their children out of harm’s way: they want their children in a
real school with real teachers, but most are willing to wait until it
is safe to do so. Second, Betsy DeVos herself was an evangelist for
distance learning and even praised it at her confirmation hearings in
2017, but is now demanding a return to brick-and-mortar schools.
Third, the Trump administration, which scorned public schools, now
sees them as essential for the lives of children, as well as the
economy. And the situation is made even more challenging because the
Trump administration has politicized decision-making and even the CDC
itself.

No one is certain of the right course of action. We do know that the
best way to tame the pandemic is for everyone to wear masks and to
practice social distancing, yet many of our national and state leaders
refuse to follow the authoritative dictates of science. We also know
that schools cannot open where it is unsafe. But one question
persists: If the Trump administration is willing to spend trillions to
bail out corporations, banks, and airlines, why is it not willing to
put up the $400-500 billion necessary to ensure the safety of our
nation’s schools, children, and educators and to achieve what it
claims to want: the reopening of our schools?
 

_[Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at NYU. Her most
recent book is Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement
and the Danger to America’s Public Schools
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(December 2017). Follow Diane Ravitch on Twitter: @DianeRavitch
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