San Diego Classrooms to Stay Empty This Fall
San Diego and Los Angeles Unified school districts have both announced they’ll not be reopening classrooms for instruction in the fall, instead opting to offer up remote learning alternatives. (At least to start, More details here.)
Get ready for some mighty thunderbolts from Dear Leader and a lot of frustrated parents. Unions representing the adults working in education can be expected to push back, as they should.
After all, if a union won’t advocate for their members’ health, what good are they? But, fear not, you can expect this idea of safe working conditions to become fodder for people who won’t wear masks, and think science is something invented by Democrats.
And the anger of parents faced with no good choices is real.
There are no easy answers when it comes to reopening schools amid the COVID-19, except the obvious one: don’t do it if you can’t protect the humans involved.
Let’s look at the big picture.
It's incredible to me that the federal government would see the necessity of bailing out airlines and banks and not see the need to do something similar for the public schools in this country," Adam Goldstein, a fifth-grade teacher in San Diego, told the New York Times last week.
"Are schools being provided proper funding to accomplish this task? No. There's your answer on reopening," tweeted Jason Calizer, another educator in Southern California.
We could reopen schools with protocols in place in the fall, but that would require shutting down just about everything for a month or so.
However, the President’s apologists need to get the economy cranked up to bolster his chances at reelection in case the smear campaign against Democrats and voter suppression don’t work.
While it is probably true that children (under 17) are less likely to become critically ill from COVID-19 and are more likely to survive if they require hospitalization, there’s an important consideration missing when these stats are used to justify restarting education, namely all the adults who end up interacting with kids in school.
What are we supposed to say to the families of bus drivers, counselors, nurses, lunch ladies, janitors, administrative staff, teachers and principals if the doors are thrown open?
Consider the (fictitious) letter below and think about what it would be like to be any part of that process.
What we should be working on in a big hurry is figuring out safe child care options. And there are opportunities embedded in all the challenges we see around us. High unemployment and tons of empty retail space are just two I can think of.
It’s gonna be up to teachers, principals, and parents (who can), to draw the line and just say “no.” School districts and the politicians adjacent to education are in a tough spot, and likely don’t have the backbone to withstand getting financial threats from above and the anger of parents who need the schools open to go to work to pay the bills.
The federal government, which could have played a role in guiding schools systems into safer ways of operating, is now little more than a reelection entity for President Trump.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, whose only qualification was campaign contributions, went on TV this weekend to insist that kids need to return to class.
In fact, internal Center for Disease Control documents uncovered by the New York TImes warn that fully reopening K-12 schools and universities would be the "highest risk" for the spread of coronavirus.
... Mr. Trump rejected the C.D.C. guidelines, calling them “very tough & expensive” on Twitter. Then Mr. Pence announced that the C.D.C. would issue new recommendations next week. “We just don’t want the guidance to be too tough,” he said.
On Friday, after repeating threats of cutting off federal funding from schools that do not fully reopen — which he does not have the authority to do — Mr. Trump lashed out again.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1281554061972692994?s=20
The CDC ended up not revising the guidelines. So now they’re just being ignored at the federal level.
It’s never over ‘tll it’s over in Trumpland. The CDC director went public with this today…
https://twitter.com/scorp99cam/status/1282750186222022656?s=20
UPDATE: Buzzfeed reporter Molly Hensley-Clancey says the following quote cannot be attributed to Secretary DeVos. My Mistake!
Secretary DeVos says that "only" 0.02% of children will probably die as a result of schools re-opening. That's 14,740 children, about 40 times the number of school shooting victims from the last 10 years.
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Why is the Secretary of Education trying to force public schools to reopen, without giving them money to do it safely?
Let’s look at her real agenda, which is to dismantle public education, privatize it, and turn schools into a training ground for dominionist Christians.
Via Mother Jones:
...in a 2001 interview for The Gathering, a group focused on advancing Christian faith through philanthropy, she and her husband offered a rare public glimpse of their views. Asked whether Christian schools should continue to rely on giving—rather than pushing for taxpayer money through vouchers—Betsy DeVos replied, “There are not enough philanthropic dollars in America to fund what is currently the need in education…Our desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God’s kingdom.”
Added Dick DeVos: “As we look at many communities in our country, the church has been displaced by the public school as the center for activity…[I]t is certainly our hope that more and more churches will get more and more active and engaged in education.”
Here’s the scariest part, via Katelyn Burns at the Outline:
Under Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Department of Education has taken steps to weaken the public school system in favor of school choice or charter schools, which can boost enrollment at parochial schools. Additionally, the administration has significantly eased the process for religious educational institutions for applying for religious exemptions for Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in education. Exemptions vary widely, ranging from blanket policies not to hire women in leadership or teacher positions, to banning LGBTQ identities on campus, and can even extend into investigations into systemic sexual assault issues on campus.
The Christian dominionist movement seen in our public institutions is in line with Trump’s push for religious liberty which, as Sohab Ahmari wrote in his op-ed, seeks to use government force to reorder the public square. “The general idea [of dominionism is] that Christians are supposed to take dominion of all aspects of society, including civil government, entertainment, education, and so forth,” Stroop said, who noted that under this concept, public schools would be shut down and religious orthodoxy would dominate the curriculum, abortion access would disappear, and the rights of LGBTQ people would be erased. “It would be an extremely oppressive white male dominated patriarchal Christian society.”
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When women are in charge…
https://twitter.com/eorden/status/1282445117031419904?s=20
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Lead Image by Queven via Pixabay