If there was any doubt just how indifferent this administration actually is towards American citizens, Secretary of Education Elisabeth Dee (“Betsy”) DeVos dispelled all those doubts Wednesday on Fox News. DeVos used her camera time to attack public school teachers for failing to reopen the nation’s schools in the face of the worst public health crisis to strike this country in over a century.
"We have seen all too many districts and all too many schools across the country not actually addressing the needs of students and anticipating school in the fall," DeVos said. "We all want to ensure students and teachers are safe when they are in school again, but those things can be done and can be clearly accomplished. The science is very clear on this.”
The secretary added that some teachers unions have prioritized using the pandemic to push a leftist political agenda, including "defunding the police, universal health care, destroying charter schools, eliminating the D.C. Scholarship Opportunity Program, and these are what teachers unions are demanding in order for kids to go back to school."
Contrary to DeVos’ right-wing screed, teachers’ unions are doing no such thing. The teachers’ unions, which are made up, unsurprisingly, of teachers, have simply acknowledged what the rest of the country already knows: This administration’s criminal incompetence in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic has made it largely impossible for children to go back to in-person learning this fall. Despite Donald Trump’s and DeVos’ myopic exhortations over the past two months, as of mid-August “(o)ver half of U.S. public elementary and secondary school students” will be studying fully online this fall. Not because they want to, but because—thanks to this incompetent administration—they have to.
For many districts, the difficult decision to go wholly online has only been made over the past three weeks, as the pandemic’s seemingly unstoppable reach has extended from the major cities, to the suburbs, and now, gradually, to the more rural areas of the country. It has been a decision fraught with the angst and concern, often extremely heated in tone, of millions of frustrated parents, usually expressing themselves on social media and in-person school board meetings.
As reported by the The New York Times, DeVos and the Trump administration have no one but themselves to blame for the situation now facing our country’s 51 million school-age children.
Many teachers and their powerful unions said they saw Mr. Trump’s language as bullying, wrongheaded, and out of touch with the reality that the virus was raging through their communities, often in red states.
In a normal administration, especially in the context of an unprecedented public health crisis, parents would have a right to expect someone occupying the Cabinet-level post of Secretary of Education (a position whose authority and guidance, in the past has prompted entire shifts of the educational curriculum for American students) to carefully and painstakingly analyze the environment facing teachers, students and parents, given the fact that the country’s entire future is more or less dependent upon the educational attainment of its youngest generation. Parents would have the right to expect that such a Secretary of Education would take all aspects of the crisis, including, most importantly, the lives and health of the children themselves, into account in making any recommendations or formulating any policy.
That is what anyone would expect from a “normal” Secretary of Education. But, as observed by Heidi Przybyla, reporting for NBC News, DeVos is anything but a “normal” Secretary of Education.
As public schools grapple with the challenge of reopening, public education advocates are criticizing Education Sec. DeVos for working remotely from Michigan, where she owns a sprawling waterfront estate with a round-the-clock security detail paid for by the taxpayers.
[...]
DeVos told the Washington Examiner in June that she was working mostly remotely from Michigan — where she owns the 22,000-square-foot estate on Lake Macatawa — with a public schedule that has been mostly empty for the past several weeks.
[...]
DeVos' press office says she has been in constant contact with governors and state superintendents virtually and in person.Yet @NBCNews couldn't find a record of similar events with public school officials.
In short, beyond poking her head out on right-wing media to squawk her boss’s mantra about “reopening” the schools at all costs, this particular Secretary of Education has done absolutely nothing to assist the nation’s school administrators, school boards, or teachers in navigating the crisis.
In the real world—the one outside the gates of that heavily guarded mansion where DeVos tries to hide from the public—schools that initially (and hopefully) opted for a “hybrid” approach or full in-person learning are coming face-to-face with some unpleasant realities about the rate of the virus’ transmission among students and teachers. In one Georgia school district that tried to fully reopen last week, over 900 students and staff have been forced into quarantine. In a single Louisiana parish, nearly 150 students, faculty and staff have been quarantined after reopening only one week ago. In Mississippi, 100 high school students are now under quarantine after a teacher exhibited COVID-19 symptoms shortly after the school’s reopening. And an as-yet undetermined number of parents and teachers in a north Texas school district are facing potential quarantine after attending a meeting 10 days ago (ironically, to discuss reopening), after one of the participants later tested positive for COVID-19.
What all of these incidents—and the many more that are bound to follow—illustrate is that the administration’s push to reopen schools for in-person learning is proving to be foolhardy in intent, and impossible in practice, even in those districts where the prevailing political sentiment has compelled local school boards and superintendents to try to reopen the schools. As more and more school boards and worried parents witness the results of these reckless reopenings, it seems almost certain that most, if not all, public school students will be back at home, receiving their lessons through remote, distance, or online instruction. Many private schools which, for financial reasons, have resisted halting in-person classes will likely follow suit, as health and liability concerns become overwhelming.
The quality of education provided by an online-only curricula is the subject of considerable debate, but what is abundantly clear is that the quality varies drastically depending on each school’s resources. As those resources are primarily dependent on local taxes, any individual district’s tax base is ultimately going to impact the quality of the education provided. The social and economic impacts of the current situation, however, go well beyond the quality of the education itself. As reported by CNBC, the most dire impact of “online-only” education for their children will be to working parents.
[L]imited in-classroom schedules and day-care capacity may mean that parents will need to be home with their children for the foreseeable future. And that may have long-term effects on their careers. Nearly three-fourths, 73%, of parents say they plan to make major changes to their professional lives to accommodate the lack of child care, according to a new Care.com online survey of 1,000 parents with children under the age of 15. About 15% of those are considering leaving the workforce altogether.
“We’re at a huge risk to lose a generation of working parents,” Deb Perelman, founder of Smitten Kitchen and mother of two, said recently during a Congressional hearing. She anticipates that working parents will see a lot of “compassion fatigue from workplaces” this fall when they have to continue to caring for kids while working full-time.
The problem of childcare is particularly acute for parents of young children who will require a high degree of supervision to acclimate and accommodate a wholly-online educational experience. Those parents who work will ultimately be forced to make a choice between their children and their jobs. In many cases that presents an impossible dilemma for parents, as observed by the education-based Hechinger Report.
Childcare during the coronavirus was already daunting enough, but as numbers spike and some states scale back on opening, parents who’ve been counting on a reprieve this fall now have the added worry about what they will do with their kids in the coming months if schools and daycares remain shuttered, reopen only part-time or seem unsafe. Gag them? Hide them in closets or under beds? One wondered on Twitter if school would be offering cages or dumpsters for storing or disposing students at reduced rates.
These are the problems that a competent, dedicated Secretary of Education should be grappling with. These are the concerns that an administration that actually cared about this nation’s schoolchildren or their parents should be trying to address, instead of bloviating about teacher’s unions to their stenographers on Fox News.
But we don’t have competence or dedication—in fact, in Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump we have the exact opposite: complete indifference and disregard.
And so America’s children, their parents, their teachers, and schools are forced to go it alone.
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