When Deeds Belie Words
America doesn’t care about its children.
That’s pretty much the conclusion we’re compelled to draw from the “reopen America’s schools” campaign the Administration – including our Sec of Ed – have been waging by pronouncement the past several weeks.
Apparently the President thinks “Let there be school openings” is analogous to “Let there be Light” (Gen. 1:3). Sorry, but it just doesn’t work that way down here on Earth.
Consider the following:
Around 90% of America’s 56 million K-12 schoolchildren attend public schools (the rest attend private schools, most of which are run by the Catholic Church) in one of the country’s 130,000 or so primary (grade) schools and 24,000 secondary (high) schools distributed among its 98,000-odd school districts.
Don’t the sheer numbers argue that there should have been a nationally-coordinated approach towards reopening (or not), guided by the CDC’s recommendations but led by the Dept. of Education and its Secretary? Yes, they do.
Instead, what we got was the Sec urging schools to reopen because “children need to be in school” etc. , with the anodyne and pointless observation that “individual districts will decide when/how to reopen.” Not helpful.
The Sec neglected to mention that her career (sic) goal has been to eliminate public schools in America and replace them with charter schools and vouchers (public tax monies which support private school attendance). And she’s a big fan of virtual schools, too (they’re for-profit, which she favors) – in fact, early in her stint as Sec, she was keen on the idea that it wasn’t the “brick and mortar” that made a school at all, and that all the focus should be on the “individual child” and “choice” (for parents).
This reminds us of the Iron Lady’s claim “There is no such thing as society,” and the Sec of Ed is reputed to be a devotee of Margaret Thatcher’s political philosophy.
Here’s the full context for that (in)famous quote:
“I think we have been through a period when too many people have been given to understand that when they have a problem it is government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant. I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They are casting their problems on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no governments can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours. People have got their entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There is no such thing as an entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.”
Well, it turns out that in times of pandemic (as in times of derechos, or raging wildfires, or any number of natural and man-made disasters), individual men and women and families can’t cope without government intervention and support, regardless of how many obligations they’ve faithfully met in the past.
But when a generation of effort has been devoted to defunding “big government” (the bugaboo of conservatives everywhere), it’s a bit facetious to ask where Big Government is when you – and everybody else – really need it.
It didn’t start with this Administration, though.
Consider:
- During the 2009 recession, many states were forced to cut back on school funding (overall around 47% of all school funding comes from the state budget, with most of the rest from local property tax receipts – only a fraction comes from federal funding as a rule, mostly in the form of Title I grants to the poorest districts/schools). They haven’t recovered from firing teachers (we’re around 77,000 short), librarians, counselors (who were particularly hard-hit), or – get this – nurses. In the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, nearly every school in America had a nurse – many, if you can believe it, had a doctor. Today it’s not unusual for a single nurse to be responsible for a couple thousand students. Conclusion: our public schools, having been maligned and drained of resources for 30 years, were in no position to bring students back into the fold during a pandemic.
- As a consequence of the above, the brick and mortar plants themselves are aging and inadequately maintained – the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2017 awarded (sic) them an infrastructure grade of “D+.” They’re aging (many of NYC’s 1800 school buildings are over a century old – one reason why NYC is in a panicked rush to install new ventilation systems just weeks before its 1,000,000 students are scheduled to return [though in shifts]), they’re overcrowded (too many students, too few teachers, too little space), and they’re under-resourced even in the best of times (many lack even basic public hygiene amenities such as soap in bathrooms). Conclusion: The physical plants which comprise our national public school infrastructure were inadequate pre-pandemic, and may now be considered grossly inadequate. They don’t allow for social distancing (that’s why so many systems are moving to an alternate-days schedule, with one-half of the class attending on certain days, and the other half on others), they’re inadequately ventilated (a lot of “newish” schools don’t have functional windows), and they haven’t got the budgetary leeway to properly supply school buildings with the protective gear and supplies (and cleaning services) now required.
- Re: teachers. About one-quarter to one-third of all public school teachers have a pre-existing condition which makes them vulnerable to Covid-19. (This isn’t because teachers are sickly; rather, their co-morbidities are comparable to those of their age cohorts across all professions.) Many states rely upon recently-retired teachers as substitutes, including long-term substitute assignments (pregnancy and sick leaves). Once teachers in those schools that re-open become ill, where are their replacements going to come from? Thirty years of teacher- and teachers unions-bashing have had consequences.
American public schools across the entire country needed a massive infusion of federal funding to even prepare for reopening safely this month and next.
So what does the U.S. Senate do? It refuses to reach agreement – really, agreement was de facto impossible given the $2.5 trillion difference in what the House Democrats voted for in May (the HEROES Act) and what the Senate Republicans were sorta kinda proposing in early August (the HEALS Act). They’re currently on vacation until September 8, by which time most American schools will have opened – if indeed they haven’t already opened and closed.
Why is this significant for school re-openings? Well, because the House bill proposed $1 trillion in aid to states and municipalities to see them through (this phase of) the pandemic. And there was a separate amount (around $75 billion in the draft HEALS Act) for K-12, although it would only be made available to schools that fully re-opened. The Senate figured that states and municipalities don’t really need any aid – states can whack their budgets even further, or issue GO bonds that will make them indebted to Wall Street for the foreseeable future, and municipalities can furlough or get rid of firefighters, EMTs, homeless services, public health employees and then declare bankruptcy, which normally results in fire sale acquisitions of public assets by private equity (in fact, that may even be the Republicans’ ultimate objective in abandoning states and municipalities). The White House declared that greater spending discretion would be given to states regarding spending from the $150 billion allotted in the first coronavirus relief bill (the CARES Act), claiming that “much” of that money remained unspent. Only problem is, 75% of that $150 billion already has been spent or blocked for future spending. Oops. That leaves a grand total of $37.5 billion left to spend (and schools aren’t the only priority, remember), or around $750 million per state.
If there’s anybody out there who thinks that school districts won’t be forced to cut corners both in terms of staffing and health and safety measures as a result, all we can say is that the bridges in Alaska leading to nowhere are now legion.
Public schools have been failing for a generation, but not for the reasons we hear about. Rather, they’ve been starved of resources, systematically and deliberately – they haven’t failed, they’ve been failed. They’re in no position to operate physically during a time of pandemic, especially given the alarming rise in cases in the many states (most, actually) which under budgetary pressures reopened prematurely and have now vowed to stay open come what may, although some regions and states are imposing mask mandates (which should have been a national mandate from the start of the pandemic in March), limiting mass gatherings again, and closing bars and indoor restaurant dining during some or all of the day. Whether these measures (too little, too late) will succeed in lowering the virus’ positivity rate nationally to below 5% - or keeping the R factor below 1.0 – remains to be seen.
The CDC suggests that if the positivity rate in a community rises above 5%, schools there shouldn’t open. Kim Reynolds, the Governor of Iowa, is willing to open schools with a positivity rate of 15% and no mask mandate. One almost feels there was a divine providence at work in the fact that Cedar Rapids schools were destroyed by the derecho. (Reynolds also insisted that Iowa was good to go when 1200 workers at a meat-packing plant in Waterloo became ill).
America’s schools cannot be safely reopened at present, which pace the Sec of Ed’s public remarks is undoubtedly satisfying to her at some level.
And because a lot of precious time and effort was spent by district boards and principals and teachers and many others trying to plan for a “safe return,” not enough resources, time, or effort was spent getting up to speed to offer a high level of K-12 education remotely. Some districts are prepared, admittedly, but this is a matter of catch-as-catch-can. Others aren’t, while still others continue to grapple with the insuperable challenge of remote teaching to students who don’t have reliable internet connections from their home. NYC, quite amazingly, hasn’t figured out who’s going to be teaching remotely on the days its students are at home – in other words, the district hasn’t staffed its remote classes.
In the meantime, the rich (the Sec of Ed’s “people”) are banding together to create learning “pods” for their own children. They do occasionally spare some words of sympathy for “Other People’s Children” (woke language is fashionable among the haves these days), but in a society where there is no such thing as society, it’s every family for itself.
If you’re a middle- or working-class parent, and you’re angry right now, you’ve every right to feel that way.
But don’t be angry at your child’s teacher, or principal, or your local school board.
Rather, direct your anger at the total absence of a national policy and coordinated response by the federal government and in particular, the Sec of Ed (she who must not be named) and her Department. Their failure was probably intentional, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t failure.
And try to save some anger for those who’ve been touting “school reform” (charterization, privatization, defunding, maligning public schools and teachers) for the past 30 years. They belonged to both parties, so there’s plenty of anger to direct towards both the Red and the Blue.
When you think about voting in future, vote for candidates – from school board members to mayor to governor to president – who support our public schools, and are willing to vote legislation to fund them as they deserve.
Your child’s future – and the future of every child in our society (yes, Virginia, it turns out there is such a thing as “society”) depend on it.
Further reading:
Nancy Bailey, “The Covid-19 Experiment: Facing the Sins of a Nation that Quit Caring About Public Education Long Ago”
Belle Chesler, "Will Public Schools Survive Covid-19?"
Peter Green, “For Teachers, This Is All Unfortunately Familiar”
Id., “Country Club Pod School”
Jan Resseger, “Congress Neglects Children: No Relief for Public Schools or State Budgets”