On the good side, the Trump Administration seems to be backing away from the Donald’s typical management-by-blind-bullying threat to withhold funds from schools who don’t reopen for face-to-face classes this fall. On the bad side, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is trying to turn federal dollars into vouchers for private schools:
She said on Fox News on Thursday morning, “We are not suggesting pulling funding from education, but instead allowing families, take that money and figure out where their kids can get educated if their schools refuse to open. Schools can reopen safely and they must reopen” [Nicole Gaudiano, “How the Trump Administration Backpedaled on Its Threats to Cut Funding,” Politico, 2020.07.09].
Either way, Trump and DeVos are talking “Defund the Schools” at a time when our public schools need more resources—maybe start with $220K per school building—to build up the cleaning supplies, masks, and staff they need to protect students and staff from coronavirus if we meet in person to make learning happen. As usual, Trump offers no concrete plan or analysis; he just blurts what he wants and threatens to hurt those who don’t give it to him. DeVos then fills that leadership vacuum with her own ideological preferences. Neither looks out for the real good of all children or the core necessity of a well-funded public education system.
Brown University economist Emily Oster talks about the hard cost-benefit analysis and practical planning we have to do if we want to reopen our schools:
Stanton: In thinking about reopening schools, when you break it down into the component parts that are required for that to happen, it’s difficult to imagine figuring out all the moving parts in time. Kids riding school buses: How does that work? Cafeterias and school lunches?
Oster: And recess.
Stanton: Music classes, with kids singing aloud or breathing hot air through instruments?
Oster: Yeah, no singing.
Stanton: Or gym class. Or water fountains. I could go on and on. How do you think through all of that—the component parts of reopening schools?
Oster: One of the things I’ve been emphasizing is a need to decide some big-picture things—what we’re going to do—and then try to tackle these individually. I think what’s very overwhelming for people in these discussions is that we are sort of simultaneously discussing the question of, “Should we reopen, and in what broad sense?” And questions like, “What about the buses?” Really, those questions need to be sequenced. You need to say, we’re going to open two days a week, five days a week, not at all—whatever it is. Make some decision there, and then move on to these individual things. Until you have a basic plan, it is very hard for all the individual pieces to come together. If I’m thinking about buses, that is dependent on whether there are five days of buses or two days of buses or no buses. You need a basic framework and then you’ve just gotta tick through these as much as we can [Zack Stanton, “‘That’s Crazy’: Reopening Schools Is Possible, But We’re Doing It Wrong,” Politico, 2020.07.09].
These practical questions are too complicated for idiot Trump and ideologue DeVos. Now more than ever, we need local control of education. We need local boards, local administrators, local teachers, and local parents to focus on making hard, practical decisions outside the glare and blare of Washington partisan politics and campaign posing. The government’s role (if we could get the White House to actually govern) is afford essential public schools the same financial support it gave Shake Shack to implement the practical actions we need to provide education and protect public health.
Agreed. Let’s fully fund our public schools. To do that we need new sources of revenue. Let’s start with an initiative that taxes the wealth of individuals with over $1 billion in assets. Sanford and other predatory Capitalists would have to share the money they stole from the working poor.
Its all about tax’s, if you don’t want to pay tax’s than please EXIT this country so the rest of us can move forward with educating our children properly and giving the educators who do so a living wage.
Opinion expressed by a husband married to a 32 year retired Calculus Teacher/Math Dept. Chair.
that was so often a victim of this states poor funding for schools.
Drop the Mic. !
We are already $3.8M behind on our promises to the teachers.
I think what Trump really was demanding is to end Homeschooling. Kids need to be in school.
Get the Catholic Church to fund the whole thing…with taxpayer money. What a grift, just convince people that there’s a devil and the money flows.
“NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. Roman Catholic Church used a special and unprecedented exemption from federal rules to amass at least $1.4 billion in taxpayer-backed coronavirus aid, with many millions going to dioceses that have paid huge settlements or sought bankruptcy protection because of clergy sexual abuse cover-ups.
The church’s haul may have reached — or even exceeded — $3.5 billion, making a global religious institution with more than a billion followers among the biggest winners in the U.S. government’s pandemic relief efforts, an Associated Press analysis of federal data released this week found.” https://apnews.com/dab8261c68c93f24c0bfc1876518b3f6
That’s even cooler that what our little shyster of a governor did here for just 1.25 BILLION for the whole state!
drumpf just commuted Stone’s prison sentence. Another reason to reimpeach orange arse.
Let’s start with Sen. Warren’s 2c wealth tax and add full taxation on all religious institutions with more than 500 individual annual participants. IOW, if a church hosts more than 500 different people or a school does, etc, they pay taxes.
The mega churches, wealthy pseudo preachers and other rich can finance a lot of public education.
Oh. And end that “home school” hogwash.
I’m with Jerry having the Catholic ‘church’? fund education. I need to find out in our local parish and diocese applied for money and if they received money how it was used? Wish me luck on getting an answer.
Say, what Jeff says about Trump and homeschool makes me think about something Noem said about schools in yet another conversation with her national audience:
Translation: Shut down normal government mandates and supervision, and you can’t trust parents to use their Freedom™ and Personal Responsibility® to keep kids educationally healthy. We need to take government action—i.e., require kids to be in school, in physical classrooms, face-to-face with teachers—to ensure that education happens. That seems to run counter to her constant assertions that we don’t need to take government action to ensure that pandemic prevention happens.
Is Barron trump gonna wear a mask and practice social distancing at school?… Asking for a friend.
St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland, has not yet settled on its back-to-school model for this fall. The school says it will be ready to teach fully online, with a mix of online and face-to-face, or “on campus, with careful observance of health and social distancing safety requirements,” but the actual delivery model depends “on local health conditions and the evolving guidelines set for schools by local and federal government agencies.”