Jan Resseger takes Trump and DeVos to task for ignoring the needs of students and adults in their headlong rush to reopen schools to prop up the economy in time for the election.
In contrast to Obama, who reacted to the Newtown massacre with compassion, our current leaders are indifferent to the risks they seek to impose on other people’s children.
Resseger cites some of the best articles that describe the disparate impact of the pandemic.
Ellie Mystal wrote in The Nation:
“We have not gotten anything right when it comes to caring for our children. We were not getting things right before the coronavirus pandemic; we did not get things right at the outset of the crisis; and as we hurtle towards the fall, we are on the verge of getting things dangerously, irreparably wrong again… It didn’t have to be this way. If we had successfully done the work of stopping the spread of the virus, as has been done in other countries, we wouldn’t have to pick which poison to expose our kids to… Meanwhile, just last week, President Donald Trump worried that CDC guidelines for protecting our children were too ‘expensive.’… And so, we are here. I wouldn’t let my children eat candy handed out by this administration. There are snakes with better parental instincts than these people.”
What’s missing from the Trump-DeVos response is empathy and simple decency.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes indeed, “What’s missing from the Trump-DeVos response is empathy and simple decency.”
Trump is completely amoral.
Exactly….empathy is what’s missing.
I was sitting on the porch having some coffee first thing this morning thinking about why anyone on this planet would put a Trump sign on their lawn considering the Trump-designed crisis our nation is living through.
Of course, the reasons tragically are many. And, long tomes will be written about it long after I kick the bucket.
I know all sorts of Trump supporters, from one extreme to the other.
Rural voters who have never voted for a Democrat in their lives. The scared, the angry, the deluded, the alleged tough guys…the outright racists who hear the code words spoken by the Republican Party (talk about vile!)…. it’s a tragic list.
But I think about some of these people and the reality is they have always lacked empathy for others. Some of these Trump voters have always been selfish -plain and simple.
And, as this essay makes clear, those people have been around for a LONG time shortchanging public schools and our kids.
The conservative concern with “family values” is a joke. We’ve known that for decades. DeVos and Trump could care care less about our families.
Fauci at the AFT yesterday: teachers need masks, googles, and disposable garments that they can take off at the end of the day before going home.
And, let me hasten to add, only in those places where incidence of new cases is very low.
cx: goggles, ofc!!!!
I know an emergency room doctor that takes her clothes off in the garage. The first thing she does at home is take a shower after every shift So far she has managed to not get infected.
And many have taken apartments to be away from their families. The UN is going to have to come up with a new category: Fourth World where self imposed ignorance and greed helps shoot a nation right past Third World.
Wow, Bob,
I hadn’t heard that about the disposable garments. I just can’t see it happening. A few schools I know are wrestling with the question of whether masks will be worn at all times or just when 6 feet distance can’t be maintained!
and flat out: the money is NOT there for schools to have this equipment at the level needed
“The wealth gap between the richest and poorest families has more than doubled since 1989.”
Income inequality is much greater so the poorest families have the fewest resources with which to combat the pandemic. Inequity is built into our system through funding schools through property taxes. This has a negative impact on they type of education available to students and the resources a school will have to keep students safe from the virus. Privatization that largely targets poor, minority students is another example of inequity. It is a system that provides more for some students and less for others. In public schools the federal government has attempted to address funding inequities through Title 1. With DeVos in charge of the DOE, she has been trying to divert Title 1 funds into vouchers. Separate and unequal access to opportunity and safety are baked into our inequitable system of education by design. If we want all children to be safe, we are going to have to provide the necessary funding to make those changes.
Diane, Thanks so much.
Jan Resseger
https://janresseger.wordpress.com/
“That all citizens will be given an equal start through a sound education is one of the most basic, promised rights of our democracy. Our chronic refusal as a nation to guarantee that right for all children…. is rooted in a kind of moral blindness, or at least a failure of moral imagination…. It is a failure which threatens our future as a nation of citizens called to a common purpose… tied to one another by a common bond.” —Senator Paul Wellstone, March 31, 2000
Paul Wellstone. A great man whose death was extremely suspicious.
I am reminded of the quote at the beginning of Reign of Error, “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.” John Adams, 1785.
Jan has done a splendid job of rounding up and commenting on the many issues the nation is facing. I also commented on her blog.
Capitulating to the reopening of schools right now is taking a lesson in crisis management from Donald Trump.
Just as Trump the Heedless missed the opportunity, back in February, to set in motion creation of adequate testing and tracing capability and PPE, we are missing the opportunity, right now, by talking about how we might “safely reopen schools,” to be holding the difficult national discussion of what we could do, until we have a vaccine, about conducting learning safely, at a distance, outside school. We need to be addressing what can and cannot be done well online, how to support parents who have kids but have to work, how to supply internet service and computers and meals to poor kids. But we’re going to imitate IQ45 and downplay the problem until the disaster is upon us, finding us, like the grasshopper in the children’s story, completely unprepared.
And then, in the middle of the horror that ensues from reopening, we’re going to say, “Gee. We just didn’t know.”
I feel like I’m watching a train wreck in slow motion.
I see two issues with not reopening schools. If money is given to workers to not work, then there is the concept of making people economically whole through the disaster. So how will parents be compensated for the loss of on site public schools? The government needs to pay them financial assistance to help provide supervision during the day. This is 5K to 10K per child. How about a family with a child who is provided special assistance on the bus and at school, 50K?
Second, if the MET study said one bad teacher costs a kid x hundred thousand dollars of future earnings, how much will it cost low SES kids to miss a year of school. Not that they should be there, but who is backstopping their education and making them whole economically?