Steven Singer is a veteran teacher in Pittsburgh. He loves being a teacher. But he loves being alive even more. He doesn’t think it will be possible to open the schools safely because our government has failed to take the steps necessary to control the pandemic. Other nations have. But we haven’t, and now we are paying the price.
Singer writes:
Nearly every other comparable country kept that downward trend. But not us.
The United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Canada…
But the United States!?
Ha!
You think we can wear masks in public to guard against the spread of infection? No way! Our President politicized them.
Stay indoors to keep away from infected people? It’s summer and the beaches are open.
And – heck! – we’ve got to make sure restaurants and bars and other businesses are open, too, or else the economy will suffer…A sane country would come together and provide people with federal relief checks, personal protective equipment (PPE), protection from evictions, and universal healthcare. But we don’t live in that country.
Instead we’re all just going to have to suffer.
Not only you and me, but our kids, too.
Because they will have to somehow try to continue their educations through all this madness – again. And this time it won’t merely be for the last quarter of the year. It will be at the start of a new grade when everything is new and fresh and the groundwork is being laid for the entire academic year.
I don’t even know what to hope for anymore.
Would it be better to try to do a whole year of distance learning?
I speak from experience here – April and May were a cluster.
Kids didn’t have the necessary technology, infrastructure or understanding of how to navigate it. And there was no way to give it to them when those were the prerequisites to instruction.
Not to mention resources. All the books and papers and lessons were back in the classroom – difficult to digitize. Teachers had to figure out how to do everything from scratch with little to no training at the drop of a hat. (And guess what – not much has changed in the subsequent weeks.)
Let’s talk motivation. Kids can be hard to motivate under the best of circumstances, but try doing it through a screen! Try building a trusting instructional relationship with a child when you’re just a noisy bunch of pixels. Try meeting individual special needs.
A lot of things inevitably end up falling through the cracks and it’s up to parents to pick up the pieces. But how can they do that when they’re trying to work from home or working outside of the home or paralyzed with anxiety and fear?
And this is probably the BEST option, because what else do we have?
Are we really going to open the school buildings and teach in-person? While that would be much better from an academic standpoint, there’s still the problem of a global pandemic.
Kids will get sick. As time goes on we see increasingly younger people getting infected with worsening symptoms. We really don’t know what the long term effects of this disease will be.
And even if young people are mostly asymptomatic, chances are good they’ll spread this thing to the rest of us.
They’ll bring it home to their families. They’ll give it to their teachers.
Even if we only have half the kids one day and the other half on another day, that won’t help much. We’re still being exposed to at least a hundred kids every week. (Not to mention the question of how to effectively teach some kids in-person while the rest are on-line!)
Even with masks on – and can you imagine teaching in a mask!? Can you imagine kids wearing masks all day!? – those respiratory droplets will spread through our buildings like mad!
Many of us are in the most susceptible groups because of age or health.
Don’t get me wrong – I want to get back to my classroom and teach my students in-person more than almost anything – except dying.
I’d rather live a little bit longer, thank you… A crappy year of education is better than mass death.
From a teacher ….
I sent this email letter, along with Diane’s blog, to my state Congressional people.
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Dear Senator Niemeyer [R-IN] and Representative Chyung [D-IN],
It is easy for politicians to stand back and say, “Schools should open.” This is what Governor Holcomb believes, hope you don’t.
This article expresses my deep concern for teachers who will be required to come back to school in the fall. I did read that 20% of teachers across the U.S. are planning to quit. There was a teacher shortage in Indiana before COVID -19 and this shortage will most likely get worse.
How are schools, with a continuing lack of funding, supposed to have decent social distancing and expect children to respect that when even adults don’t? Our president isn’t showing us that wearing a mask is important and many Hoosier adults also don’t respect this necessity.
I am terribly afraid that opening schools will create a horrible situation. Schools are enclosed environments. Remember the problems created when the virus was just starting and cruise ships would arrive with people in bad shape?
There are going to be adults in each school and their health will be put in jeopardy. The virus is mutating and is getting stronger and is now affecting young adults. How much damage will ensue if schools, just like states, open too early?
Other nations have successfully worked to contain this deadly virus. The United States hasn’t.
Kids will get sick. As time goes on we see increasingly younger people getting infected with worsening symptoms. We really don’t know what the long term effects of this disease will be.
Sincerely,Carol Ring [a HAPPILY retired teacher]
Good morning Diane and everyone,
No matter how we reopen schools in-person in the fall, students and staff will be guinea pigs. Nobody knows what the consequences will be or how it will play out. I teach grades 7-11, and I must say that most of my students did fairly well with learning online. It wasn’t perfect and it was a poor substitute for in person learning, but it did work ok. I’m thinking of ways to do it better if it comes to that. I think elementary school students are a different case. I particularly worry about the colder months when the buildings are closed and students and staff start to get ill with colds, flu, etc. It’s going to be extremely hard to keep schools open with all of those factors.
As I have said, each person must consider the risk versus reward for him or herself. If I were a sage administrator, I would assign my high risk teachers due to age or preexisting condition to more remote assignments, wherever possible. I do not know if assigning teachers this way violates any existing laws, but it seems like a way to somewhat control the working conditions for the most vulnerable.
And the households the children bring the virus home to? The households the teachers bring the virus home to.
Perhaps if we were South Korea 60 million people 25 million in the Seoul Metro area. Denser than the NY/NJ/ Conn.metro area .
South Korea nationwide 12,373 cases/ 280 deaths. They can open schools .
You control the virus and schools and the economy can follow. The South Korean economy declined by 1.5 %, USA 4.8% .
DIANE,
I HAVE WANTED TO WRITE TO YOU OFTEN, BUT I LOST YOUR ADRESS. I STILL HAVE LOTS OF THINGS TO SAY ABOUGHT TRUMP, OUR SCHOOLS, AND THE FUTURE, BUT I HAVE ONLY BEEN ABLE TO REACH A FEW FRENDS. ALTHOUGH MY MEMORY OF EVERYTHING IS BAD–INCLUDING SPELLING WORDS–I STILL WAN’T TO KEEP WRITING TILL MY END.
JOANNE YATVIN
I have your address, Joanne.
Schools forced to choose between awful & terrible in fall because fed gov refuses to do what is necessary to mediate virus spread, provide $ to people to mediate effect of unemployment, offset state/local tax loss. Rush to “reopen” = virus resurgence. Long past time to refuse to accept living with the so-called choice made by people who care not a wit about the wellbeing of all people.
yes: reality argues that so long as everyone knows that the federal government is NOT going to step in and do what science demands, pretending that schools can open safely is just that — pretending. It is past time to stop spending thought and money on theories which simply cannot exist, and instead figure out how to do a much better job helping kids stuck at home.
Thank you so much, Diane. You did an excellent job summarizing the main points from my latest blog article. You always seem able to cut right to the heart of the matter. I’m so grateful you popularize the voices of working educators. We desperately need support. As you can see, there are far too many folks willing to sacrifice us to the economy. However, even from that point of view it’s wishful thinking. What happens when teachers get sick? Where will the replacements come from? We’ll just end up distance learning anyway, but by then many parents and possibly children will be sick, too.
Bill Gates does not care if the teaching force is thinned and class sizes multiplied; Michael Bloomberg even said aloud that he wanted to cut the number of teachers — in half. The Waltons do not want to pay taxes that go to teacher salaries, pensions, or indirectly to union dues. You know they don’t care about our lives. They’re Monsanto investors. They’re stoppers and friskers. They are the ones buying our school board elections, city council elections, and state legislature elections. Decisions are going to be made in the name of corporate profits, not public health and safety.
“A global study has found strong evidence that a new form of the coronavirus has spread from Europe to the US. The new mutation makes the virus more likely to infect people but does not seem to make them any sicker than earlier variations of the virus, an international team of researchers reported Thursday.
“‘It is now the dominant form infecting people,’ Erica Ollmann Saphire of the La Jolla Institute for Immunology and the Coronavirus Immunotherapy Consortium, who worked on the study, told CNN.
“‘This is now the virus.’
“The study, published in the journal Cell, builds on some earlier work the team did that was released on a preprint server earlier in the year. Shared information on genetic sequences had indicated that a certain mutant version of the virus was taking over.”
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/health/coronavirus-mutation-spread-study/
Seems like Coronavirus learns fast.
If so, then how are we learning to outlearn it? How are we learning not to be enablers of its drive to survive and thrive?
In the last issue of “the Nation” I scanned the first of six pages and sent it to the superintendent in Highland whom I admire and thought it might be of interest. For those interested the whole six pages are enlightening I think I tried and failed to copy and paste that first page here but if you can get a copy it is an article of what happened in the New York public schools.
Our experience with the up to 40,000 students who went to daily to childcare facilities run by the YMCA during the lock down, the 10,000 students who went to daily childcare facilities run by NYC Public, and a survey of 916 childcare centers that cared for approximately 20,000 children through the lock down suggest that there is a very low risk that teachers will be infected by children. See https://www.npr.org/2020/06/24/882316641/what-parents-can-learn-from-child-care-centers-that-stayed-open-during-lockdowns
There is also this interview of a pediatrician who specializes in infectious disease from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/us/coronavirus-schools-reopening-guidelines-aap.html
My goodness, you are quite the ideologue, dismiss anything that doesn’t fit the preconceived conclusion, accept and trumpet anything that does, no matter how tenuous. Note the conclusion of the first link you cite: “Right now, Sharfstein says, we just don’t know how important it is to limit group size. ‘I think it’s a failure that we haven’t prioritized opening schools.’
“Prioritizing schools, he adds, means doing lots of research on children and the coronavirus as soon as possible to inform the right policies to put in place.”
Question: should opening schools be prioritized over certainty about what the virus actually does? Question: is doing lots of research…to inform the right policies actually being done? Answer: no, not in the absence of national leadership and international collaboration.
As to the second link, I gave up after losing track of how many the times the word “seems” was used. What seems to be known if very, very different from what is known. But not if one is an ideologue who fits argument, no matter how many contortions one must engage in to get there.
Did i dismiss anything? Instead I added to the information that readers here might consider. We have not seen infection hot spots in child care facilities that have remained open. The second link was an interview of a phylsician researcher who specializes in pediatric infectious disease. It seem very Trumpian of you to dismiss the opinion of a scientific expert as ideological.
It would be EXTREMELY helpful if you could present some evidence that child to adult transmission is significant for Coved-19. There were two such cases in Iceland. Perhaps that will give you a point to start.
I very much look forward to your response.
Can one extrapolate from preschoolers to school-aged kids, 5-18? I don’t think so. A recent study in Lancet found that kids 10 and older are as likely to contract the virus as adults are. Is there something about kids 10-18 that makes them magically able to contract the virus but unable to spread it to others?
Bob,
The children in the links above are not preschoolers, but the school age children of essential workers who could not go to school because the schools were closed.
Could you provide a link to the Lancet article? Is it https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31304-0/fulltext ?
Good to see that children under the age of 10 are significantly less likely to have been infected in the study I linked to above. This might reduce concerns about the inability of small children to practice social distancing and wearing masks.
As a 32 year veteran teacher, I wholeheartedly agree with Steve Singer! Going back is not the answer right now, as it can not be done safely within the constraints of most school budgets. It also does not meet safety levels for students or staff. We should be working on improving distance learning and accessibility to technology and internet for all families.
The Covid epidemic in the USofA will be nowhere near contained come school starting time. It is the height of hubris and arrogance that anyone believes that we will be. Unfortunately almost all adminimals* have jumped on the “sky is falling in terms of student learning” bandwagon and believe that they will know how to handle preventing the contagion from spreading when school opens. Not only that but that they will be able to provide equitable and just opportunities for ALL students. And they are dead wrong.
It will be up to the teachers to deny and refuse those adminimals’ proposals and, quoting Dolly, tell them to “Take this job and shove it!”
*From “Oye’s Devil’s Dictionary of Education” (all apologies to A Bierce): Adminimal (n): A spineless creature formerly known as an administrator and/or principal who gleefully implements unethical and unjust educational malpractices such as the standards and testing malpractice regime. Adminimals are known by/for their brown-nosing behavior in kissing the arses of those above them in the testucation hierarchy. These sycophantic toadies (not to be confused with cane toads, adminimals are far worse to the environment) are infamous for demanding that those below them in the testucation hierarchy kiss the adminimal’s arse on a daily basis, having the teachers simultaneously telling said adminimals that their arse and its byproducts don’t stink. Adminimals are experts at Eichmanizing their staff through using techniques of fear and compliance inducing mind control. Beware, any interaction with an adminimal will sully one’s soul forever unless one has been properly intellectually vaccinated.
Agree, Duane!
Yet we’ve made no steps as far as I can see to improve online education from the disaster it was this spring. Another year down the toilet for kids. Another terrible year for parents. Especially at-risk kids and their parents.
Great piece, Steven!
We can’t safely reopen schools until we are able to identify who has the virus, trace his or her contacts, and isolate those people from the rest of the school population. To do that, we need to VASTLY expand our testing ability, and this requires coordinated federal action under the Defense Production Act.
Opening schools without being able to test everyone, especially when numbers of cases are rising daily, is crazy. But the alternatives are also not great–distance learning and parents who cannot go to work because they have to be home with their children.
So, we have these stark choices–take the chance that lots and lots of teachers, administrators, staff, and kids will die OR create enough testing capacity–enough to test everyone who is going to be in school, just as we now test everyone who is going to be in contact with Don the Con.
Opening school without developing that capacity first is insane. The arguments for doing so are magical thinking. Yes, I know. It was so much fun believing in Santa Claus. And it would be lovely to think that our foregathers were always honorable and brilliant. And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
Let me remind everyone that we are talking, here, about how many teacher and parent and student deaths are acceptable.
Trump can’t even commit to having people wear a mask. How are children, especially high school ones, going to believe they have to wear a mask when their parents don’t see it as necessary. It’s a ‘state to state’ order says the Orange Ignoramus.
How long before it is officially said that too many schools opened too early?
Trump has an ethics policy?
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As U.S. coronavirus cases continue to climb and more hospitals report nearing capacity, officials across the country say some states, including Florida, Texas and Arizona, reopened too quickly.
Forty lobbyists with ties to President Donald Trump helped clients secure more than $10 billion in federal coronavirus aid, among them five former administration officials whose work potentially violates Trump’s own ethics policy, according to a report. The lobbyists identified Monday by the watchdog group Public Citizen either worked in the Trump executive branch, served on his campaign, were part of the committee that raised money for inaugural festivities or were part of his presidential transition.
The White House is again rejecting calls for a national mask-wearing mandate. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows says in an appearance on “Fox and Friends” Monday morning that the president sees the issue as a “state-to-state” matter