Archives for the month of: July, 2020
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Trump Guts Environmental Protections

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2020 //
14

Trump is the worst president in American history, not “modern times.” He is an international menace and a threat to all living things. His incompetence and stupidity are equaled only by his arrogance.

The New York Times reports:

 

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Wednesday unilaterally weakened one of the nation’s bedrock conservation laws, the National Environmental Policy Act, limiting public review of federal infrastructure projects to speed up the permitting of freeways, power plants and pipelines.

In doing so, the Trump administration claimed it will save hundreds of millions of dollars over almost a decade by significantly reducing the amount of time allowed to complete reviews of major infrastructure projects.

The president announced the final changes to the rule at the U.P.S. Hapeville Airport Hub in Atlanta, making the case that “mountains and mountains of red tape” and lengthy permit processes have held up major infrastructure projects across the country, including a lane expansion to the perpetually clogged Interstate 75 in Georgia.

“All of that ends today,” he said. “We’re doing something dramatic.”

Revising the 50-year-old law through regulatory reinterpretation is one of the biggest — and most audacious — deregulatory actions of the Trump administration, which to date has moved to roll back 100 rulesprotecting clean air and water, and others that aim to reduce the threat of human-caused climate change.

Categories Environment, Trump

New York Times: DeVos Allies Try to Understand Her Abandonment of Local Control

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2020 //
36

The New York Times wrote about Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ sudden turnaround, from champion of local control to heavy-handed advocate of federal threats to reopen schools regardless of local conditions or wishes. Those quoted in the story are DeVos allies, which makes sense, since they must feel a sense of betrayal.

*Keri Rodrigues of the Walton-funded National Parents Union; she was a leader of the battle in Massachusetts for more charter schools, which was overwhelmingly defeated in a state referendum.

*Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a prominent voice for charters, vouchers, and high-stakes testing, issues quite far from the interests of the 85% of U.S. students who attend public schools.

*Sarah Carpenter of the Walton-funded Memphis Lift, which is highly critical of the local public schools; several low-performing Memphis public schools were turned into charters and handed over to the Achievement School District, but experienced no gains over five years.

*Ubiquitous conservative pundit Frederick Hess.

DeVos’s allies are surprised to see her depart suddenly from her conservative principles.

Supporters of public schools must be even more surprised, but for different reasons.

DeVos has repeatedly denounced and demeaned public schools and their teachers. She has sung the praises of online learning, which she now finds inadequate. (Her mentor Jeb Bush is still predicting that online learning is the future, even though most parents and students have had their fill of it.)

Most likely, Trump’s campaign consultants told him that this was a winning issue for him, and Betsy is falling into line, denouncing the distance learning and home schooling that she usually celebrates, and insisting that students must return to their brick-and-mortar public schools for full-time instruction.

We have learned, to our great surprise, that Betsy, like Donald, has no fixed principles.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Blended Learning, Online Education

Dr. Nan Fulcher and Justin Parmenter: A Warning for North Carolina

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2020 //
4

NBCT Teacher Justin Parmenter and microbiologist Dr. Nan Fulcher write here about North Carolina’s reliance on limited studies to justify reopening schools.

 

A Warning for Governor Cooper: the burden of COVID-19 in NC is far higher than in countries that struggled with school outbreaks after reopening

On Tuesday Governor Roy Cooper announced that North Carolina students will return to school for in-person instruction in August. Schools will be expected to follow distancing protocols and symptoms screenings will be done as students and staff enter school buildings. Also on Tuesday, North Carolina set new records for single day death totals and COVID hospitalizations.

On Saturday we wrote about the COVID-19 data that North Carolina school officials are mulling over. In analyzing the specific points presented by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS) to the NC State Board of Education, we noted the scarcity of information on COVID-19 spread in schools, and the potential for misinterpreting the few studies that do exist.

In our article, we only addressed the studies cited by the NCDHHS that supported the statement “schools do not appear to have played a major role in COVID-19 transmission.”

We did not address the fact that the NCDHHS failed to include other data in their report — information about countries that had already reopened their schools prior to the end of the 2019-2020 school year.

To shed more light on reopened schools, we now highlight a recent New York Times (NYT) article, which was published the same day as our last blog article.

The NYT outlines critical considerations for reopening U.S. schools, citing much of the same research we analyzed — and identifying the same flaws.

In addition, the authors discuss what happened when countries reopened their schools following initial closure due to the first COVID-19 cases. Information about reopened schools was absent from the NCDHHS’s literature review. This data could have greatly helped to inform discussion about North Carolina’s plan for the upcoming school year.

The NYT article cites the report entitled “Summary of School Re-Opening Models and Implementation Approaches During the COVID 19 Pandemic, which was distributed by the University of Washington Department of Global Health (updated 7-6-2020).

To set the stage for analyzing the UW report, we generated some values that reflect the COVID-19 burden in each country at the time they reopened their schools. Because the studies had different methods for determining transmission rates, direct comparison of each country’s infection data was not possible.

Therefore, to illustrate the prevalence of COVID-19 in each country, we determined the number of new daily cases expressed as a fraction of the country’s total population. (For example, Denmark had 198 new reported cases the day schools reopened; that value divided by the total population of 5.8 million equals 0.34 cases/10,000 people)

Table 1. COVID-19 infection data from six countries on the date that schools reopened.

New daily cases on reopen date per 10,000 people

Denmark 0.22
France 0.01
Germany. 0.15
Israel. 0.1
Norway. 0.07
S. Korea. 0.01

In the UW report, the authors considered Denmark and Norway to be among the European countries with low community transmission, while Germany was considered to be “higher”. This conclusion doesn’t track with our calculations, but high variability among the number of new daily case reports at the time could account for the discrepancy.

As for the outcome of reopening schools, the UW report presented the following results: [*NOTE: each country employed different mitigation measures and different strategies for grouping students and determining which ages returned to school.]

Denmark and Norway – These two countries reopened schools gradually, starting with preschool and then all students six weeks later. This approach did not result in an increased rate of growth of COVID-19 cases in either country.

Germany – The return of older students later in the reopening process was accompanied by increased transmission among students; staff infection rates were equivalent to that of the general population. Individual schools were closed for quarantine as outbreaks occurred. Recently, Germany closed a small number of schools preemptively in response to local community outbreaks.

Israel – Schools adopted fewer social distancing measures due to crowding. After reopening schools, over 300 children and staff were infected within a month, with over 130 cases at a single school. Around 200 schools out of 5,200 were closed for quarantine during June, others remaining open through the end of the month.

South Korea – Soon after reopening, schools near a warehouse facility outbreak were closed and other schools postponed reopening. Other closings have occurred in response to other small community clusters. No reports of school-related infections have been reported to date.

France – There were no publications on the outcome, but news accounts indicate that, despite a small number of cases (70 per 1.2 million students) after gradual opening in mid-May, cases have subsided and schools have fully reopened with no additional outbreaks.

The overall conclusion from UW was that reopening schools in countries where community transmission was low did not increase overall spread, but opening schools in countries where community transmission was higher correlated with school outbreaks and subsequent school closures.

To consider how reopening U.S. schools will compare to the other countries’ experiences, we looked at the current data for new daily cases for the entire country and for North Carolina (Table 2).

Table 2. Current COVID-19 infection data (7-11-2020) for the United States and North Carolina.

New daily cases per 10,000 people, 7-12-20

United States 1.87
North Carolina 2.35

It’s clear that none of the countries that reopened schools in late spring had anywhere near the extent of COVID-19 that’s present in the U.S.

Further, the value for new daily cases from each country that reopened schools (with the exception of Israel) continued to decline after school was back in session.

With transmission rates continuing to rise in the U.S. and in North Carolina, the number of daily new cases in both places could double by the time school starts on August 17th.

If the experience of other countries holds true — that COVID-19 spread in reopened schools reflects the prevalence of the infection in the community — reopening schools where the number of active cases is high would present an enormous risk for students and staff in those areas.

Even if children don’t pass along SARS-CoV-2 as easily as adults, there could still be a significant increase in spread among students and their families in communities hardest hit by COVID-19.

NC school officials urgently need to consider the lessons from other countries’ school reopening experiences, and look at the pace at which the virus is spreading right now … and where it’s predicted to be this fall and beyond.

Nan Fulcher earned her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of North Carolina, specializing in infectious disease research. She’s involved in science and outdoor education programming for children and does freelance graphic design.

 

Categories Health, North Carolina, Safety

Dana Milbank: Trump’s Blatant Racism May Transform Anerica

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2020 //
17

Dana Milbank argues in this column that Trump’s overt racism is creating a massive backlash that will unseat him and transform American politics for the better.

Here’s hoping and praying he is right.

Trump’s racism has stigmatized the Republican Party. Moderates have jumped ship, and the party is now identified with white nationalism and the KKK, all to protect a president who had no party affiliation until he ran for president. How can Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the GOP’s only African American in the Senate, remain in the party of Trump?

Milbank wrote:

Four years ago, Christopher Parker, an African American political scientist at the University of Washington, made the provocative argument that Donald Trump’s candidacy could “do more to advance racial understanding than the election of Barack Obama.”

“Trump’s clear bigotry,” Parker wrote in the American Prospect, a liberal journal, “makes it impossible for whites to deny the existence of racism in America. . . . His success clashes with many white Americans’ vision of the United States as a fair and just place.”

Those words seem prescient today, after four years of President Trump’s racism, from the “very fine people” marching with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville to, in just the past week, a “white power” retweet and a threat to veto defense spending to protect the names of Confederate generals; after a pandemic disproportionately ravaged African American communities while an indifferent president tried to move on; after Trump-allied demonstrators, some carrying firearms and Confederate flags, tried to “liberate” themselves from public health restrictions; after the video of George Floyd’s killing showed the world blatant police brutality; after Trump used federal firepower against peaceful civil rights demonstrators of all colors.

The reckoning Parker foresaw is now upon us. White women, disgusted by Trump’s cruelty, are abandoning him in large number. White liberals, stunned by the brazen racism, have taken to the streets. And signs point to African American turnout in November that will rival the record level of 2012, when Obama was on the ballot. This, by itself, would flip Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to Democrats, an analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress shows.

Surprisingly high Democratic turnout in recent contests in Wisconsin, Georgia, Kentucky and Colorado points to the possibility of a building wave. The various measures of Democratic enthusiasm suggest “turnout beyond anything we’ve seen since 1960,” University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington predicts. If so, that would mean a historic repudiation of Trump, who knows his hope of reelection depends on low turnout. He has warned that mail-in ballots and other attempts to encourage more voting would mean “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

That may not be wrong. Trump has accelerated a decades-old trend toward parties redefining themselves by race and racial attitudes. Racial resentment is now the single most important factor driving Republicans and Republican-leaning movers, according to extensive research, most recently by Nicholas Valentino and Kirill Zhirkov at the University of Michigan — more than religion, culture, class or ideology. An ongoing study by University of North Carolina researchers finds that racial resentment even drives hostility toward mask-wearing and social distancing. Conversely, racial liberalism now drives Democrats of all colors more than any other factor.

Consider just one yardstick, a standard question of racial attitudes in which people are asked to agree or disagree with this statement: “It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.”

In 2012, 56 percent of white Republicans agreed with that statement, according to the American National Election Studies. The number grew in 2016 with Trump’s rise, to 59 percent. Last month, an astonishing 71 percent of white Republicans agreed, according to a YouGov poll written by Parker and conducted by GQR (where my wife is a partner).

The opposite movement among white Democrats is even more striking. In 2012, 38 percent agreed that African Americans didn’t try hard enough. In 2016, that dropped to 27 percent. And now? Just 13 percent.

To the extent Trump’s racist provocation is a strategy (rather than simply an instinct), it is a miscalculation. The electorate was more than 90 percent white when Richard Nixon deployed his Southern strategy; the proportion is now 70 percent white and shrinking. But more than that, Trump’s racism has alienated a large number of white people.

“For many white Americans, the things Trump is saying and getting away with, they just didn’t think they lived in a world where that could happen,” says Vincent Hutchings, a political scientist specializing in public opinion at the University of Michigan. Racist appeals in particular alienate white, college-educated women, and even some women without college degrees, he has found: “One of the best ways to exacerbate the gender gap isn’t to talk about gender but to talk about race.”

Trump’s racism has also emboldened white Democrats, who have often been on the losing end of racial politics since George H.W. Bush deployed Willie Horton against Michael Dukakis in 1988. “They’re embracing the racial issues they used to cower on in decades past,” Hetherington says.

This is what Parker had in mind when he wrote in 2016 that Trump could be “good for the United States.” The backlash Trump provoked among whites and nonwhites alike “could kick off a second Reconstruction,” Parker now thinks. “I know it sounds crazy, especially coming from a black man,” he says, but “I think Trump actually is one of the best things that’s happened in this country.”

Categories Accountability, Racism, Republicans, Trump

Ralph Ratto: COVID and School Ventilation

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2020 //
19

Ralph Ratto is a retired teacher in New York State. In this post, he reminds readers of the importance of school ventilation systems, which are seldom in a good state of repair, and the necessity of paying to clean and upgrade them for the safety of students and staff.

He asks: Why is Congress willing to fund banks and big corporations but not the health of our nation’s children and their teachers.

If school ventilation systems fail to provide fresh air before Covid, what do you think will happen with Covid? So my question is really this, why haven’t school districts, and states remediated while school buildings were closed?

This is not rocket science! Clean those univents and filters in classrooms, install new ones where needed, and add exhaust fans.

Spacing desks 6′ apart is not enough, cleaning surfaces is not enough! If the air quality is poor all of that will not matter.

The Feds and states must pour money into our school infrastructure if they want to open the economy. Forget the corporate bailouts, for once in my lifetime I would love our nation to put schools at the top of a national priority and support them with the funding needed.

Categories Funding, Health, Safety

Making Black Lives Matter in School

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2020 //
14

The following article appeared in the Grio and was co-authored by Dr. Andre Perry, Jitu Brown, Keron Blair, Richard Fowler, Stacy Davis Gates and Tiffany Dena Loftin.

George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and now Rayshard Brooks — all Black people whose lives and purposes were snuffed out by White Supremacy. These four slain Americans were fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters, and one-time students of our nation’s public education system.

If we acknowledge the truth about the systemic racism in our country, we must also acknowledge the impact that racism has on our children and their classrooms. For us, #BlackLivesMatter is more than just a hashtag or social media post. #BlackLivesMatter is a policy doctrine that should govern how we think about safety, health care, the economy and certainly our nation’s public schools.

For Black lives to matter, we must reconstitute our nation’s classrooms and ensure that they are places that push back against the epidemic of racism and anti-Blackness. Its symptoms include under-resourced school buildings, oversized classrooms, over-policing, less access to necessary protections, lack of opportunity, and disinvestment.

Together, we — parents, students, community, educators and our local unions — believe we can cure anti-Blackness in our children’s classrooms

Here are the 10 things we can do today to combat anti-Blackness and racism for the sake of our babies and their neighborhood public schools:

1. Our school curricula must be culturally relevant, responsive and designed to prepare Black students for a future as global citizens. We must move away from rote memorization for standardized testing to teaching and critical thinking. Forget Columbus and talk about the role colonialism and capitalism played in structuring our nation and the modern world. Incorporating ethnic studies, with an emphasis on the Black experience as a conduit to addressing other marginalized groups, is critical. That way, more people will be familiar with key concepts — such as the building of our economy on exploitation and extraction (through slavery, Jim Crow, labor suppression, mass incarceration and criminalization). This will allow future generations to see the power dynamic created by policing and how it evolved by protecting wealthy business interests and oppressing Black bodies, enslaved and as they exist today.

2. We need smaller class sizes. Black parents have been demanding this for decades. Smaller class sizes allow for more individualized attention to each student. As we return to schools in an ongoing pandemic, small classes will be critical to keeping students physically and mentally healthy while they academically progress.

3. School safety can no longer mean school police and security staff. We know by now that most Black children are justifiably terrified by the police. Research affirms that police presence in schools leads to harsher punishment disproportionately affecting Black students — regardless of the severity or frequency of the behavior. For far too long, misguided leaders have depended on police in our public schools as a form of discipline. It is time for that to change. Our students deserve to learn in safe, loving and welcoming environments. Law enforcement officials walking the hallways of America’s schools only stoke fear.

4. We must recruit and support Black educators. When schools undergo major changes, Black educators are deliberately shut out. Disregarding their institutional, classroom and community knowledge has crippled generations of students and harmed our community. Everyone, from cafeteria workers to bus drivers, should have the tools to support our students, especially those experiencing disproportionate levels of trauma. By supporting our most vulnerable kids and families, school staff can improve the climate for the entire community. Salaries, working conditions and the protected right to organize must reflect the high level of commitment required to be an anti-racist educator.

5. It’s time for serious investment in school infrastructure and technology. Too many Black children attend schools where the walls are crumbling, there is lead in the water and heating and cooling are in disrepair. We want playgrounds, libraries and digital devices for every child. We want broadband internet to be a public utility, free or subsidized for families that can’t afford it.

6. Our schools and communities can no longer be turned over to private interests through vouchers, charters, education savings accounts, commercial tech platforms and other schemes used to syphon off public monies for private profit. Privatization hurts Black students and communities by excluding the neediest students, stealing funds that would otherwise support the 90+ % of kids enrolled in neighborhood public schools, and requiring those schools to further cut budgets and services for the vast majority of students. Black communities are tired of false and destructive choices of others. Our tax dollars are controlled by somebody else who’s eager to make a profit, escape our communities, and starve our people as they push an anti-Black agenda.

7. Schools serving Black students need more resources, not less. COVID-19 has laid bare the disproportionate health vulnerabilities facing Black people. The same vulnerabilities exist in public education. For decades, Black students, parents and educators have suffered from educational neglect and discrimination in public schooling. This suffering must end today. It starts by building bigger budgets for our neighborhood public schools. In order to learn at the same level as their white counterparts, our kids need more nurses, guidance counselors, paraeducators, social workers, mentors, and enrichment opportunities. These critical supports cost money. Equity demands that more public school dollars should flow to our most vulnerable students and their classrooms.

8. We need sustainable community schools. Many of these elements (greater community control, parental engagement and support, wraparound services, challenging and culturally relevant academics and enrichment) come together in the sustainable community school model. The Journey for Justice Alliance has suggested following Maryland’s lead by turning any school receiving Title I funds into a sustainable community school — neighborhood public schools that bring together many partners to provide a range of supports and opportunities to children, youth, families and communities.

9. We must eliminate standardized testing. Based in racist ideology, these tests are biased against Black students and contribute to the evil myth of anti-Blackness mentioned above. They are used to rank, sort and deprive Black children of everything, from access to advanced coursework to a chance to study with the best teachers. Standardized tests are the excuse decision-makers use to stigmatize Black neighborhood schools with misleading grades before targeting them for closure, privatization and disinvestment — despite obvious student need. Meanwhile, schools serving children with the privilege these tests measure are rewarded. The children’s privilege, and that of the school, also gets compounded.

These ideas are not new. Folks have been waging campaigns to gain these wins for a long time. They are worth restating at this moment, and they are certainly worth fighting for. Let us take to the streets with these demands in hand to make a new world possible

Authors:

Dr. Andre Perry – fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings

Jitu Brown – National Director of Journey for Justice

Keron Blair – Executive Director for the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools

Richard Fowler – Fox News Contributor/National Syndicated Radio Host

Stacy Davis Gates – Executive Vice President for the Chicago Teachers Union

Tiffany Dena Loftin – Director of the NAACP Youth and College Division

Categories Accountability, Bias, Charter Schools, Citizenship, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, Justice, Privatization, Race, Racism, Vouchers

Happy Birthday, Woody Guthrie!

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2020 //
20

Garrison Keillor’s “The Writers’ Almanac” reports that today is Woody Guthrie’s birthday. He may be America’s most beloved and most often sung folk singer. Everyone sings “This Land is My Land,” but not usually with all the lyrics. Guthrie was radical in his politics, having experienced the hard times of the Depression. At one point, he lived in an apartment in Queens owned by Fred Trump, and he wrote a song about how Trump didn’t rent to black people.

Today is the birthday of Woodrow Wilson — aka “Woody” Guthrie, born in Okemah, Oklahoma (1912). Woody Guthrie never finished high school, but he spent his spare time reading books at the local public library. He took occasional jobs as a sign painter and started playing music on a guitar he found in the street. During the Dust Bowl in the mid-1930s, Guthrie followed workers who were moving to California. They taught him traditional folk and blues songs, and Guthrie went on to write thousands of his own, including “This Train Is Bound for Glory.” In 1940, he wrote the folk classic “This Land Is Your Land” because he was growing sick of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.”

Woody Guthrie once said: “I hate a song that makes you think that you’re not any good. […] Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling. I am out to fight those kinds of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood.”

Categories Art

The Reopening Question: Is It Safe?

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2020 //
99

There is one basic principle that must be honored in deciding whether and when to reopen schools: SAFETY FIRST.

No child or teacher or staff member should die because of a rush to reopen.

NBC News reported:

WASHINGTON — As the calls from the White House to fully reopen schools grow louder, evidence continues to pile up to show that scenario is unlikely to happen, at least not on the national scale President Donald Trump desires. That’s not because state and local officials aren’t trying, but because the spread of the virus is beginning to overwhelm even the best-laid plans.

Dallas Independent School District Superintendent Michael Hinojosa, for example, had been working on a blueprint to reopen schools in August as part of a long and delicate process. But with the virus now surging across Texas, the outbreak may make the decision for him.

“Initially I thought we would be ready, but I’m starting to have second thoughts,” Hinojosa told MSNBC’s Garret Haake last week. “Our parents have pivoted, more than 50 percent of them are now saying they don’t want to come, and we’re hearing loud and clear from our employees, especially our teachers, that they have a lot of concerns about how we can pull this off.”

His experience could be a preview of what’s to come for many school districts.

Public health experts, school officials, and teacher unions are warning that any proposal to physically reopen likely depends on containing the broader spread of the virus outside the classroom.

“I think it does become hard or impossible in areas with very high rates of infection,” Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement at Johns Hopkins University and an advocate for reopening schools, said. “People will just be getting sick in the community and bringing it into the school. It will be very disruptive to the ability to stay open.”

With cases rising rapidly in much of the country, even states and districts with the most well-crafted and aggressive reopening plans could be whistling past the empty schoolyard if that’s the case.
San Diego, which was planning to open five days a week, announced on Monday it would only offer online learning thanks to the recent rise in coronavirus cases. Los Angeles will do the same.

Officials in Nashville and Atlanta have also announced the school year will start online due to their own coronavirus surges. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam has warned that school districts, some of which are already adopting hybrid plans, will not reopen if the state can’t keep infections down.

This presents obstacles to President Trump’s late scramble to open up schools, which he’s so far pursued by demanding that the Centers for Disease Control scale back its safety guidelines and by threatening schools that don’t open with some kind of financial punishment.

Even as Texas state officials move forward with a plan to require all schools to reopen full-time, for example, Governor Greg Abbott has cautioned that “if we continue to see COVID spreading the way that it is right now, it may be necessary to employ that flexibility and use online learning.” State guidance materials caution schools to design plans for “intermittent closure” if outbreaks occur.

The CDC offers some guidance to schools on how to isolate students or staff if they fall ill, but if parents pull their kids out of class in large numbers in favor of a remote learning option, that could effectively quash reopenings even if they continue on paper.

Both the worsening pandemic and Trump’s demands threaten to accelerate the trend by increasing anxiety about health conditions in schools. In Texas, a poll in June by the University of Texas/Texas Politics Project found 65 percent of respondents still considered schools “unsafe” for students.

“For me the goal is not just to open, it’s to stay open,” Dr. Thomas Frieden, a former CDC director, said on MSNBC. “If we open for a week or two and have to shut down the nation again, that would be a much worse travesty for our nation’s young children.”

Keeping teachers on board with reopening amid a raging series of outbreaks is also likely to be a struggle. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten has warned of a potential exodus of teachers retiring, quitting, or taking leave if they decide conditions are unsafe.

Some officials affiliated with the Trump administration have notably hedged their calls for reopening with disclaimers that pushing down cases is a critical step.

“The first thing we need to do is we need to get the virus under control,” White House testing czar Admiral Brett Giroir, who has advocated for reopening schools, said on ABC News on Sunday. “When we get the virus more under control, then we can really think about how we put children back in the classroom.”

While the White House has not presented a clear alternative to CDC guidelines or committed to funding new safety measures, plenty of outside health officials have argued that physically reopening schools should be the nation’s top priority given the immense strain even partial closures put on families.

Experts have proposed an array of potential measures to get there, from isolating groups of students to prevent large outbreaks, to installing partitions around desks, to pooling staff tests to detect infections early, to hiring aides to back up teachers.

The White House has frequently cited recommendations by the American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, to attempt 5-day-a-week reopenings in schools.

But the AAP, seemingly alarmed by Trump’s approach, issued a joint statement with national teachers unions and the School Superintendents Association on Friday warning that any approach to schools needed to follow public health guidance and get buy-in from local parents and teachers.

Critically, they warned that reopening plans should be scrapped if the outbreak becomes too severe.
“Schools in areas with high levels of COVID-19 community spread should not be compelled to reopen against the judgment of local experts,” they wrote.

Categories Health, Safety

New York City: How Does a District with More than One Million Students Plan to Reopen?

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2020 //
32

Leonie Haimson writes here how New York Coty hopes to reopen its public schools, which enroll more than one million students.

Haimson has chided the city for years about its failure to reduce class sizes, and that long history of neglect is making it even more difficult to find space to reopen with small classes.

DOE officials have determined that to maintain proper social distancing, a range of 9-12 students per classroom will be allowed, varying according to the size of the classroom.

Because class sizes are much larger than this in nearly every school, schools will have to separate their students into two or three or sometimes four groups who will take turns attending school in person, to be provided with remote learning when not in school. Families can also choose full-time remote learning with their children never attending school in person.

As a result of vastly different levels of school and classroom overcrowding across the city, some schools will be able to offer about half of their students in-person instruction each day; while others may only be able to allow each student to attend school one or two days a week. Or alternatively, different schools will opt for different groups of students attending school every other week or every third week.

For the most overcrowded schools, there will likely be three cohorts of students with complex schedules (not counting the group who stays home for full time remote learning) as shown to the right.

As usual with most such DOE documents, it provokes as many questions as it answers:
How will the existing number of teachers be able to teach three or four different student groups at the same time, including the ones who are present in school, the ones who are home receiving online instruction part-time, and those receiving full-time remote instruction –– particularly with planned budget cuts and a staffing freeze to schools?

If schools are encouraged to repurpose gymnasiums and cafeterias to allow for more classes to be taught at once, as the Chancellor has suggested, what additional personnel will be used to teach those students?

Will the same teachers be assigned to teach the same groups of students over time, whether in person or remotely?

What will working parents do when their kids are learning from home and cannot be in school?

How will busing and after school be handled?

If children attend school 1-3 days a week, parents will need to make arrangements for them when they are not in school.

Categories Accountability, Class size, New York City

Irony! Gompers Charter School Fights Union!

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2020 //
11

There is a charter school in San Diego called the Gompers Preparatory Academy. Since 2018, its private management has been fighting teachers who want to form a union. When the COVID crisis struck and the state planned budget cuts, Gompers laid off more than a third of the staff. By coincidence (!), nearly all the teachers laid off were the very ones who wanted to form a union!

Does the charter management know who Samuel Gompers was? Hint: the first president of the American Federation of Labor and a pioneer of the union movement.

Gompers Preparatory Academy announced Monday it had rescinded a decision made two weeks ago to lay off more than a third of the school’s teachers because of state budget cuts.

The layoffs would have increased class sizes from 19 students to 28 at the public charter school in southeastern San Diego. Ninety percent of Gompers students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, and some may be the first in their families to attend college, the school has said.

Some teachers had criticized the layoffs as an attempt to end their recently formed union…

Nearly all teachers who received layoff notices last month were union supporters, a San Diego Education Association spokesperson previously told inewsource. Gompers leaders had maintained the cuts were necessary and said decisions were based on seniority.

Categories Budget Cuts, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, San Diego, Teachers, Unions
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