Whether Trump wins or loses in November, it will take months or years to repair the damage he is inflicting on the United States Postal Service. Read about “Trump’s War on Christmas.”
Archives for the month of: August, 2020
Trump is obsessed with the U.S. Postal Service. He is certain that the U.S. mail is his enemy. One of his aides told him that he lost the 2016 popular vote because of mail fraud, and he’s ranted about the USPS ever since. He openly admitted in a recent news conference that he wants to block mail-in voting in hopes of cutting Democratic votes. Trump forced out the career professional who was running USPS and replaced with a donor to his campaign, Louis DeJoy. In the name of “efficiency,” USPS has been removing hundreds of high-speed sorting machines and thousands of mailboxes. At a time when millions of people count on the mails for their prescriptions and Social Security checks, the slowdowns are wreaking havoc. Even Republicans from heavily rural states whose constituents rely on the local post office have remained silent, as Trump orders the dismantling of USPS.
Democrats scheduled a hearing with Trump’s Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, who gave $2 million to the Trump coffers, but decided to move up the date to August 24. Trump and his wife voted by mail in Florida.
The House Oversight Committee will hold an emergency hearing on mail delays and concerns about potential White House interference in the U.S. Postal Service, inviting Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and Postal Service board of governors Chairman Robert M. Duncan to testify Aug. 24, top Democrats announced on Sunday.
Democrats have alleged that DeJoy, a former Republican National Committee chairman, is taking steps that are causing dysfunction in the mail system and could wreak havoc in the presidential election. The House had earlier not planned a hearing until September.
“The postmaster general and top Postal Service leadership must answer to the Congress and the American people as to why they are pushing these dangerous new policies that threaten to silence the voices of millions, just months before the election,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), House Oversight Chair Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) said in a statement announcing the hearing.
The Postal Service is beset with delays because of policy changes implemented by DeJoy, a former logistics executive and ally of President Trump. DeJoy banned postal workers from making extra trips to ensure on-time mail delivery and cracked down on overtime hours. Localities across the country have struggled with USPS backlogs of up to a week, hamstringing local businesses and delaying the arrival of crucial mail items, including prescription medications, Social Security checks and bills.
The Postal Service is in the process of removing 671 high-speed mail-sorting machines nationwide this month, a process that will eliminate 21.4 million items per hour’s worth of processing capability from the agency’s inventory.
On Thursday and Friday, it began removing public collection boxes in parts of California, New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon and Montana. The agency said Friday that it would stop mailbox removals, which it said were routine, until after the election.
And White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that it would also halt sorting-machine removals.
Meadows also said the White House is open to Congress passing a stand-alone measure to ensure the U.S. Postal Service is adequately funded to manage a surge in mail voting in November.
“The president of the United States is not going to interfere with anybody casting their votes in a legitimate way whether it’s the post office or anything else,” he said.
Both statements would appear to step back from the president’s comments Thursday when he said he opposed Postal Service funding because he wanted to restrict expanding voting by mail.
Meadows insisted the president is only opposed to states sending ballots directly to all registered voters — not to a more common practice in which states send mail ballots only to registered voters who request them. Trump, however, attacked all forms of mail voting for months before recently dialing back his criticism in particular states, including Florida, where he voted by mail himself this year.
“The president doesn’t have a problem with anybody voting by mail if you would look at it in terms of a no-excuse absentee ballot,” Meadows said. “What he opposes is universal mail-in ballots.”
There are five states that voted nearly entirely by mail before the pandemic and four more that have announced plans to do so since the pandemic hit. Meadows suggested more states will attempt to shift to sending ballots directly to all registered voters between now and the election.
“This is more about states trying to re-create how they get their ballots and they’re trying to do it on a compressed timeline that won’t work,” he said.
Alexandra Petri is a humorist for the Washington Post. She explains here that Trump, Pence, and DeVos are offering the nation’s children a chance to be heroes by forcing them to return to school without safety measures in place.
She writes:
Wonderful news this week for those children who have long envied essential workers and sacrificial-economy grandparents their plaudits and wished that they, too, could be on the front lines of this coronavirus thing: Now they will have the opportunity!
Everyone knows how important it is that we have a plan to reopen schools safely. That is why the Trump administration has devised a plan: to reopen schools. They sure hope your governor has plans for the safety part! In the meantime, your kids and their teachers get to be heroes and pioneers, instead of just reading about them in musty textbooks!
Of course, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention technically does have some suggestions and guidelines for how to reopen safely. To do so would not be impossible, the agency recognized, but it would require a lot of effort, expense and preparation. This was until the president had the brilliant idea: What if we simply decided it didn’t?
“We don’t want the guidance from CDC to be a reason schools don’t open,” as Vice President Pence said at Wednesday’s press conference.
The CDC’s director, Robert Redfield, said, “I want to make it very clear that what is not the intent of CDC’s guidelines is to be used as a rationale to keep schools closed.”
“They must fully open. And they must be fully operational,” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said. “And how that happens is best left to education and community leaders.”
Look, does the CDC know better what benchmarks a school should pass to reopen safely than your school’s five or six beleaguered administrators without degrees in public health do? Please do not answer this question, as it was rhetorical.
Is there any scientific support for this approach? So far, we don’t really have data showing that children are major carriers of the virus. Is this the same as, “There is data showing that children are NOT major carriers of the virus”? No, but — the fact that so many people can’t tell the difference just shows why being back at school is so crucial!
So will there be testing? Of course there will be! It’s a school! Probably there will also be essays and pop quizzes!
And is the CDC going to change its guidelines now that the president is upset that they are too detailed? Again, these guidelines are not binding! You can just do whatever. If you think it is too onerous to do what the CDC suggests is necessary in order to be safe, then simply do not do it! Also, yes.
The bottom line is: SCHOOLS MUST OPEN! Not only is it good for the economy, and not only will it be good for students to get to socialize and see counselors and have nutrition — all this, is, of course, true! which is why the American Pediatric Association urged us to set physically reopening schools as our goal! — but these brave pupils’ presence will also be a great incentive for your local government to get this virus under control, something the president and his team are very disappointed municipalities have not already managed to do on their own. We all agree that the best part of a plane ride is when you get off the plane at your destination, which is why we are now taking steps to push everyone out the door of that plane in the hopes that they will turn out to be at their destination and not 29,000 feet in the air surrounded by water vapor and highly intrepid geese.
But don’t look at this as a situation where the Trump administration is doing nothing to mitigate the alarming uptick of cases besides insist that, maybe, with less testing, it would go away, and now they would like to send your kids back into it. This is a situation where children are being offered what they want most: the opportunity to be heroes! Before, people complained that school was boring. Where was the drama? Where was the excitement? This is the boost the whole “school” concept needed. Send kids to learn pre-algebra and also play Russian roulette with the lives of their elderly relatives and teachers? Now I’m interested!
And best yet, in keeping with our commitment to choice in education, if your child is too wealthy to be willing to be a hero just yet, you can hire a substitute to attend class and do all the testing in their place. Rumor has it that the president was doing this even before the virus! But he has always been ahead of the unflattened curve.
Samuel Jayne Tanner and Ben Stasny write a satirical posting for a middle-school English language arts teacher that appeared in McSweeny’s.
Area School District is looking for a Language Arts Teacher/ Cheerleading Coach/ Custodian/ Nurse to help lead our COVID-19 and anti-racism instruction during this unprecedented moment.
The Language Arts Teacher/ Cheerleading Coach/ Custodian/ Nurse/ COVID-19 & Anti-Racism Specialist will be responsible for providing equitable grammatical, emotional, health, school spirit, and hygiene counsel to students. In these turbulent times, guidance for our students is more important than it has ever been before. This position will also provide an overall vision for COVID-19 relief and anti-racism throughout our middle school program as well as design a non-contact floor routine. The Language Arts Teacher/ Cheerleading Coach/ Custodian/ Nurse/ COVID-19 & Anti-Racism Specialist must step-up and deliver the steady, immersive leadership that is required in this new normal…
Applicants should drive up to the first available COVID testing tent in our faculty parking lot and call our front office to alert school admin that you are there. Depending on how many staff have called in sick or are carrying out a job action, someone will eventually come out and greet you. Be ready to take a COVID test, teach a practice lesson using White Fragility that demonstrates Common Core standards, lead a verse of the school fight song, disinfect 27 doorknobs, and give your interviewer a COVID test. Good luck!
Katherine Stewart, a scholar of rightwing evangelicals, writes in The New Republic about Betsy DeVos’s brazen transfer of public funds to private schools during the pandemic. Stewart is the author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. Stewart surveys the generous distribution of federal funds to private and religious schools, far more generous than the federal money for public schools. As you have read in numerous posts and in a study by the Network for Public Education, charter schools, which enroll about 6% of American students collected $1 billion to $2 billion from the Paycheck Protection Program. Stewart shows that private and religious schools collected even more. This was no accident. It is part of DeVos’s long-term goal of destroying public education.
She writes:
How much more does the Trump administration value the children of elite private and religious schools than the children who attend public schools? We can answer the question with some hard numbers. Public school students merit something like $266 apiece in extra pandemic-related funding. Kids attending the right private schools are worth $5,000 each or possibly much more.
That $266, by the way, is an overestimate. It’s what you get when you take the $13.5 billion allocated for K-12 education in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act of this past March and divide it up among the nation’s 50.8 million public school students. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos made sure to siphon some of that money for private and religious schools, which she has long favored, although she did receive pushback: On July 22, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), joined by school districts in California, Connecticut, and Colorado, sued DeVos and her department over the policy, calling it “as immoral as it is illegal…”
The $5,000 per student figure for some private schools cited above comes out of the Paycheck Protection Program, which was established by the CARES Act and implemented by the Small Business Administration. Public schools aren’t eligible for PPP money, which is technically a loan but will be forgiven if the funds are used for expenses that meet certain criteria. Although the SBA does not disclose exact loan amounts, it does make public the recipients receiving more than $150,000 and identifies amounts within broad ranges.
With this information, we know that Buckingham Browne & Nichols School, a private pre-K–12 school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a $75 million endowment and a student body of around 1,013, where annual tuition runs up to $52,300, collected a loan of between $5 and $10 million—or roughly $5,000 to $10,000 per student. (The school did not respond to multiple requests to confirm the exact amount.)…
Georgetown Preparatory School, which serves about 500 students on 93 acres in North Bethesda, Maryland, and whose notable alumni include Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, collected a $2.7 million PPP loan, which works out to $5,440 per student. According to an analysis by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the total amount of large PPP loans given to private and religious schools was at least $2.67 billion and as much as $6.47 billion—or about half as much as the total for all schools under the CARES Act, even though private and religious schools educate only 10 percent of the nation’s schoolchildren.
And these schools could potentially receive even more. DeVos stuffed a provision in the CARES Act for “equitable services” that may send another $1.35 billion, which might otherwise have gone to public schools, to private schools. She’s also giving them a cut of the $3 billion Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund…
The religious school beneficiaries remain free, as they always have been, of the anti-discrimination laws that apply to public schools. For example, Cathedral High School in Indiana took in a PPP loan of between $2 and $5 million ($1,700 to $4,200 per student), but it fired a teacher for having a same-sex spouse. The Foundation Academy in Winter Garden, Florida, whose 2016-17 handbook informs school families that the husband “has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family” while “a wife is to submit herself graciously” and which groups “homosexuality, lesbianism bisexuality” along with “bestiality” as grounds for expulsion, took in between $1 and $2 million in PPP money. Americans United estimates that at least 4,006 religious schools, or about 70 percent of private school recipients, received large PPP loans.
There is no indication, however, that the private schools receiving PPP money are under anything like the pressure the Trump administration is applying to public schools to fully reopen in the coming school year. When Fairfax County public schools offered parents a choice between in-person and remote learning, DeVos denounced the move in vehement terms. (The district has since announced that the 2020-21 school year will be fully remote.) But the Fairmont Preparatory Academy of Anaheim, California, which took in a minimum of $5 million, or $7,700 per student in PPP money, is offering families the same choice, so far with no criticism from the Department of Education…
Betsy DeVos did not take over the Department of Education in order to improve public education as we know it but to degrade it. She came to office with an ideology as simple as it is destructive: Government should get out of the business of education, she has consistently maintained. DeVos brought with her two powerful interest groups. On the one hand are the privatizers, on the other are the proselytizers, and both paws are reaching for the same pot of taxpayer money.
In a May radio interview, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Catholic archbishop of New York, asked DeVos whether she was trying to “utilize this particular crisis to ensure that justice is finally done.” “Yes, absolutely,” she replied. Alluding to her longstanding efforts to divert taxpayer money to sectarian schools, DeVos said, “For more than three decades that has been something that I’m passionate about.”
The public has consistently underestimated the extremity of the agenda against public schooling. Listen more carefully to what DeVos and her backers are actually saying. For decades, Christian nationalist leaders have denounced public schools as hotbeds of secularism. For just as long, reactionary economic ideologues have condemned them as breeding grounds for socialism. DeVos’s boss simply repeats the message at a louder volume: During his Fourth of July speech at Mount Rushmore, Donald Trump said public schools are teaching kids to “hate our country” with a “far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance.” They all understand at some level that a robust public school system is one of the pillars of a modern, progressive, pluralistic, and democratic society. That’s why they want to destroy it.
Gary Rubinstein writes here about a lawsuit filed by parents of children on Success Academy’s “got to go” list. The celebrated charter chain settled for $1.1 million. The corporate chain fought the lawsuit for 4.5 years, refused to turn over documents but finally settled.
Gary writes:
Success Academy is the largest and most controversial charter chain in New York. By one measure — state test scores — it is the most successful. But over the years they have been embroiled in several significant scandals. The two most prominent was the ‘rip and redo’ incident, where a teacher was caught on tape screaming at and ripping up a paper of a very well behaved young child, and the ‘got to go’ list where a principal created a list of students he planned to either expel or otherwise compel to leave.
But beyond these two high profile scandals, there are thousands of unreported mini-scandals that are just as harmful to the students who suffer them. Over the years hundreds, if not thousands, of families have suffered from the way that Success Academy gets those families to transfer their children out of the school. One trick they use a lot is threatening to leave back — or actually leaving back — students who are passing their classes and the state tests. This was documented nicely in a podcast about them last year. But the most heartless way they get parents to ‘voluntarily’ switch to another school is through coordinated harassment. When Success Academy has students who do not respond to their strict disciplinary code, what they do is start calling the parents day after day and demand that the parents come get their children. Sometimes the phone calls start at 8:00 AM. If the parents are at work and they are not able to come and get the child, Success Academy threatens to call Administration for Child Services (ACS) on them and, in some cases, actually does call ACS or the police or has the child picked up by an ambulance and brought to the emergency room. Even with all this, Success Academy is still the darling of the education reform movement since, I guess, the ends (high state test scores) justify the means (abusing — in my opinion — families and children).
In December 2015, five families of Success Academy students filed a civil suit against them. The five families had similar complaints about how Success Academy created what the lawsuit called a ‘hostile learning environment.’ Many of the children had various disabilities, like ADHD. Some of the court filings that I have read describe how Success Academy did not modify their protocols to address these disabilities. Also in the documents the families filed, we learn that Success Academy was not cooperative during the five year trial.
Gary wonders whether other families treated shabbily by Success Academy be encouraged to sue by this precedent?
According to CNN, the Centers got Disease Control was ”blindsided” when Trump announced today that he was dispatching teams fron the CDC to help schools reopen safely. He didn’t mention sending money to equip schools to reopen safely.
CDC blindsided by Trump’s statement it could deploy teams to schools this fall
Leaders at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were blindsided this week when President Donald Trump announced that the agency could deploy teams to assist schools with safely reopening in the fall, a senior CDC official told CNN.
“My administration also stands ready to deploy CDC teams to support schools that are opening and schools that need help in safety and in order to safely reopen,” Trump said on Tuesday during a briefing.
The announcement left CDC officials scrambling this week to train-up staff to be able to deploy if they are called upon, the senior official said.
Trumps comments are the latest example of a breakdown in communication between the public health agency and the White House.
Early on in the coronavirus pandemic, the CDC Task Force regularly learned about assignments during presidential briefings, finding out in real time along with the public, a senior official said.
The CDC official added that the agency is expected to come up with a vaccine plan for schools in at least four states by October, even though there is no realistic expectation that a vaccine would be ready by then.
Trump’s comments were made on Thursday amid the White House’s release of eight new recommendations for US schools as they prepare to reopen.
The recommendations include ensuring that students and staff “understand the symptoms of COVID-19” and require “all students, teachers and staff to self-assess their health every morning before coming to school.” The recommendations also encourage the use of masks, but do not require students, teachers or staff to wear them. They also “require students, teachers and staff to socially distance around high-risk individuals,” however it’s unclear how schools will go about doing that.
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Trump has convinced himself that the only way he can win is by suppressing the vote, by any means possible.
He has repeatedly attacked mail-in voting as fraudulent, although both he and his wife filed to vote by mail in Florida and he hailed that state’s mail-in plans.
He appointed Louis DeJoy, a major Republican donor, as Postmaster General of the United States. DeJoy has begun systematically undermining the United States Postal Service. He reassigned the top leadership of the agency. The USPS has dismantled the machinery that sorts high-volume mail. Postal drop boxes are being removed. Post offices with low volume are closing.
Kimberly Karol, president of the Iowa Postal Workers Union, spoke to NPR and described what is happening.
Last night, Karol was interviewed by Rachel Maddow.
Maddow explained how Montanans blocked the USPS efforts to remove half the mailboxes across the state. Her conclusion: Pressure works. “They are stealing the mailboxes.”
The removal of mailboxes is not limited to Montana. It’s happening across the nation.
Before DeJoy’s appointment, the USPS warned 46 states that it lacked the capacity to guarantee that all mailed ballots would be counted:
Anticipating an avalanche of absentee ballots, the U.S. Postal Service recently sent detailed letters to 46 states and D.C. warning that it cannot guarantee all ballots cast by mail for the November election will arrive in time to be counted — adding another layer of uncertainty ahead of the high-stakes presidential contest.
The letters sketch a grim possibility for the tens of millions of Americans eligible for a mail-in ballot this fall: Even if people follow all of their state’s election rules, the pace of Postal Service delivery may disqualify their votes.
The Postal Service’s warnings of potential disenfranchisement came as the agency undergoes a sweeping organizational and policy overhaul amid dire financial conditions. Cost-cutting moves have already delayed mail delivery by as much as a week in some places, and a new decision to decommission 10 percent of the Postal Service’s sorting machines sparked widespread concern the slowdowns will only worsen. Rank-and-file postal workers say the move is ill-timed and could sharply diminish the speedy processing of flat mail, including letters and ballots.
The ballot warnings, issued at the end of July from Thomas J. Marshall, general counsel and executive vice president of the Postal Service, and obtained through a records request by The Washington Post, were planned before the appointment of Louis DeJoy, a former logistics executive and ally of President Trump, as postmaster general in early summer. They go beyond the traditional coordination between the Postal Service and election officials, drafted as fears surrounding the coronavirus pandemic triggered an unprecedented and sudden shift to mail-in voting.
Democrats sought additional funding for the Postal Service, but Trump blocked it.
The United States Postal Service is established in the Constitution, but since Trump has never read that document, he doesn’t care. He named a Postmaster General and replaced most of its governing board with lackeys who are loyal to him, not the Constitution.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution, known as the Postal Clause or the Postal Power, empowers Congress “To establish Post Offices and Post Roads.The Post Office has the constitutional authority to designate mail routes. The Post Office is also empowered to construct or designate post offices with the implied authority to carry, deliver, and regulate the mail of the United States as a whole. The Postal Power also includes the power to designate certain materials as non-mailable, and to pass statutes criminalizing abuses of the postal system (such as mail fraud and armed robbery of post offices”
Trump corrupts the rule of law and the Constitution with equal diffidence. He believes that as president, he can do whatever he wants. Having survived impeachment, he is above the law.
Please read the articles in Capital & Main’s series on teaching in the age of COVID-19, which is titled “The Year of Teaching Dangerously.” They spell out the frustrations and the learning curve that teachers and students have coped with in these uncertain times. Routines went out the window. Teachers had to improvise, to be creative and innovative, and to learn to live with unprecedented challenges.
They are linked here:
“Elementary School Students’ Uneasy Year Zero” by Sasha Abramsky.
“Are High Schoolers Zoning Out on Zoom?” by Sasha Abramsky.
“Middle School Teachers Face a Fall Term of Uncertainty,” by Sasha Abramsky.
“Teachers Discover that Distance Learning is a Dance,” by Larry Buhl.
From the last article:
Imagine you’ve been cast in your school’s spring musical – in this case, High School Musical — and you’ve been rehearsing for months, but the COVID crisis closes everything a day before the show opens. Andrea Calvo, a teacher at Orange County’s Ladera Vista Junior High School of the Arts in Fullerton, was directing the show and said the performers, as well as students and in her guitar and choir classes, have been emotionally “all over the place” since March.
“Some days [they are] depressed, some days happy. They went through all the emotions and the ups and downs that teachers did,” Calvo said. There was so much confusion on how online instruction would go, and how long it would last. “We were grieving but didn’t know what we were grieving.”
In July the Orange County School Board stepped into the national spotlight by declaring its schools, unlike Los Angeles County to the north and San Diego County to the south, would open for fall classes – and without masks or social distancing. It would prove to be a moot point, because later that week Gov. Gavin Newsom mandated that all schools on the state COVID-19 monitoring list – including Orange County’s – be closed until they are off California’s monitoring list for 14 consecutive days.
A week before the fall term started, Calvo said that teachers’ stress levels have lowered somewhat since the March scramble to take learning online. Now there’s a plan to reopen schools – when the school meets the state criteria and not before – if not an exact date.
“Not knowing is stressful,” Calvo says. “Nobody thinks distance learning went well in the spring. We were in crisis mode.”
After a few months of trial and error, and a summer to connect with other music teachers nationwide on distance learning best practices, Calvo says she’s better equipped to teach online. She adds that the students at her school all had iPads, so they were already better poised for distance learning than students in other schools. Not that it made the switch easy. Nothing in her 20 years of teaching could prepare Calvo for Zoom meetings with choir students who appeared, singing, on 60 little video boxes on a computer monitor.
“We did warmups, they recorded themselves, and I hosted,” she said. “For musical theater, I demonstrate movement [in real time] and they follow.” There were too many students to fit on one computer screen, but fortunately Calvo had help from a student teacher, who monitored a second screen.
But Calvo says Orange County adopted what it calls a “Do no harm” grading policy during the crisis. The idea is that you can’t hold students to the same standards while schools are closed. “Some students were at home with family and quarantining there. Some may be at home all alone caring for siblings, some had sick parents. We don’t know what students are going through.”
But Calvo and fellow teachers and staff do want some idea of what students are going through, and they try to make sure everything is all right. “We make spreadsheets to see, ‘Oh this student didn’t log in for three days. So in that case we call and ask if everything is okay.’”
Not giving up on its plan to force everyone back into classrooms during the pandemic, the O.C. Board of Education last month vowed to sue Gov. Newsom over school closures, claiming that online instruction had been a “failure.”
Distance learning for the long haul
Calvo said that attitudes of parents and county residents have shifted over the past five months as more have accepted that the pandemic will change learning for the foreseeable future. “In May, Orange County posted photos of what classes would look like, with PPE and distancing, and people said, ‘Oh, that looks awful.’ Now, more people want schools to look like that when they open.”
“As a teacher and a parent I think distance learning is safest,” says Calvo. “But that is from a place of privilege, because I know I am able to stay home. A lot of parent friends feel the same way but I recognize we may be in a bubble.”
Calvo assumes distance learning will be the norm well into the new school year. That’s a challenge for any school, but for hers, which has 30 arts electives, it’s an even bigger challenge to maintain its culture. “There is a lot of creativity here. [Distance learning] is a dance.”
Capital & Main published a five-part series on teaching during the pandemic. The series is called “The Year of Teaching Dangerously.”
Sasha Abramsky launched the series with an article about how schools in California were adapting to the pandemic.
Abramsky writes about the uncertainty, confusion, and conflict that accompanied the shutdown, as teachers were required to address new realities and to confront stark inequities.
In March, when Northern California counties issued stay-at-home orders, followed shortly afterwards by a statewide shutdown, schools scrambled to improvise a pivot to online “distance learning.” Some were able to make the change within days; others took many weeks. Grading and assessment systems were largely put to one side, at least in the public school system. And school districts rushed – and in some cases struggled – to purchase and distribute Chromebooks or iPads to students who didn’t have them; to set up Wi-Fi hotspots for families lacking home Internet access; to work out how to keep distributing food to children from low-income families who relied on school breakfasts and lunches; and to set up methods of teaching online that wouldn’t leave out students who had special education plans, or who were English language learners.
Bureaucratic systems fabled for their inflexibility were, suddenly, tasked with finding kluge-like solutions, at speed, to meet these extraordinary challenges. Inevitably, the result was hit or miss.
The articles in this week’s new series, “The Year of Teaching Dangerously,” reflect the extraordinary challenges facing elementary, middle and high schools as the pandemic continues to wreak havoc on daily life.
What began as a temporary shutdown evolved into a new way of life, for teachers, students, and parents.
Diane Ravitch's blog 