In the South and Midwest and other parts of the nation, the coronavirus continues to spread. No one can be sure what will happen even in places where it has apparently subsided. Steven Singer warns that reckless reopening not only endangers students but tells them they are not valued.
The grownups say they need to keep the economy running, but are they risking the lives of children and teachers? When they make their decisions, are they doing it on a zoom call or in person?
He asks:
How would you feel when time-after-time the grown ups show you exactly how they feel about you, how little you actually matter, how much everything else is worth and how little they really care about you?
How would you feel if you were a little school kid getting ready for her first day of class this morning?
Would you feel safe, valued, loved?
Trump promised during Trump Fascist Lovefest 2020, last week, that he “will always protect Americans.” But, of course, he denies the existence of the pandemic or downplays it insists on the reopening, in person, of schools and churches; pretends that there are adequate supplies of tests and PPE; refuses to cooperate with international partners; pushes fake cures; uses the disease to spread racist ideas; promises a vaccine on an unrealistic timetable; refuses to model wearing a mask, himself, or to insist on this at his events; and so continues to endanger everyone. The insistence on school reopenings shows what a LIE his promise to protect Americans is.
Trump proudly positions himself as someone who has ended costly foreign wars and not started new ones, but the Moronavirus trumpinski orangii is killing Americans by the hundreds of thousands via his incompetence in response to SARS-CoV-2.
trump is DELUSIONAL
trump is arrested between the ages of 2 1/2 and 3 years old.
trump should be wearing diapers.
trump has NEVER done anything fo himself. I wonder if he wipes his own rear end?
Oh … I wish I were a cartoonist.
Bob, I share your responses with my husband … for they are priceless. Thank YOU for being here. I always read what you write.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/05/09/donnie-baby/
A cartoon for you, Yvonne! Love to you and yours!
And another: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/08/11/voting-in-trumplandia/
Tell us what you really think, Bob. 😉
I feel about Donald Trump they way I might feel about having colon cancer.
and to a degree, citizens are not seeing or hearing about what military endeavors are currently happening: what is kept out of the news allows many to believe it doesn’t happen
Steven Singer brings up important points. Thank you, Steven Singer.
trump is a traitorous LIAR and works for Putin. I
wonder what the bounties are for every dead American?
America’s lame responses to the pandemic is on that dump and his enablers of crime and dysfunction.
Exactly right, Yvonne. History will not be kind to this moron, unless, of course, the U.S. emerges as a full-blown fascist state after the coming economic turndown.
that dump should reinstate Obama’s Pandemic Response Team, but he is too jealous of Obama to do what makes sense.
the dump is only about himself and his WEAK ego.
the dump is all ID.
A recent ad on Trump & education from The Lincoln Project:
GREAT ad!
This IS a great ad, wdf1. Thank you!
Jersey Jazzman has written a very good analysis of our current pandemic crisis and the refusal of Republicans to help cash strapped states. It is difficult to make ageing buildings safe without necessary funds. http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2020/08/state-aid-is-school-aid.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JerseyJazzman+%28Jersey+Jazzman%29
The wife of the Democratic nominee has kicked off her back to school tour with a visit to a well-connected charter school in Delaware where they’ve already announced their intention to reopen the school with in-person learning in a matter of weeksweeks. The visit to Shortlidge Academy on Tuesday kicked off Jill Biden’s “Back-to-School” tour, in which she will visit schools in eight battleground states. Not the message I would’ve hoped for from ours.
Shortlidge is a highly segregated charter school that replaced a “failing“ public school.
Minority enrollment is 97% of the student body (majority Black)
https://www.publicschoolreview.com/shortlidge-evan-g-academy-profile
Is the charter school more segregated than the public school it replaced?
The research from the UCLA Center on Civil Rights and the Helen Ladd-Charles Clotfelder study at Duke concluded that charters are more segregated than public schools. That is not true of every charter, but of charters in general.
I had hoped that Richard could tell us about these particular schools.
It’s just amazing that all these think tanks are operating somewhere outside the current reality:
“We just don’t know yet. But parents, educators and experts would be wise to consider the impact of the current crisis on America’s youngest citizens, and how best to mitigate it.”
No one in government is going to do anything to “mitigate the impact of the crisis”. They didn’t do anything to mitigate the impact during the crisis. After the crisis passes we’ll suddenly have a government that cares at all about students?
Our government completely and utterly failed in this crisis. Some schools did okay! But they did that without any assistance or support. Thinks tanks seem to be operating in some “functioning government” fantasy land. Our government doesn’t function. It didn’t function to open schools and it won’t function to mitigate damage.
Kids are on their own in this country. They’ll be harmed by the United States’ failure to manage the pandemic and they will be completely on their own to “mitigate” the damage that has been done to them due to that failure. The failure is ongoing.
Thanks, Chiara,
I think those “Think Tanks” don’t THINK much.
Here’s that the government is doing to “mitigate the crisis” for school kids::
20 OSEP Tweets for 2020 | #11: Find loads of resources compiled by
ECTACenter
to support children and families during the COVID-19 pandemic. Resources include toolkits, handouts, videos and more!”
They’re slapping up links to handouts and videos. That’s it. That’s the extent of the concern about an entire generation of children who will be harmed by the pandemic in the federal government- they made a page with links on it.
US kids are on their own and the sooner they learn that the better. Their government failed and it will continue to fail.
“ICYMI: 17 million students lack home internet. With no relief from Congress in sight, schools deploy an awkward mix of buses, mobile hotspots to get them connected”
Make no mistake- these kids were abandoned by their government, both federal and state.
The United States does not have the competence or capability to get infrastructure in place to serve one quarter of US students. They failed to do this. They have multi-billion dollar tech companies and internet providers and they had 8 months to get it done and they failed. They didn’t even try.
No one in government serves these kids. No one works for them. If they had people working on their behalf it would have gotten done. It didn’t.
How many full time paid “ed reform advocates” are there? 20,000? They didn’t get anything done for public school students either.
Much of the discussion here has only considered the risks of opening schools without an accompanying list of the benefits from opening the schools. If you ignore the benefits of having working health care, a functioning food supply chain, and energy production and distribution, while noting the risks of having these people go to work every day, you would be forced to conclude that these people should not go to work.
The problem is that not opening schools endangers students as well, and it is not clear that the danger to students from opening schools is larger than the danger of having them closed. The balancing of the two is, I think, the right place to begin a discussion.
Did you see the 9 am post, TE? It considers the risks and the benefits.
Dr. Ravitch,
I do not see a time stamp on the posts, but if you mean the post by the award winning science reporter for the NYT, it seems to me to be just weighing the evidence about how transmittable and risky covid is among children, trying to determine the cost of sending her children to school.
There is only a little about the cost of not sending her children to school. She does mention that her children have the technology to do distance learning. I suppose it is also obvious that she can still do her work while at home (though her husband, as a professional athlete and documentary film maker, might have more problems with that) so that is not part of the cost of not sending her children to school. Also not mentioned is her confidence that she can participate in her children’s education. As an adjunct professor at NYU, I imagine she has some ability to help.
Do you think the costs of not sending her children to school represent the median NYC resident’s cost?
I think that spending time discussing how we might “safely open schools” has taken time away from spending time discussing how we can make the best of the bad option of remote learning and how we can deal with the problems that having kids at home poses (food insecurity for some, lack of connectivity or equipment, safety at home, etc). Having spent the last couple months discussing how to square the circle and build a perpetual motion machine, we now are rushing headlong into catastrophe.
So, talk about how to open schools safely, an utterly fanciful notion, like belief in magic fairy dust or the efficacy of oleander for the treatment of Covid-19, has had these enormous opportunity costs.
Now, back to the online instruction of my granddaughter.
I see this argument frequently. It just doesn’t parse. Reliable food supply chain is right at the top of survival reqt for 100% of people daily. Healthcare: a matter of life and death for the ill [not everyone]– yet triaged, so as to minimize covid spread, via postponing elective surgery when hospital covid capacity is threatened, via telemedicine, and very few patients seen at a time in dr’s offices. Energy production & distribution: also arguably required for survival. Almost entirely managed remotely & easily distanced, w/maintenance-repair outdoors &/or doesn’t involve assembling groups of people closely indoors.
Where does in-person K12 instruction fit into this picture? It doesn’t. Kids “falling behind” is laughable as a counterweight to ramping up community spread. Kids depressed & suicidal & abused etc as a result of keeping schools closed is an absurd claim: social isolation is harmful, & is being caused by covid, period.
Childcare for essential workers on the other hand is crucial. This is where govt should be focusing attention & $$. Stop confusing it w/ in-person K12 instruction.
Bethree5,
I appreciate the consideration of the costs of closing hospitals or other parts of the economy, but I wonder if education is as useless as your post suggests. If there is no cost to students not attending schools, surely our truancy laws are misguided.
Would you be in favor repealing such laws, based on the notion that students being disadvantaged by not attending school is “laughable’?
Teachers as babysitters
Teachers are sitters
Children care tools
Watching the litters
Of kids in the schools
Please don’t misunderstand me there’s nothing laughable about kids in trouble psychologically or otherwise from being isolated to keep covid spread down. However, teachers cannot both teach and counsel and provide therapy and healthcare and food, although that all ends up on their shoulders in poor districts due to our society’s disjointed and spotty social services, where the school somehow ends up the last man standing. They never could (despite platitudes to the contrary). Dysfunction in poor families can be ameliorated somewhat by in-person teaching for some kids, that’s all. What’s laughable is claiming to address that by opening schools and ramping up community spread/ illness/ death. Those same kids’ families are at significantly higher risk of morbidity and mortality.
Public education is a necessity for any society and that’s why we mandate attendance. Keeping school bldgs closed to prevent covid spread does not mean there is no education. We’re doing our best to provide remote education while the emergency lasts. Curriculum will be slowed down. Kids will “fall behind” in the sense that they may not learn as much or as fast as they would have, had there been no pandemic. That is not “useless.” At worst it may mean extending the time needed to complete a hisch diploma.
Many parents will not send their children to school because they value and love their children. Parents that send their children to school during the pandemic do not value their children.
If the parents say I have to go to work, and cannot stay home, I say where there is a will, there is a way.
Trump only values himself and even then his ignorance gets in the way of taking care of himself. Trump is mutated walking terminal cancer.
The way for nurses, physicians, and other staff members at hospitals is to stay home and not staff the hospitals. The way for the workers in the food supply change is to stay home and food does not move from the farms to the city. Simple enough.
Childcare for essential workers – healthcare and food supply – is essential work. So is childcare for anyone who must work onsite in order to put food on the table. Don’t conflate it with in-person schoolteaching. Instruction is provided remotely to minimize indoor gatherings during pandemic. Older students in essential childcare settings can & have been getting remote instruction at those sites.
Essential childcare is done in safer settings whose strict protocols can’t be scaled up to accommodate school populations.
bethree5,
It has often been suggested here that teachers and healthcare workers like nurses and physicians are comparable. I think that the pandemic has revealed this to be false. Healthcare professionals expertise has been shown to be essential, while teachers are not essential.
Huh? What have you been smoking, TE?
That’s a little rough, LLoyd. There are too many people living on the edge who have no good choices.
I thought maybe Lloyd was referring to the need for govt programs (& govt’s lack of will). Many people have to leave home for work to put food on the table & keep roof over head. “Will” doesn’t provide options out of thin air, & that’s all congress has got for us.
I know Lloyd has a good heart. I just think he spoke in the heat of the moment and his choice of an old aphorism to punctuate his position struck me as a bit of wishful thinking. I did not read in his comment any suggestion that the “government” should/could step up and provide “the way.” That boat has sailed for the time being. The idea that we could “scale up” this nation’s childcare facilities, in a Covid safe manner, to meet the disparate needs, evident across the country, on a time frame that is useful is a pipe dream.
Yup.
To Yvonne up there, at 11:01 AM: yep, it45 definitely operates at the level of a toddler–or even younger. If you hadn’t seen it, watch the clip from Anderson Cooper 360, where Anderson explains what “object permanence” is (& when it develops), & that it45 still hasn’t achieved it.
&, again, I highly recommend Mary Trump’s book, which explains its psyche in just 17 sentences or so. Particularly interesting is how, if it passes the point at which it can “charm” people to achieve its purposes, it simply has…temper tantrums. (Yes, we’ve all seen them.)
retiredbutmissthekids.
Mary Trump’s book really bothered me. I read it and the next day I was depressed all day.
Trump is a horrible person and unfit to serve.
If trump wasn’t such an evil person, I would feel sorry for him, which I don’t. trump is a traitorous liar and a big, fat bully and so stupid, too.
I hope it isn’t too late to write this. Sorry the book made you depressed. I admit, I was hesitant to read it myself, but once I’d read it, & underlined the 17 or so issues (as yellow-lining students are wont to do–both in college & in teaching Grades 6-8!), I felt…vindicated by a professional’s opinion, especially she who had known it45 most of its life. So much criticism for those psychologists & psychiatrists who have been “tagging” it45 w/DSM personality disorders, sociopathy, etc.
is shown to be unwarranted as Mary really explains it all…one who knows & has all the right creds to call its bluff, guff, bullying, cruelty, inhumanity.
As if we didn’t need more proof, there’s that The Atlantic article from 9/3. (GregB has posted the link to the article in one of Diane’s 9/3 posts.) Mocking & disrespect for our dead and disabled troops.
it45 actually acts out of its own abhorrence of its own cowardice & vanity (“bone spurs” & worry about the orange hair withstanding the rain).
I only hope that the WWII Veteran who’d given it45 (&,of course, it took it!) his Purple Heart (we have my Dad’s–o.b.m.–who would have been 100 on 8/24–& it is cherished) comes to get the P.H. back.
How a single wedding changed the contours of Maine’s coronavirus outbreak
Charles Eichacker
https://bangordailynews.com/2020/08/29/news/how-a-single-wedding-changed-the-complexion-of-maines-coronavirus-outbreak/
“It has infected at least 123 people and caused secondary outbreaks at a rehabilitation center in Madison and, more than 200 miles to the south, at the York County Jail in Alfred. One woman who did not attend the wedding has now died from the disease.”
// End quotes
The attendees had their temperatures checked and some who attended also had come up negative on tests that they had before attending.
While some might ask what relevance this has to schools, I’d have to ask ” isn’t it obvious?”
Schools are gathering places for many more than 62 people (the number in the wedding party) Some school classrooms alone have more than half that. Lunch rooms in schools probably have that many people eating at one time.
Schools are talking about using temperature checks like they used to screen wedding attendees (utterly useless if people are not showing symptoms and people are most capable of infecting others in the days before they show symptoms.)
Also, tests can have a high rate of false negatives, so when we see claims of “less than 1% positivity”, we should take them with a grain (or is it block?) Of salt.
Finally, children and teachers can be vectors for the virus, bringing it back to their families and other people in the community , just as the wedding attendees acted as vectors.
I’ve observed dozens of virtual lessons this week and for all the “How would you feel..” questions about schools and building relationships for learning and efforts for access and equity … the teachers are doing an incredible job. Sure – some are struggling working through new platforms and programs and more – but they are trying and will get it – they are professionals!
Their enthusiasm in many instances jumps off the screen. And, the principals and assistants and counselors and social workers reaching out is something to see. And, the staff making hundreds of phone calls for no-shows and tech help – well – connecting with parents and guardians goes a long way in caring.
As for your entire list…
Only one bumper sticker..
“If your kid isn’t learning to read this, ‘thank’ the President the Fools on the Hill”
I now know (for certain–we aren’t sure about some elderly & older friends who had died; one was in FL, & had just, one day, passed out on the floor) an entire family which tested positive for Covid-19. 2 grandparents (in their 70s or 80s), a grandchild & the father. Grandma was babysitting the 6-year-old & nicely included the neighbor’s youngster who, it turned out, had a fever, & tested positive.