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Peter Greene: What Happens to “Accountability” After the Pandemic?

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2020 //
10

Peter Greene thinks that we should use this respite from the pressure of high-stakes testing to rethink accountability.

Our current accountability system was cobbled together hastily in 2001 during the writing of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. The NCLB law was based on a hoax, a fallacious claim that there had been a Texas miracle, all due to testing every child every year. Congress bought the lie and enacted the law. Since then, Congress has been unwilling to review the creaky and ineffective accountability system that it mandated.

No high-performing nation in the world tests every child every year. But we do. We have done it for 20 years and have little or nothing to show for it. The students who were left behind in 2001 are still left behind. Then Obama-Duncan brought in their “Race to the Top,” doubling down on standardized testing, and spent more than $5 billion without reaching “the top” or closing gaps or raising test scores.

Greene says: Let’s think about what happens next.

The defining question for any accountability system is this:

Accountable to whom, for what?

The “to whom” part is the hard part of educational accountability, because classroom teachers serve a thousand different masters.

Teachers need to be accountable to their administration, to their school board, to their students, to the parents of their students, to the taxpayers who fund the school and pay their salaries, to the state, to the students’ future employers, and to their own colleagues. School administrators also need to be accountable to those various stakeholders, but in different ways. Each set of stakeholders also has a wide variety of concerns; some parents are primarily concerned with academic issues, while others give priority to their child’s emotional health and happiness.

Parents may want to know if their children are on track for future success, or how their children’s progress compares to others. Those are two different measures, just as “How tall is my child” and “Is my child the tallest in class” are two different questions, each of which can be answered without answering the other.

Taxpayers want to know if they’re getting their money’s worth. State and federal politicians may want to see if benchmarks they have imposed on schools are being met. Teachers want to know how well their students are learning the various content the teachers have been delivering. Administrators may want to identify their “best” and “worst” teachers. School boards may want to know if their new hires are on track.

Answers to every single one of these questions require different measures collected with different tools. Some questions can’t be answered at all (there is no reliable way to rank teachers best-to-worst). One of the biggest fallacies of the ed reform movement has been the notion that a single multiple-choice math and reading test can somehow measure everything.

The reform dream was to be able to reduce school quality to a simple data point, a score or letter grade that tells us whether a school is any good or not. This is foolish. Ask any number of people to describe their idea of an “A” school; no two descriptions will match. A single grade system must by definition be reductive and useless for anything except as a crude tool for punishing some schools and marketing others.

Teachers and their unions are not opposed to accountability; they are opposed to accountability measures that are random and invalid. Meanwhile, accountability discussions never seem to include measures that would hold politicians accountable for getting schools the support and resources that they need. A good example would be the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), a law that Congress passed to hold schools accountable for properly educating students with specials needs, and also a law that Congress has never come close to fully funding.

My view: Accountability starts at the top, not the bottom. Congress has never been willing to hold itself accountable for the mandates it imposes. State legislatures have been unaccountable as well, never having provided the funding that schools require to provide the resources that schools need.

Yes, let’s have that conversation about who should be accountable and how will it be measured and what matters most.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Reform, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

Michael Hynes: A New Vision for Education After the Pandemic

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2020 //
58

Michael Hynes is the superintendent of schools in the Port Washington school district on Long Island in New York. He is one of the most creative, innovative, and unconventional thinkers in education today. His new book was just published, offering advice to school leaders and, frankly, to everyone, about what is most important in life.

Mike Hynes is my candidate for the next State Commissioner of Education in New York. He has fresh ideas, deep experience, and values the well-being of children more than test scores.

In this brief essay, he outlines what schools should do after the pandemic.

He writes:

Now is the time for our school leaders to generate a new compelling philosophy of education and an innovative architecture for a just and humane school system. We must refocus our energy on a foundation built on a sense of purpose, forging relationships and maximizing the potential and talents of all children. Let’s take advantage of the possibility that our nation’s attention can shift 180 degrees, from obsessing over test scores and accountability to an entirely different paradigm of physical, mental, and emotional well-being for students and staff.

It is our collective responsibility to foster engaging and meaningful environments when educating our children in the new era of a post pandemic education. As the great philosopher John Dewey stated over one hundred years ago, “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.” The first sentence in the 2018 World Bank Group’s Flagship Report- Learning: To Realize Education’s Promise states, “Schooling is not the same as learning.” I couldn’t agree more. The report continues to speak about that as a society, we must learn to realize education’s promise.

Now is this the time to revolutionize this antiquated system built on old structures and ideologies. I recommend we change the purpose of schooling to the following core values:

· Emphasize well-being. Make child and teacher well-being a top priority in all schools, as engines of learning and system efficiency.

· Upgrade testing and other assessments. Stop the standardized testing of children in grades 3-8, and “opt-up” to higher-quality assessments by classroom teachers. Eliminate the ranking and sorting of children based on standardized testing. Train students in self-assessment, and require only one comprehensive testing period to graduate from high school.

· Invest resources fairly. Fund schools equitably on the basis of need. Provide small class sizes.

· Boost learning through physical activity. Give children multiple outdoor free-play recess breaks throughout the school day to boost their well-being and performance. We observed schools in Finland that give children four 15-minute free-play breaks a day.

· Change the focus. Create an emotional atmosphere and physical environment of warmth, comfort and safety so that children are happy and eager to come to school. Teach not just basic skills, but also arts, crafts, music, civics, ethics, home economics and life skills.

· Make homework efficient. Reduce the homework load in elementary and middle schools to no more than 30 minutes per night, and make it responsibility-based rather than stress-based.

· Trust educators and children. Give them professional respect, creative freedom and autonomy, including the ability to experiment, take manageable risks and fail in the pursuit of success.

· Improve, expand and destigmatize vocational and technical education. Encourage more students to attend schools in which they can acquire valuable career/trade skills.

In short, if we learn anything at all from this pandemic, we should clearly recognize that we need our teachers more than ever before. It’s imperative that schools focus on a balanced approach to education, one that embraces physical, emotional, cognitive and social growth. We have an enormous amount of work to do, but our children deserve nothing less.

If you agree, please send his essay to every school board member you know and to anyone else who is interested in finding a new way to educate our children, one that develops their well-being and joy in learning, instead of subjecting them to an endless and useless series of standardized tests.

Categories Character, Citizenship, Creativity, Education Reform, Equity, Funding, Hope, Innovation, Joy, Play

Texas: Charter Schools Grow Rapidly Despite Inferior Performance Compared to Public Schools

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2020 //
8

William Gumbert prepared a graphic portrayal of the dramatic growth of privately managed charter schools in Texas.

Two facts stand out from his presentation:

1) Charter schools are diverting billions of dollars from the state’s underfunded public schools.

2) Public schools perform better than charter schools.

Public officials are turning public money over to entrepreneurs at a furious pace without regard to the results.

Charter schools this year will take more than $3 Billion away from the state’s public schools, despite the poor performance of the charter schools. Since their inception, charters have diverted more than $23 Billion from the state’s public schools.

Public schools in Texas are underfunded and have been underfunded since 2011, when the state legislature recklessly cut $5.4 Billion from the schools’ budget. That cut was never fully restored.

Diverting money to charter schools adds more damage to the public schools that continue to enroll the vast majority of students in the state.

Texas has about 5.4 million students. More than half of all its students are Hispanic. About 12-13% are African American. About 28% are white. The majority (58.7%) are identified by the state as “economically disadvantaged.”

The legislature does not look like the people of Texas, most of whom are people of color. Almost two-thirds of the state legislature are white. More than three-quarters are men. Why does the legislature substitute charter schools for adequate funding?

Read the whole report here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Funding, Privatization, Texas

David Dayen: Who Will the Federal Reserve Bail Out? Big Corporations? Wall Street?

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2020 //
20

David Dayen writes a daily report on COVID-19 for The American Prospect.

Today’s post is very disturbing, and it has so many links included that you will have to open the post to read the source of his data and assertions. Bear in mind that the Fed is giving away OUR money, not theirs and certainly not Trump’s.

Who is getting it? That’s a secret.

Dayen writes:

Yesterday we found out that two luxury hotel companies made off with $46 million in PPP forgivable small business loans, for such high-end brand locations as Ritz-Carlton, Marriott and Sofitel. The companies paid a combined $13 million to top executives last year. We know this because Braemar Hotels and Ashford Hospitalty Trust were required to disclose the loans in SEC filings.

Disclosure, in other words, brought these distortions in PPP lending to light. But those are relatively small sums compared to what the Federal Reserve’s money cannon is about to shoot out. And if the Fed gets its way, there won’t be any way to discover hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars put into the hands of companies.

The Fed has not committed to releasing detailed, transaction-level information about its lending. It has interpreted the CARES Act disclosure requirements to mean that they only need to give aggregate disclosure of the terms and rules of the various lending facilities they set up, not the names of the individual companies getting the loans. And then every 30 days, they have to supply the total amount lent out and the interest received.

This is being driven by the business community, which doesn’t want “bailout stigma” after receiving support from the Fed. I’m not sure why they think it won’t arouse suspicions if a travel company or some other large firm suddenly starts expanding out of nowhere after months without revenue.

The airline bailout in the CARES Act had very different disclosure rules: the Treasury Secretary had to post the amounts, interest rate, conditions, and even the term sheet for each recipient. But when it came to the Fed, the disclosure reverted back to the central bank’s Section 13(3) emergency lending authority. Somebody changed the rules, a mystery that ought to be unraveled. It may have come from the Fed writing the language itself, along with the CARES Act provision freeing it from open meetings laws.

Austan Goolsbee, of all people, explained pretty clearly to Politico why the Fed doesn’t want to disclose company names. “The reason they’re not releasing the list… people will start holding them accountable for who’s getting the money,” Goolsbee said. [I]t’s kind of the flashbacks of 2008 2009 that it’s going to matter for the credibility of this program and whether we the American people think it is working and want to keep engaging in it.”

Bharat Ramamurti, one of four members of the bailout oversight panel, has been among the few calling for detailed transparency around who is getting a piece of what could be as much as $4.5 trillion in loans. For all we know, some of that money has already been released, without any information about who got what. After pressure from Bharat and Americans for Financial Reform, the Fed has only committed to “information regarding participants” in the corporate credit facilities, without any details about what that information will be (will it even be the identity of the participants?), or what they will do in its numerous other lending facilities. It could mean industry-level aggregates, or a raw number of borrowers, or anything.

It’s true that, like with the hotel chains, public companies might have to file something with the SEC. But the beneficiaries of Fed lending may not all be public companies. Private equity portfolio companies could use Fed resources, for example. The press will be vital, and have already ferreted out some information. But there’s no substitute for systematic, transaction-level transparency.

There aren’t many conditions being placed on this money to begin with, to ensure it stabilizes the real economy, rather than flowing up to executives and investors. But transparency can help raise the pressure. Once you see that Company X received several billion in low-cost loans, you can tie it to what we already know about Company X: its executive compensation, use of financial engineering to reward investors, average worker pay. If conditions will ever be placed, they will happen because of the “name and shame” possibilities that accompany disclosure.

Relying on the Fed so heavily to save the economy already will shuttle the relief through large corporations and Wall Street banks. That’s how the Fed operates as an institution, and it colors our pandemic response. Operating in the dark is even worse.

We’ve already had this fight during the last bailout. The Fed claimed they were only giving banks “liquidity assistance” in the short-term to deal with a credit crunch. But this bailout will go to companies throughout the economy, with loans up to four years. Knowing this information is vital to knowing whether the taxpayer has been ripped off, on a galactic scale compared to the penny-ante small business loan schemes.

Eventually, Bloomberg sued the Fed and got some information about the 2008-2009 bailout. It may take that again. But career staff inside the Fed making the decision on what to disclose should know: they will lose credibility as an institution if they once again opt for secrecy. The public has a right to learn what’s being done in their name.

Funny, I had this antiquated idea that with public money goes public accountability. Apparently, the deal here is that our money to “save the economy” is going to unknown recipients. What, wait?

Categories Funding

Alexander and Blunt: Government Needs a “Shark Tank” Competition to Produce More Virus Tests

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2020 //
14

Lamar Alexander and Roy Blunt are senior Republican Senators who chair important committees. In this article, they propose a “shark tank” competition for government agencies, believing that the funding and the competition will ramp up the number of tests produced. They admit that the federal government has failed to supply the numbers of reliable tests needed by the American public to feel safe and ready to resume work.

Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) is chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) is chairman of the Senate’s health appropriations subcommittee.

As I read the article, I couldn’t help but think that the premise of the article is silly. The scientists at NIH and other federal agencies need more funding but they don’t need a “shark tank” to spur them on. The scientists know the gravity of the situation. They are doing the best they can with the resources they have. If they need more resources for staff and equipment, they should get it without the phony spur of a “race.”

They should be encouraged to collaborate, not to compete. Science works best when scientists share what they know worth their peers.

Alexander and Blunt rely on the same thinking that leads to “merit pay,” which has always failed. That thinking presumes that most professionals are slackers and won’t do their best without incentives. It was wrong for teachers and it’s wrong now for scientists.

Give them the resources needed to do their job and let them do it without hokey tricks or “shark tank” competition. They want to develop better tests; they want to find a cure. They don’t need a prize to motivate them.

Categories Competition, Education Reform, Funding, Health, Merit pay, Science

NYC: Success Academy Lays Off Employees, Fires Teachers

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2020 //
28

Alex Zimmerman of Chalkbeat reports that Success Academy is laying off employees and firing teachers. The layoffs, about 4% of “non-core” employees, were laid because of the financial crunch caused by the pandemic. The teachers were fired, the chain said, because of their performance.

SA has a board of billionaires and millionaires and is known for its lavish spending on test prep rallies (“Slam the Exam”) in expensive facilities like the Barkley Center in Brooklyn and its graduation ceremony at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It regularly holds plush dinners where hedge fund managers and other moguls announce multimillion-dollar gifts.

One network employee who was laid off and spoke on condition of anonymity said employees were not offered severance, though healthcare benefits would extend into the summer.

“Success Academy is an incredibly well-resourced organization,” the staffer said. “For them to offer no financial assistance for laid off employees in these economic conditions speaks to what the executive office values, which is certainly not its employees.”

Success officials did not immediately respond to a question about severance packages.

One former Success official said the staff cuts could foreshadow staffing shifts in the rest of the city’s charter school landscape.

“I think Success does do a really good job of seeing around the corner,” said the official who still works in the charter sector and spoke on condition of anonymity. “Are they reading the moment a little bit more in advance and some of the difficulties that are coming down the line for the whole sector?”

Success, for instance, was the city’s first big charter network to announce its move to remote learning, making the call two days before the de Blasio administration closed the city’s district schools. The organization has also launched a more regimented approach to remote learning, with caregivers asked to help monitor hours of daily instruction even among the network’s youngest students.

The move to reduce staff is likely to raise eyebrows, as the network has a reputation for spending lavishly on everything from advertising and rallies to executive compensation. Moskowitz earns roughly $890,000 a year, according to the organization’s most recent tax filing.

Categories Education Reform, Funding, Harlem Success Academy

Stephen Dyer: Charter Schools Admit They Are Not Public Schools

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2020 //
13

Stephen Dyer of Innovation Ohio points to the central hypocrisy of charters seeking Coronavirus Relief funds.

Public schools are not eligible to request these funds.

Thus, charter schools acknowledge that they are NOT public schools. They seek money reserved for small businesses.

The squalid aspect of this maneuver is that any money they get is taken away from a business that was forced to close, to lay off employees, and to operate without revenues. Charters suffered not at all. They never lost funding. They want to take money out of the mouths of those small business owners who suffered real harm.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Privatization

Seth Sandronsky Interviews Mercedes Schneider about the Virus and Standardized Tests

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2020 //
14

Veteran journalist Seth Sandronsky interviews Louisiana teacher and blogger a Mercedes Schneider about how the coronavirus affected state standardized testing.

Schneider makes a bold prediction that states will cut their budgets for testing due to the economic stress caused by the virus.

I hope she’s right. Up until now, state legislators have been willing to sacrifice the arts, recess, school nurses, class size, and almost everything else, while protecting the Sacred Tests.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Funding, Standardized Testing

What Public School Employees Need to Know about the CARES Law

By dianeravitch
April 11, 2020 //
9

Terri Michal is a member of the elected board of education in Birmingham, Alabama.

She writes:


I love public education employees. They are the most resourceful group of people you could ever meet. They have to be. These employees work in an atmosphere of politics and nepotism.

They suffer through Legislators and administrators that create policies for them even though many of these policy makers have never worked in a school a day in their lives. Because of this, school-based employees have had to learn to MacGyver their way through each and every day.

These employees do this because they know what’s at stake; The future of the 51 million students who attend our public schools as well as the future of our country that one day those students will run.

Recently being made aware of a new piece of federal legislation that could impact the lives of public education employees, I did a quick survey of all my friends that work in that sector. I found that a large portion of them are not aware of this new law.

You see, they are working hard trying to ensure that students are fed, that packets of school work are assembled, and that the digital divide, which this pandemic has now thrust into the spotlight, is addressed as best it can be.
They are busy trying to MacGyver their way through a pandemic that education policy does not address, yet they are still expected to somehow provide continuity in teaching and learning.

But at what cost? How much will our students actually benefit from these weeks of taped and spliced together hybrids of online and paper and pencil learning, and is that greater than the sacrifices our employees’ may ultimately make?

How much responsibility should school districts share in making sure the most vulnerable in our communities are fed? Under a pandemic and amidst shelter in place orders, at what point do schools step back and local governments and other agencies step up?

I think these are just a few of the questions that are being asked by those in position to educate public school employees about their rights under the new FFCRA, and they just don’t have the answers. So they are saying very little, fearful that what little societal infrastructure public education can provide during this pandemic will fall apart.

Lacking any universal definition of what public education is today and what its responsibilities truly are, public education employees are expected to be and do it all. With a smile on their faces. Because it’s “for the children”. The rest will be sorted out later.

Well, this pandemic has thrust this topic to the forefront. It’s time to sort it out. It’s time to recognize public school employees as employees, not martyrs or miracle workers, or folks with big hearts that are willing to sacrifice it all.

They are employees, and in the United States employees have rights.

In that vein, public education employees, you need to know what your rights are so that you can decide what is right for you and your families.

If you are being asked to work in a building and you feel that you cannot or should not be doing it, if you cannot work (telework included) due to childcare issues, if you or a family member are sick with COVID-19, or you take care of anyone that is in a high risk category, there are now some federal job protections for you.

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) contains several provisions that will provide meaningful assistance to school district employees. It took effect April 2, 2020, and will end on December 31, 2020.
The FFCRA provides two types of leave for employees impacted by COVID-19: Emergency Paid Sick Leave and Emergency Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Leave.

First, let’s talk about the Emergency Paid Sick Leave.

It provides 10 days of paid sick leave to an employee who is unable to work or telework if:

1. The employee is subject to a federal, state or local quarantine or isolation order related to COVID -19;

2. The employee has been advised by a health care provider to self-quarantine due to concerns related to COVID-19;

3. The employee is experiencing symptoms and is seeking a medical diagnosis;

4. The employee is caring for someone described above;

5. The employee is caring for the employee’s child if the school or place of care for the child is closed, or if the childcare provider of the child is unavailable due to COVID-19 precautions.

6. The employee is experiencing any other substantially similar condition specified by the Secretary of Health and Human Services in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of Labor.

How much it pays:

If an employee is unable to work due to the conditions described in 1-3, the employee is entitled to their regular rate or the applicable minimum wage, whichever is higher, up to $511 per day over a 2-week period.

If an employee is unable to work due to the conditions described in 4 or 6, such as a lack of child care, the employee is entitled to pay at 2/3 their regular rate or 2/3 the applicable minimum wage, whichever is higher, up to $200 per day for 2 weeks.

If an employee is unable to work due to the conditions described in 5 the employee is entitled to pay at 2/3 their regular rate or 2/3 the applicable minimum wage, whichever is higher, up to $200 per day for 12 weeks.

If the employee is part-time, the employee is entitled to be paid for a number of hours equal to the number of hours that the employee works, on average, in a 2 week period.

All full-time and part-time school system employees are covered by the Emergency Paid Sick Leave and are eligible for the two weeks of emergency paid sick leave if they meet one of the six criteria listed above.

Now let’s discuss the Emergency FMLA Leave.

It allows an employee to take up to 12 weeks of leave if the employee is unable to work or telework due to a need for leave to take care of the employee’s child if the school or place of child care has been closed, or if the child care provider is unavailable due to a public health emergency.

How much it pays:

The first 10 days (2 weeks) of leave may be unpaid, except that an employee may choose to use the new emergency sick leave (as identified above) or any other accrued paid leave.

The remaining 10 weeks of FMLA leave provided by this law will be paid at 2/3rds of the employee’s regular rate, up to a maximum payment of $200 per day ($10,000 total).

Emergency FMLA applies to any full-time or part-time employee who have been on the payroll for 30 calendar days.

Another important fact for employees who lack childcare or are caring for an ill child:
Employees in those circumstances can combine both emergency leaves. Here how combining the two may work:

• Weeks 1-2 – Emergency Paid Sick Leave at 67% regular salary up to $200/day

• Weeks 3-12 – Emergency FMLA Leave at 67% regular salary up to $200/day

In the case of lack of childcare, an employee may choose to use accrued leave and emergency paid sick leave together in order to make 100% of his or her salary for that period of time up to two weeks.

Remember it is illegal for an employer to discharge, discipline, or otherwise discriminate against an employee taking leave.

If you feel you need to use one or both emergency leave options, please notify your organization for further guidance. If you are not a member of an organization contact your supervisor to obtain the proper paperwork.

I am not advocating for or against utilizing the FFCRA, but I will say this: IF these MacGyvered forms of distance learning do get shut down due to the fact that public school employees exercised their legal rights, parents don’t worry, we can make up any time in the classroom that may have been lost.

How?

The easiest and cheapest way to do this would be to end high stakes testing.

Think about it. Most school systems spend weeks after spring break doing test prep and high stakes testing. If schools are able to go back into session in August (which I PRAY is the case!) then they could use the first four weeks to make up what was lost and omit the high stakes testing at the end of the year. This is a slightly altered version of a suggestion made by Dr. Eric Mackey, Alabama’s State Superintendent.

Let’s not aid the destruction of public education by buying into the false narratives that these last few weeks of school are critical and must continue at all costs, that the sky is falling if we don’t get our children behind a digital device, and that our schools are solely responsible for the care and feeding of our students. Instead let’s recognize how out of focus our vision has become concerning our expectations of public education and public education employees, and let’s begin a discussion asking parents, communities, and community leaders what their responsibilities are when it comes to our children and youth.

Public Ed can come back from this better and stronger, but only if we take action to correct the inequities and misguided policies that this pandemic has thrust onto the National stage.

Finally, to our public school employees, please take this time to care for yourself and your families. We will need you more than ever once our school doors reopen.

Categories Funding, Health, Teachers

Dana Milbank: When You Drown Government in a Bathtub, People Die

By dianeravitch
April 10, 2020 //
39

Dana Milbank, opinion writer for the Washington Post, says that the a Republican right wing finally have the helpless federal government they have longed for, and people are dying because of the government’s incompetence. Is this a polite way of saying that the Tea Party libertarians have blood on their hands? Note: there are only two areas where these people are eager and willing to lavish public funds: the military and religious schools.

He writes:

I had been expecting this for 21 years.

“It’s not a matter of ‘if,’ but ‘when,’” the legendary epidemiologist D.A. Henderson told me in 1999 when we discussed the likelihood of a biological event causing mass destruction.

In 2001, I wrote about experts urging a “medical Manhattan Project” for new vaccines, antibiotics and antivirals…

I repeat these things not to pretend I was prescient but to show that the nation’s top scientists and public health experts were shouting these warnings from the rooftops — deafeningly, unanimously and consistently. In the years after the 2001 terrorist attacks, the Bush and Obama administrations seemed to be listening.

But then came the tea party, the anti-government conservatism that infected the Republican Party in 2010 and triumphed with President Trump’s election. Perhaps the best articulation of its ideology came from the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who once said: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

They got their wish. What you see today is your government, drowning — a government that couldn’t produce a rudimentary test for coronavirus, that couldn’t contain the pandemic as other countries have done, that couldn’t produce enough ventilators for the sick or even enough face masks and gowns for health-care workers.

Now it is time to drown this disastrous philosophy in the bathtub — and with it the poisonous attitude that the government is a harmful “beast” that must be “starved.” It is not an exaggeration to say that this ideology caused the current debacle with a deliberate strategy to sabotage government.

Overall, entitlement programs continued to grow, and the Pentagon’s many friends protected its budget. And Trump has abandoned responsible budgeting. But in one area, the tea party types, with their sequesters, debt-limit standoffs and other austerity schemes, did all too well. Between 2011 and 2018, nondefense discretionary spending fell by 12 percent — and, with it, the government’s already iffy ability to prevent and ameliorate public health emergencies unraveled.

John Auerbach, president of Trust for America’s Health, described for me the fallout: Over a dozen years, the Public Health Emergency Preparedness grants to state and local public health departments were cut by a third and the Hospital Preparedness Program cut in half, 60,000 jobs were lost at state and local public health departments, and similarly severe cuts were made to laboratories. A $15 billion grant program under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the Prevention and Public Health Fund, was plundered for other purposes.

Now Americans are paying for this with their lives — and their livelihoods.

If the United States had more public health capacity it “absolutely” would have been on par with Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, which have far fewer cases, Auerbach said. South Korea has had four deaths per 1 million people, Singapore one death per million, and Taiwan 0.2 deaths per million. The United States: 39 per million — and rising fast.

To have mitigated the virus the way Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan did would have required spending about $4.5 billion a year on public health, Auerbach estimates. Instead we’re spending trillions to rescue the economy.
Democrats aren’t blameless in pandemic preparedness. And some Republicans tried to be responsible — but the starve-the-beast crowd wouldn’t hear of it.

After Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) voted for the 2009 stimulus bill because he secured $10 billion for the National Institutes of Health, he was essentially forced out of the GOP. Rising in the party were people such as Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), whose far-right Republican Study Committee in 2011 proposed a plan, applauded by GOP leadership, to cut NIH funding by 40 percent.

In 2014, NIH chief Francis Collins said there likely would have been a vaccine for the Ebola outbreak if not for a 10 percent cut in NIH funding between 2010 and 2014 that included halving Ebola vaccine research. Republicans jeered.

In 2016, when President Barack Obama requested $1.9 billion to fight the Zika virus, Republicans in Congress sat on the request for seven months and then cut it nearly in half.

Since then, Trump has proposed cuts to the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention so severe even congressional Republicans rejected them. And last month they fed the “beast” a $2.2 trillion feast to fight the pandemic.

Now they know: When you drown the government in the bathtub, people die.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Funding, Health, Republicans
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