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Steven Singer: Distance Learning Is Horrible, Death is Worse

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2020 //
24

Steven Singer is a veteran teacher in Pittsburgh. He loves being a teacher. But he loves being alive even more. He doesn’t think it will be possible to open the schools safely because our government has failed to take the steps necessary to control the pandemic. Other nations have. But we haven’t, and now we are paying the price.

Singer writes:

Nearly every other comparable country kept that downward trend. But not us.

The United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Canada…

But the United States!?

Ha!

You think we can wear masks in public to guard against the spread of infection? No way! Our President politicized them.

Stay indoors to keep away from infected people? It’s summer and the beaches are open.

And – heck! – we’ve got to make sure restaurants and bars and other businesses are open, too, or else the economy will suffer…A sane country would come together and provide people with federal relief checks, personal protective equipment (PPE), protection from evictions, and universal healthcare. But we don’t live in that country.

Instead we’re all just going to have to suffer.

Not only you and me, but our kids, too.

Because they will have to somehow try to continue their educations through all this madness – again. And this time it won’t merely be for the last quarter of the year. It will be at the start of a new grade when everything is new and fresh and the groundwork is being laid for the entire academic year.

I don’t even know what to hope for anymore.

Would it be better to try to do a whole year of distance learning?

I speak from experience here – April and May were a cluster.

Kids didn’t have the necessary technology, infrastructure or understanding of how to navigate it. And there was no way to give it to them when those were the prerequisites to instruction.

Not to mention resources. All the books and papers and lessons were back in the classroom – difficult to digitize. Teachers had to figure out how to do everything from scratch with little to no training at the drop of a hat. (And guess what – not much has changed in the subsequent weeks.)

Let’s talk motivation. Kids can be hard to motivate under the best of circumstances, but try doing it through a screen! Try building a trusting instructional relationship with a child when you’re just a noisy bunch of pixels. Try meeting individual special needs.

A lot of things inevitably end up falling through the cracks and it’s up to parents to pick up the pieces. But how can they do that when they’re trying to work from home or working outside of the home or paralyzed with anxiety and fear?

And this is probably the BEST option, because what else do we have?

Are we really going to open the school buildings and teach in-person? While that would be much better from an academic standpoint, there’s still the problem of a global pandemic.

Kids will get sick. As time goes on we see increasingly younger people getting infected with worsening symptoms. We really don’t know what the long term effects of this disease will be.

And even if young people are mostly asymptomatic, chances are good they’ll spread this thing to the rest of us.

They’ll bring it home to their families. They’ll give it to their teachers.

Even if we only have half the kids one day and the other half on another day, that won’t help much. We’re still being exposed to at least a hundred kids every week. (Not to mention the question of how to effectively teach some kids in-person while the rest are on-line!)

Even with masks on – and can you imagine teaching in a mask!? Can you imagine kids wearing masks all day!? – those respiratory droplets will spread through our buildings like mad!

Many of us are in the most susceptible groups because of age or health.

Don’t get me wrong – I want to get back to my classroom and teach my students in-person more than almost anything – except dying.

I’d rather live a little bit longer, thank you… A crappy year of education is better than mass death.

Categories Health, Safety, Trump

Nancy Bailey: 22 Reasons Why Schools Should Not Open This Fall

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2020 //
56

Nancy Bailey has 22 reasons why schools should not open this fall.

Here are the first four:

1. Illness and Russian Roulette

According to the CDC, the risk might seem low for children, but they still get sick, some seriously. Children and teenagers have died. Questions still surround the disease. It’s not worth the risk. Maybe the situation will improve by January, or next summer. Currently we’re experiencing a pandemic and safety is the number one concern.

2. How Will the Flu and Covid-19 Tango?

Maybe Covid-19 alone doesn’t affect children as badly as adults, but what if you mix it with the flu? Every year the flu kills children. Last January, before Covid-19 became well known, 27 children had died of the flu. What will the dance of these two illnesses look like in the fall?

3. Adults Matter Too!

A large concern with children is that they can spread the disease to teachers, parents, and grandparents who could be vulnerable. It isn’t fair to risk their health by reopening schools. Teachers and staff should not have to fear their workplace.

4. Lacking Consensus

Adults can’t agree on recommendations surrounding Covid-19, so how can teachers protect children brought together in the classroom? Some students will want to wear their masks, others won’t. Some students will take the virus seriously, others won’t.

Agree or not, Nancy is always thoughtful.

Categories Accountability, Health

My Knee, and Why I Can Walk Again

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2020 //
29

Six years ago, I fell and broke my knee. That event changed my life in unexpected ways. For the first time in my life, I felt physically unsteady and vulnerable. My sense of invincibility disappeared. After a lifetime of bounding up and down stairs, I learned to hold onto a railing and watch my step.

In April 2014, I was running to the postoffice on a Saturday, hoping to get there before it closed, and I tripped down the stairs outside my house. My left knee landed on a flagstone, and I felt a horrible crushing sensation. I was alone at the time. My partner Mary was in Georgia, visiting with her college classmates. I just lay there on the ground for about five minutes, waiting to see how bad it was.

I was on Long Island, and none of my neighbors was home. I tried to stand but I couldn’t. I dragged myself on my back up the stairs (three of them) and into the house. I pulled down the phone and called a neighbor who lived a few doors away and she called an ambulance. I was transported to the closest hospital, in the small town of Greenport. They couldn’t help me. The next day my son took a bus out to pick me up and bring me to the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City. There, the doctor x-rayed my knee and told me I had well and truly broken it and needed a total knee replacement. Mary had already had double knee surgery, and I had some idea of what was in store for me.

I had to wait two weeks to get into surgery, and during that two weeks I traveled to Louisville, Kentucky, using a walker, to receive the Grawemeyer Award for my 2010 book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. When I walked to the podium at the University of Louisville to accept my award, I did not use a crutch or a walker, and I thought maybe the diagnosis was wrong. But when I got home, I was dressing to go out, lost my balance, and almost crashed through a wall. Surgery it would be.

After the surgery, I went to rehab diligently, but my leg simply would not straighten out. It was bent. The physical therapist assured me I would wake up one morning and it would be straight, but day after day I felt my leg locked into a bent shape. I could not straighten it. I fell into the deepest depression of my life. I believed I would never walk again without a walker.

Then a dear friend from college days told me to go at once to a different physical therapist. I did, and the therapist told me that my knee was encased in scar tissue. I went back to the surgeon, and he performed a “manipulation.” That means that I was given morphine, knocked out, and while I was unconscious, he forced my leg straight. He took pictures to show me that my leg was straight. But when I woke up, my leg almost immediately sprung back into a bent position.

Back to the physical therapist, who said there were only two people who could help me: One was a sports medicine doctor in Vail, the other was a sports medicine doctor in Cincinnati. I chose the latter because the flight was nonstop and closer. I went to Dr. Frank Noyes at the Noyes Knee Institute at Mercy Hospital. As it happened, he literally wrote the book on scar tissue (arthrofibrosis). He told me I was too old for surgery but that he could fix my leg. We went into a small room, where I sat on the edge of a table and stretched my bent knee so that my heel was on another table. Then two very large men on either side of me pressed my leg down until it was straight. The pain was intense, and I was crying, but while they forced my leg straight, they quickly built a plaster cast around it, then cut the cast open, filled it with cotton and gauze, put it into a large box, and presented it to me. Dr. Noyes told me to wear it eight-ten hours a day for at least six weeks, wrapping it tightly with ace bandages.

After six weeks, the cast straightened my leg. I was able to walk again. I could no longer run or even walk fast, but I could walk without any help.

I asked my surgeon why no one in New York City was able to perform such a simple procedure. He explained that he was a surgeon not a rehabilitation specialist.

I mention this story not to share my personal pain, depression, and recovery but to share the understanding that there are sometimes ways to fix what seem to be impossible physical conditions. Not always. I thought I would never be able to walk again without a walker. My gait is somewhat stilted, but I walk without crutches or a walker.

If you need the same kind of help, you now know where you can get it. Dr. Noyes may have retired by now, but he trained others in his methods. Every time I see someone with a bent knee, on a walker, I long to tell then this story. That’s why I’m telling it now. It might help someone else.

Categories Health, Personal

Dana Milbank: America Slides Back to the Medieval Era

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2020 //
54

My favorite Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank summarizes where our “leaders” are in responding to the global pandemic. No wonder the EU won’t allow Americans to enter its borders.

Sen. Rand Paul doesn’t much care what Anthony Fauci has to say. The Kentucky Republican gets his public health advice from Friedrich Hayek.

Hayek, the Austrian-born economist and libertarian hero, died in 1992. But Paul, an ophthalmologist before he took up politics, still takes medical guidance from the 20th-century philosopher.

“Hayek had it right!” Paul proclaimed at Tuesday’s Senate health committee hearing on the coronavirus pandemic.

“Only decentralized power and decision-making based on millions of individualized situations can arrive at what risks and behaviors each individual should choose.”

Paul focused his wrath on Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious-disease official. “Virtually every day we seem to hear from you things we can’t do,” Paul complained. “All I hear is, we can’t do this, we can’t do that, we can’t play baseball.”

Fauci assured Paul that “I never said we can’t play a certain sport.”

Unsatisfied, Paul demanded: “We just need more optimism.”

So that’s what we need. The United States is hitting new records for infection, largely because President Trump and allied governors across the South and Southwest ignored public health guidance. While other countries beat back the virus, we’re on course to have 100,000 new cases a day, Fauci said, and doing little about it. But we just need to be more upbeat!

Not for the first time, it feels as though 21st-century America is 14th-century Europe, reacting with all manner of useless countermeasures to the plague: balancing ill “humors” and dispelling evil “vapors” caused by planetary misalignment, religious marches and public self-flagellation, cures involving live chickens and unicorns, and the wearing of amulets and reciting of “abracadabra.”

Now, we have science to tell us how to beat the coronavirus — with face masks and social distancing. Yet our response is resolutely medieval.

The president ridicules mask wearing as politically correct and unmanly. His campaign staff tears down social distancing signs at his mass rally. Governors of hard-hit states tamper with data, sideline public health experts and blame the spread on Latino farmworkers, civil rights demonstrations and increased testing — anything but their reckless and premature relaxing of restrictions.

And then there’s Vice President Pence, head of the White House coronavirus task force. “I’d just encourage every American to continue to pray,” he said at Friday’s task force briefing.

I’m all for prayer. But prayer without face masks won’t defeat the virus.

“The attitude of pushing back from authority and pushing back on scientific data is very concerning,” Fauci told senators Tuesday, bemoaning a “lack of trust” in government. “We’re in the middle of a catastrophic outbreak and we really do need to be guided by scientific principles.”

A lack of urgency about the virus caused the testing debacle. A lack of regard for science caused the hydroxychloroquine debacle. A contempt for public health advice caused the reopening debacle. A president’s vanity caused the anti-face-mask debacle. An immunology debacle likely comes next: If Trump rushes out a vaccine before the election, would anybody believe it’s safe?

Belatedly, more than a dozen states have paused or scaled back their rash plans to reopen without heeding public health guidance. But we still have the White House proclaiming “remarkable progress” against the pandemic because the latest victims are younger — as though they won’t infect the old and the sick. Trump insists he wasn’t joking when he said he told health officials to “slow the testing down” to suppress the number of reported cases. He’s proceeding with plans for an in-person, mask-optional convention in Florida, now a virus hot spot.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blames street protests (even though New York, Washington and Minneapolis experienced no such surge in cases) and “overwhelmingly Hispanic” workers, and as cases spiked last week, he claimed that “nothing has changed.” Like other GOP governors and the Trump administration, he also blames an increase in testing — which doesn’t explain the higher rate of positive tests.

Pence, too, rejects the obvious conclusion that “the reopening has to do with what we’re seeing” in the viral spread. (It’s the evil vapors!) He said Sunday that it’s a “good idea” to wear face masks — just after attending a church event at which half the 2,200 people, including the choir, eschewed masks.

At Tuesday’s committee hearing, Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who is retiring, urged Trump to “occasionally wear a mask” so his admirers “would follow his lead and help end this political debate.”

But neither Alexander’s pleadings, nor those of the various health officials testifying, are likely to break down America’s medieval resistance to science. Paul, citing the successful reopening of schools in Europe, demanded U.S. schools reopen (ignoring that Europe has contained the virus). Invoking the superiority of Hayek’s theories to the findings of public health officials, Paul said “we shouldn’t presume that a group of experts somehow knows what’s best.”

Categories Education Reform, Health, Ignorance, Science

Biden Calls for Massive Federal Response to Pandemic

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2020 //
7

Joe Biden seems to be waging a vigorous front-porch campaign.

The Washington Post reports:

WILMINGTON, Del. – Joe Biden doesn’t just want to ensure that every person in this country gets free testing for the novel coronavirus. He wants their treatment covered, too, no matter whether or how they are insured.

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee also calls for adding $200 per month to the checks of everyone who collects Social Security, temporarily increasing Medicaid funding by 12 percent and expanding food stamp benefits by 15 percent.

Biden, who has mostly stayed in his house here for nearly four months, will venture out Tuesday afternoon to deliver a speech at a local school on his vision for fighting the coronavirus crisis.

As infections and hospitalizations surge, and with the United States poised to surpass 125,000 confirmed covid-19 deaths as soon as today, Biden will recall how President Trump described himself as a “wartime” leader at the start of the pandemic and then accuse him of “surrendering to the virus.”

“Americans social distanced and did their part to bend the curve, but Trump didn’t lead,” Biden plans to say, according to a preview shared by aides.

Biden will argue that the need for federal outlays to contain the worst public health crisis since 1918 and the worst economic crisis since 1933 is only growing – and he wants to guarantee emergency paid leave not just for everyone who gets covid-19 but also those who care for them – “for as long as they need to recover.”

Categories Biden, Funding, Health

Chief Justice Roberts Provides Swing Vote to Strike Down Law to Ban Abortions

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2020 //
27

Chief Justice John Roberts voted with the Supreme Court’s four liberal justices to strike down a Louisiana law that would have severely restricted access to abortion.

The Washington Post reports:

The Supreme Court on Monday provided a victory for abortion rights activists, striking down a restrictive Louisiana law that would have left the state with only one abortion clinic.


Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the court’s liberals in the 5 to 4 decision. It was a blow to conservatives who had hoped for a dramatic change in the court’s abortion jurisprudence in the first case heard by a court reinforced by President Trump’s two conservative appointees.


Instead, Roberts said the Louisiana law could not stand given the court’s 2016 decision to to overturn a similar Texas law in 2016.
“The legal doctrine of stare decisis requires us, absent special circumstances, to treat like cases alike,” Roberts wrote in concurring with the decision. “The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons. Therefore Louisiana’s law cannot stand under our precedents.”


Roberts ‘s vote was all the more striking because he dissented in the Texas case. He said he continues “believe that the [Texas] case was wrongly decided.” But he said the question was whether to “adhere to it in the present case.”


It was perhaps the most dramatic example of Roberts’s new role as the pivotal member of the court, and indicated that while he supports restrictions on abortion, he is unready at this point to overhaul the court’s jurisprudence supporting the right of a woman to choose the procedure.

A side note: in states where protestors have refused to wear face masks, some have chanted, “My body, my choice!”

Ironic. Do the anti-maskers support abortion rights?

Categories Accountability, Health, Louisiana

WaPo: Trump Campaign Staff Removed Social Distancing Warnings in Tulsa

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2020 //
36

The Washington Post reported today:

In the hours before President Trump’s rally in Tulsa, his campaign directed the removal of thousands of “Do Not Sit Here, Please!” stickers from seats in the arena that were intended to establish social distance between rallygoers, according to video and photos obtained by The Washington Post and a person familiar with the event.

The removal contradicted instructions from the management of the BOK Center, the 19,000-seat arena in downtown Tulsa where Trump held his rally on June 20. At the time, coronavirus cases were rising sharply in Tulsa County, and Trump faced intense criticism for convening a large crowd for an indoor political rally, his first such event since the start of the pandemic.

As part of its safety plan, arena management had purchased 12,000 do-not-sit stickers for Trump’s rally, intended to keep people apart by leaving open seats between attendees. On the day of the rally, event staff had already affixed them on nearly every other seat in the arena when Trump’s campaign told event management to stop and then began removing the stickers, hours before the president’s arrival, according to a person familiar with the event who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

In a video clip obtained by The Washington Post, two men — one in a suit and one wearing a badge and a face mask — can be seen pulling stickers off seats in a section of the arena. It is unclear who those two men are. When Trump took the stage on Saturday evening, the crowd was clustered together and attendees were not leaving empty seats between themselves.
The actions by Trump’s campaign were first reported Friday by Billboard Magazine.
As rally preparations were underway, Trump’s campaign staff intervened with the venue manager, ASM Global, and told them to stop labeling seats in this way, Doug Thornton, executive vice president of ASM Global, told the magazine.

“They also told us that they didn’t want any signs posted saying we should social distance in the venue,” Thornton said. “The campaign went through and removed the stickers.”

Categories Health, Safety, Trump, Tulsa

Pence Puts a Happy Face on Rise in COVID Cases

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2020 //
17

While other nations such as Spain and Italy have seen an overall decline in new cases of COVID, the US is reporting a new high in the number of those infected. Other nations have followed the advice of public health officials. The US has not.

Mike Pence looked for good news in the rising number of COVID cases in the south and west. The spike is only happening in certain counties, he said, and it’s mostly among younger people who have less risk of death.

Pence did not wear a mask at the press briefing of the coronavirus task force.

The Trump administration on Friday claimed “remarkable progress” in fighting the coronavirus pandemic, despite a surge of cases in the South and West and as several Republican governors allied with President Trump are under pressure to impose stricter public health restrictions to gain control of outbreaks in their states.

Vice President Pence held the first public briefing of the coronavirus task force in nearly two months and sought to deliver an upbeat message that was at odds with warnings from public health experts. The vice president dodged the question of whether people should wear masks in public, as his own administration recommends, and said campaign rallies that pack people together, in violation of public health guidance, will continue.

Pence offered no new strategies to combat the rapidly spreading virus and minimized record daily case counts in several states as “outbreaks in specific counties….”

While Pence acknowledged the rising numbers of cases in the South and the West, he sought to play down the threat while heaping praise on Trump for how he has handled the pandemic. The vice president argued that many of the new cases are being found in younger Americans, who are at less risk of developing deadly complications from the virus than older Americans are. He also argued that states have told him they have enough medical equipment to deal with the surge in infections and repeated the misleading claim that more testing is the main reason for the rising numbers of cases.

Pence rejected the idea that campaign rallies should be curtailed during the pandemic, arguing that the events are constitutionally protected free speech, and he defended two events Trump held in the past week over objections from local officials or the advice of his own public health advisers.

“Well, the freedom of speech, the right to peaceably assemble, is enshrined in the Constitution of the United States, and we have an election coming up this fall,” Pence said, adding that people who attend such events are offered screenings and health advice.

Categories Health, Lies, Pence

Alexandra Petri: Mike Pence Reassures the People of Troy

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2020 //
17

Alexandra Petri is the brilliant satirist for The Washington Post. She wrote this column, titled: “The Greeks Are Gone from Troy, for Sure,” by Mike Pence.


“In recent days, the media has taken to sounding the alarm bells over a ‘second wave’ of coronavirus infections. Such panic is overblown. Thanks to the leadership of President Trump and the courage and compassion of the American people, our public health system is far stronger than it was four months ago, and we are winning the fight against the invisible enemy.”

— Vice President Pence in “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave,’” Wall Street Journal

In recent days, Cassandra has taken to sounding the alarm bells over a “second wave” of Greek attack that will soon come sweeping over us like the wrath of Poseidon and leave our city in ruins. Such panic is overblown. (Although, technically, “panic” is fear induced by the god Pan, so really this is not even panic at all. But whatever it is, it is overblown.)

Thanks to the leadership of King Priam and the courage and compassion of the Trojan people, our walled city is far stronger and even less pregnable than it was nine years ago, and we have won the fight against the Greeks. And if you doubt that, just look at this enormous and beautifully constructed wooden horse they have left for us, which is definitely not hollow and will absolutely not be filled with handpicked soldiers ready to pour out and devastate our city.

The Laocoöns and Cassandras are full of negativity about this horse. At least, I think that was what Laocoön was saying before he was seized mid-sentence and crushed to death by sea serpents, along with his two sons! Probably a sign that what he was saying was not important. And when has Cassandra ever been right about anything?

The point is: The war has been a great success. And I can’t think of anyone better to have led us through it than King Priam. Yes, we have had losses, but ultimately we were victorious. That is what this horse means. We should seize it and be grateful.

Looking back, everything the king did was good. It was good, actually, that he put his sons in charge of everything, Hector, Paris — even Deiphobus. Hector was — how do I put this? — godlike. And so good at taming horses. We all miss him. And we even miss Paris, who actually turned out to be kind of helpful and, seemingly by random chance, managed to kill Achilles! I would think that shooting someone in the heel with an arrow would actually be a sign that you were just hitting body parts at random and not very good at what you were doing. But no, it was brilliant strategy! Which is what we have had throughout. And Deiphobus is here, too!

When King Priam asked me to chair our Get the Greeks to Leave and Destroy Their Champion Achilles Task Force nine years ago (Hector was busy), he directed us to pursue not only a Whole-of-the-House-of-Priam approach but a Whole-of-Troy approach. And now that the Greeks have left, spontaneously, I think, I can look back on that task force and see everything we did as a success. It must have been the partnerships I forged, or perhaps it was the weapons I forged. Maybe it was our alliance with the warlike Amazons, a match for men that put us over the top. (Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)

We’ve also made great progress on developing a device that will keep the Greeks out of here forever. Operation Wind-Swift-Footed Iris is aiming to have a technology that will shroud our city in something even better than Apollo’s protection — though what, really, could be better than that? I hope this wasn’t blasphemy.
I know we have asked the Trojan people to make sacrifices, like not leaving this walled city because there were Greeks outside, something that, amazingly, a few people were unwilling to do but most of you have been great about. But the time for sacrifices is over, except in the sense that we need to make a literal sacrifice to thank the gods for their protection.

Now is the time to bring in the horse and commemorate this achievement. We have defeated this visible enemy, which was also sometimes invisible because the gods are tricky.

Look, we can test the horse, if you like, but I think testing just makes it more likely you will find out information that makes you unhappy, and that is the last thing we need in our moment of triumph. But sure, have Helen walk around the horse calling out in the voices of the Greeks’ loved ones, just in case! Knock yourself out! I am sure the worst is over.

This is a time of celebration, and I think we can all sleep soundly in our beds. And I, for one, will sleep better once we get that horse inside. Congratulations, people of Troy.

Categories Health, Humor, Pence, Stupid, Trump

Trump Administration Seeks to Toss Out Obamacare

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2020 //
10

In the midst of the pandemic, with Americans subject to a deadly disease, the Trump regime filed yet another court effort to invalidate Obamacare. This would strip millions of people of health insurance.

How cruel.

Do Trump voters know?

Categories Cruelty, Health
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