Reopening the nation’s schools amid a surging pandemic is on track to be one of the defining issues of this election, simply because of its timing. Nearly all public schools are normally back in session by Labor Day, which happens to coincide with what used to be viewed as the beginning of the election season, back in the pre-COVID era, before the daily news of this deadly viral pandemic resulted in millions of homebound Americans becoming permanently glued to their news outlet of choice.
What occurs in the nation’s public school system between late August and November is likely to be more consequential, from a practical standpoint, to millions of voters than any relief or stimulus legislation negotiated between the House and Senate, because its effects will be so immediately and obviously felt. But since the effects of exposing millions of children to the SARS-Cov-2 virus will unfold over a period of about eight weeks, it will be a particularly difficult issue for Donald Trump. Saddled with a notoriously short attention span, a man who cannot be expected to read his daily briefings—whether those briefings warn about exploding pandemics, or just Vladimir Putin placing bounties on the heads of American soldiers—clearly cannot be expected to cope with a crisis unfolding over eight whole weeks.
Unfortunately for Trump, the school issue isn’t going to magically go away before November 3, any more than the novel coronavirus itself. The schools problem has already begun to cause parents to tear their hair out with anxiety, and July is barely half over. As thousands of local school districts, school boards and communities grapple with this unprecedented challenge, a sense of awareness is beginning to coalesce regarding the magnitude of what they are being asked to deal with. The season of finger-pointing has not yet begun, but rays of recognition, if you will, are beginning to peek through. And what is gradually being illuminated for all to see is how this looming catastrophe can be attributed to the utter ineptitude and incompetence of this administration in handling the pandemic.
As David Graham, writing for The Atlantic observes, nearly all parents desperately want their kids to be able to go back to school. But at the the same time, nearly all want their children to be safe. They don’t want to dread seeing their children coming back from a day’s worth of classes, wondering whether some other parent let his child go to school that day with a fever or a cough. They don’t want to have to ask again and again whether this or that teacher is following all the CDC guidelines and whether their son or daughter really spent the entire day wearing that mask and staying six feet apart from the other kids. They’ve seen how kids behave in groups, and they know there is no real way to keep them totally separated from each other.
Most of these parents are willing to put their kids “out there,” so to speak, if they’re convinced that the school is as safe as possible. But they’re already finding out that the schools cannot provide that kind of assurance. Because for the schools to provide that kind of assurance, two things have to happen: the spread of the virus has to be under control, and the schools have to have enough resources to make them as safe as possible.
Neither of these things has happened, and both failures are directly traceable to the actions—and inaction—of Donald Trump. The first issue, of controlling the pandemic, is now universally regarded as a lost cause.
“His defiance of science has made it impossible to do what he wanted to do,” Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, told me. “The irony is his incompetence and his arrogance and his refusal to listen to experts and his downplaying of the virus have made it impossible to do what he thought he needed to run for reelection.”
Trump failed to recognize that the single most pressing issue for a vast number of Americans, beyond securing their own personal safety and ability to return to work, was the ability to send their kids back to school. For many parents, even as of late May and early June of this year it was practically a given that this pandemic would be under control, that their kids would be back to school or college in September. The prospect of COVID-19 infections skyrocketing at rates now approaching 75,000 per day, causing further lockdowns and yielding halting, hastily reversed state reopenings, was incomprehensible, even such a short time ago. The idea that our country could have the worst response to the pandemic in the world was simply beyond imagination.
And, as Graham observes, in the face of this disastrous failure, to witness the cold cynicism and complete lack of concern by this administration towards their own schools was the final shock for many parents.
The country’s inability to reopen schools is the yardstick by which to measure all of the accumulated failures of the American response to COVID-19. Instead of uniting Americans behind the project of reopening schools, restoring the most important service that has not returned since the start of the pandemic, the Trump administration has politicized the debate. It is asking districts to solve problems—testing, tracing, community spread—that every other level of government has thus far failed to solve, but not providing funding to do so. In fact, Trump is threatening to cut funding to school districts that do not reopen.
For the vast majority, their childrens’ educations are based on those parents’ fondest hopes and dreams. They are not reducible to political footballs, where their only value is sublimated to Trumps re-election prospects. Because Trump made the pandemic itself “political,” he apparently thought he could do the same with our childrens’ lives.
But most parents don’t see it that way. Red-state parents have seen their governors backtracking on the business reopenings. They see that their states are experiencing spikes in infection and deaths. They’re starting to hear from friends about people who have caught this disease and more and more of them know it’s not a hoax. Trump’s political fortunes may matter a great deal to many of these people, but so do their own lives, which in many cases are dependent on their childrens’ ability to go to school.
Trump’s biggest miscalculation may have been simple timing. By pushing so hard for schools to fully reopen just when infection rates have begun to soar out of control, he risked losing the blind trust that his supporters had always provided, on an issue that was not an abstraction capable of demagoguery like “immigration” or street protests against racial injustice. These were issues that could fire up Trump’s base because they had no personal stake in them. It was easy to gin up his supporters’ racism when they literally had no skin in the game—racism is a convenient, lazy, and above all very easy way for people to shift the blame for their problems. But when the subject becomes their children, their own flesh and blood, the game loses some of its appeal. Add in their ability to make a living and you risk alienating more people than you’re impressing. As things currently stand, the pandemic is so out of control that school districts everywhere—in blue or red America—have little choice but to pay attention to their own health departments in determining whether schools ought to reopen, and how that should happen.
As long as the country continues to experience community spread and high infection rates, it’s hard for school systems to create conditions for safe reopening—not only for students and teachers, but for custodians, bus drivers, and family members of all those people. “If the virus is exploding in the community, there is no way you’re going to be able to do school in person,” says Tom Frieden, who led the CDC from 2009 to 2017.
Graham notes that the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)—which, along with San Diego, just opted not to reopen at the start of this school year—decided it would need three things in order to reopen safely. “The schools need to institute new procedures, from social distancing to regular cleaning; they need regular and prompt testing for students, teachers, and staff; and they need reliable contact tracing.” The first can be done by any school district, but the next two require significant assistance and expertise from the state or federal government. In this, LAUSD is not so different from any other school in red-state America.
But the testing, expertise and reliable contact tracing are non-existent. States cannot afford them, and the federal government, of which Trump is at least supposed to be in charge, failed to provide the resources that would have made them possible. That these resources are relatively tiny expenditures, compared to the overall federal relief provided so eagerly to struggling small businesses, for example, should be obvious. Yet because these relatively minor expenditures in time, testing and effort have not been provided by the Trump administration, mostly for political reasons, most schools cannot “safely” open in full. Because schools perform so many functions, operating, as Graham observes, as “de facto child care centers” which allow parents to work, providing meals and more., the economic impact of this administration’s simple failure to prepare and provide is incalculable. As Graham points out, the lack of federal guidance on just how schools might go about reopening has been a singular impediment to any reopening.
Washington has offered a response that is at worst antagonistic and at best conflicted. After the CDC issued reopening guidelines, Trump denounced them and called for them to be watered down. DeVos emphasized that these were merely guidelines, not recommendations, creating the weird situation of the federal government telling school districts to disregard the federal government.
Even worse, the Trump administration has resorted to threatening schools’ funding if they don’t fully open, both ignoring the fact that viruses are astonishingly indifferent to threats, and virtually guaranteeing an antagonistic reaction from local school boards. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans have tried to tie the funding to making schools safe for reopening, which is an exactly ass-backwards approach, or, as Graham notes, “putting the cart before the horse.”
Faced with such gross ineptitude and wholesale disregard for the actual safety of children, schools are left to make their own decisions which are inevitably ad hoc, varying from county to county, state to state, further infuriating parents who compare the safety measures employed by their own schools to those of neighboring districts. After all, no one—Republican or Democrat—wants to be accused of putting their kids in mortal danger. Ultimately the biggest fear for these school districts, school boards, and parents alike is that after all these improvised efforts being made, one outbreak is likely to send their entire district into another shutdown. Meanwhile the administration—for its own political ends—continues to insist on “full reopening” which local districts rightly see as reckless and irresponsible, if not outrightly homicidal.
The failure of this administration to contain a viral pandemic that many less-wealthy countries have managed to control is terrible enough. The failure of our federal government to provide any helpful guidance or the funding necessary to make our schools safe, and the complete lack of concern demonstrated by this administration towards the children, teachers and families whose lives are actually on the line is simply inexcusable.
Parents would like nothing more than to have schools fully reopen this fall, but the Trump administration has made that impossible. The chaos and hardship that this failure is going to wreak on millions of Americans’ lives, including children, is nobody’s fault but Trump’s.