DeVos: Defund public schools, then reopen them
What planet has Betsy DeVos been quarantining on?
And why is she beating up, yet again, on the public school districts her U.S. Department of Education was created to help?
In case you’ve been in a coma since the man who began his career by defrauding the Educational Testing Service became president, DeVos is the high net worth individual Donald Trump tapped to be his Secretary of Education back in 2017, or about 19,127 false or misleading claims ago.
She lives on Planet MAGA, working from her gated estate in an exclusive enclave of sycophantic billionaires not far from White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s cold water walk-up in the planet’s industrial district. DeVos’ oblivious disinterest in the circumstances of ordinary Americans — she is to white entitlement what Ru Paul is to crossdressing — may account for her unfamiliarity with the pandemic crisis in which most of native country is mired.
Back here on Planet Earth, public school administrators are spending their own summers trying to figure out how they’re going to keep classrooms staffed and COVID-free at a time when the tax revenues their districts rely on are shrinking.
And if DeVos was anyone else’s Secretary of Education, she’d be calling President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell about 20 times a day to remind them any plan to reopen the nation’s public schools is doomed unless Congress authorizes emergency aid to strapped school districts facing billions of dollars in pandemic related expenditures, none of them anticipated.
But this is Trumpworld, where the nation’s top law enforcement officer is the most lawless person in Washington and public health officials lose their jobs for trying to protect the public health. It’s the bureaucratic version of Opposites Day, when kids eat dinner for breakfast and go to school in the pajamas they normally wear to bed.
So instead of promoting public education, DeVos has spent her tenure denigrating public schools and the men and women who run them. Long before Black Lives Matter protesters made defunding the police their rallying cry, DeVos was quietly working to defund the nation’s schools. Except that instead of diverting taxpayer dollars to other public priorities, like mental health care or food assistance, she hopes to divert money Congress has allocated to public schools to for-profit education companies and private schools that promote her Christian values.
Blaming the victims
Parents who fail to grasp DeVos’ enthusiasm for privatizing public education may have cheered this week when she lashed out against public school districts that plan to resume in-person instruction on only a parttime basis this fall, asserting that anything less than a return to the pre-pandemic status quo would short-change students.
That’s a sentiment shared by millions of parents wondering how they’ll keep their jobs, or cope with dramatically higher childcare expenses, if their children can’t return to fulltime classes in the fall.
So those parents feel reassured when the woman who plays the nation’s top education official assures them there’s no question that schools can reopen safely if only timid school districts can summon the will to reopen them. You tell ’em, Madam Secretary!
But here’s the thing: Educators are the people who want school to resume on a parttime basis. The teachers, principals and superintendents I and my Free Press colleagues have been talking to throughout the pandemic are keenly aware of the myriad ways in which remote learning falls short of in-person instruction. They also know that preparing lesson plans for both online learning in-person instruction would mean heavier workloads for teachers, with the likelihood of worse learning outcomes for students.
So DeVos’ suggestion that professional educators are standing in the way of schools becoming “fully operational” in the fall is a lot of disingenuous horse poop. Ditto for President Trump’s assertion that Democratic governors and lawmakers, whose constituents are most likely to suffer if schools can’t resume full-time operation this fall, are conspiring to prolong a school shut-down in an effort to stoke anti-Trump sentiment.
It’s the virus, stupid (and Mitch McConnell)
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The real obstacles to the resumption of fulltime schooling, as DeVos and Trump well know, are the continuing public health threat posed by COVID-19 and the Republican Senate’s unfathomable reluctance to allocate the resources schools need to reopen safely.
It has been nearly two months since the U,S. House passed H.R. 6800, popularly known as the Heroes Act, which provides more than $50 billion to help K-12 schools continue to deliver instruction during the pandemic and establishes the nationwide testing and tracing protocols the Trump Administration’s own health officials have repeatedly cited as critical to managing the pandemic. Senate Majority Leader McConnell has kept the Senate in recess for most of the time since, ignoring the pleas of school officials who face crippling staff cuts without the assurance of federal aid.
Trump’s response to the Senate’s delinquency has been to criticize the CDC for issuing physical distancing directives that are “too tough” and threatening to cut federal funding to districts that postpone full reopening in the name of protecting child safety. Toughness, the president’s gold standard in most other circumstances, is apparently a liability when it comes to enforcing public health standards.
If Trump or DeVos cared a whit about reopening schools safely, they’d be leaning on Republican senators to negotiate an aid package that provides school districts with the wherewithal to do so. The new school year will be chaotic, and probably short-lived, unless schools have the resources they need.
But this is about Trump’s re-election, not school kids. We’ll know DeVos and Trump are serious about the latter when they stop jawboning educators and prevail on McConnell and his truant colleagues to get back to work.
Brian Dickerson is the Editorial Page Editor of the Free Press. Contact him at bdickerson@freepress.com.