Muddled promises on schools pose political problem for Biden
WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden is in a political firestorm over how and when to get more schools open amid the coronavirus pandemic, with Republicans seizing on confusion surrounding Biden’s goal to reopen a majority of schools within his first 100 days to paint the president as beholden to teachers’ unions at the expense of American families.
His administration in recent weeks has sent muddled and at times contradictory messages about Biden’s goal. On Tuesday night, the president said his 100-day goal was to have most elementary schools open five days a week, seeming to conflict with his own press secretary, who had said last week that schools would be considered “open” if they held in-person classes even one day a week.
Biden’s aides dismiss the controversy as a flareup that will disappear once the coronavirus is better under control and more school districts reopen, pointing to recent polls suggesting the public so far believes Biden is doing a good job in handling the issue.
But there could be lingering damage if Biden is seen to break an early promise on an issue so important to so many Americans.
Teachers’ unions have said they support reopening schools once officials are able to make the buildings safer, but they need the $130 billion included in Biden’s proposed American Rescue Plan to make it happen. And even if the bill passes Congress by the Democrats’ mid-March deadline, it’s unclear whether districts would be able to make changes in time to hasten school openings before the end of Biden’s first 100 days.
Dan Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendents Association,
said teachers are willing to go back to in-person learning “only if this bill is passed, only if the dollars get to the school districts in time for them to be able to do the work that they need to do in terms of spacing, in terms of sanitizing, and only if we get the majority of our teachers vaccinated.”
“It’s possible. But at this stage, at this point, it’s not probable,” he said.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said in an interview she hopes Biden will meet his goal, and has said teachers should return to school when COVID-19 mitigation strategies are in place. But she noted that with social distancing, school still won’t feel normal.
“You’re not going to be able to have every single child in every single school in the normal way that we think about normal school,” she said.
Until the nation reaches herd immunity with the widespread distribution of the vaccine, Weingarten said, “we’re not going to be normal.”
This leaves Biden caught between teachers’ unions expressing caution towards his expanded goal on reopening, and critics who say just one day of classroom time a week for a majority of schools is far too little. Data from Burbio, a service that tracks school opening plans, recently reported that 66% of K-12 students already are learning in-person to some degree.
Republicans have been using the issue to hit at Democrats for weeks, pointing to data suggesting that many schools are safe to open now and charging that the Biden administration is siding with teachers’ unions over science and the needs of American families.
“In places across America where public education depends on the whims of a powerful public sector union, the best interests of children have often come dead last,” Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, said during a floor speech earlier this month. “As the months have rolled by and the data have poured in, it’s become clear that schools can open safely.”
“An administration that puts facts and science first would be conducting a full-court press to open schools,” McConnell said.
Republicans see the issue as one that has an urgent and immediate impact on nearly every American family, and one that’s particularly salient for the kinds of suburban swing voters who can be decisive in tough House districts and statewide races.
Republican strategist Rory Cooper said the issue is particularly relevant in “collar counties around major urban areas.” He and other parents are “enraged with the state of schooling right now,” he said.
Children face “mental health issues, academic issues, physical and social issues. And the priority seems to be on the adults who worked in the school system, rather than the children who are supposed to benefit from it,” Cooper said.
Democrats believe they can turn the issue back on any Republicans who vote against the COVID-19 aid bill, and plan to hammer those lawmakers for blocking funding to get kids back to school.
But Republicans are already using the issue against Democrats in races this year. One of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Republican opponents, Kevin Faulconer, launched his campaign hammering Newsom on the issue after stepping off a yellow school bus, a symbol of the frustration of parents whose kids remain locked out of classrooms because of the
pandemic.
While teachers’ unions have embraced what they say was much-needed leadership from the president after the Trump administration left educators worried about their heath and without adequate protection, they also acknowledge that Biden’s goal has put pressure on the unions to deliver.
“Has it made it harder, you know, on everyone to have an ambitious, bold goal for the American people? Of course,” Weingarten said, adding that she gives Biden “credit for wanting to help families get to a sense of hope.”
Part of what’s contributing to the confusion, according to National Education Association President Becky Pringle, is that there’s no one-size-fits-all program that schools can implement to meet Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines on how to safely reopen. She said she felt that’s what was guiding the Biden administration’s now-discarded one-day-a-week standard
for reopening.
“It was an acknowledgment that every school has different challenges in meeting those guidelines,” Pringle said, noting that implementing social distancing guidelines, for example, would be a different challenge in crowded urban schools than it would be in more sparsely attended rural schools.”
Another challenge for Biden in getting teachers and students fully back to in-person learning is the question of vaccinations for teachers, where the administration’s message has been muddled.
While Biden said Tuesday that teachers should move up in priority for getting vaccinated, White House press secretary Jen Psaki clarified his stance on Wednesday, saying that while teachers should be a priority, vaccinating teachers was just a recommendation and not required for schools to reopen. And Dr. Anthony Fauci, the administration’s top infectious disease expert, said it would be “non-workable”
for every teacher to get vaccinated before schools reopen.
Domenech said the comments from the administration are certain to be met with frustration from teachers.
“To say that vaccination should not be a prerequisite, I think that sets up an unnecessary issue,” he said.
And with his 100-day goal for schools, Biden is taking responsibility for something that he cannot ultimately control.
Even if school districts receive the money they need to quickly implement changes, the decision on whether to reopen is left up to teachers’ unions and local officials, and is made on an individual basis across the nation’s more than 13,500 school districts.
Psaki acknowledged that during a briefing Wednesday, declaring that while the federal government can help with money and guidelines on how to safely reopen, “this is going to be up to local schools and school districts.”
WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden’s effort to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour could provide a welcome opportunity for someone like Cristian Cardona, a 21-year-old fast food worker. Cardona would love to earn enough to afford to move out of his parents’ house in Orlando, Florida, and maybe scrape together money for college.
More than 1,000 miles away in Detroit, Nya Marshall worries that a $15 minimum wage would drive up her labor costs and perhaps force her to close her 2-year-old restaurant, already under strain from the viral pandemic.
Between Cardona’s hope and Marshall’s fear lies a roiling public debate, one with enormous consequences for American workers and businesses. Will the Biden administration succeed in enacting a much higher federal minimum wage – and should it? Economists have argued the merits of minimum wage hikes for years.
“The mother of all economic debates” is how economists Michael Feroli and Daniel Silver of JPMorgan Chase describe it.
The administration has cast its campaign to raise the minimum as a way to lift up millions of the working poor, reduce America’s vast financial inequality and help boost the economy.
“No American should work full time and live in poverty,” said Rosemary Boeglin, a White House spokeswoman. “Research has shown that raising the minimum wage reduces poverty and has positive economic benefits for workers, their families, their communities, and local businesses where they spend those additional dollars.”
Yet just this month, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that while raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would increase pay for 17 million people and pull 900,000 out of poverty, it would also end 1.4 million jobs. The reasoning is that employers would cut jobs to make up for their higher labor costs.
The fate of Biden’s minimum wage proposal remains hazy. Facing resistance in Congress, the president has acknowledged that he will likely have to omit the measure from the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 financial relief package he is proposing and re-introduce it later as a separate bill.
For years, there was almost no debate at all about a minimum wage. Classical economists had standard advice on imposing or raising minimum wages: Don’t. Piling higher labor costs on employers, the thinking went, would force them to cut jobs and end up hurting the very low-wage workers the minimum wage was intended to help.
But groundbreaking research in the 1990s suggested that the Econ 101 version was simplistic at best. Now there is growing confidence among economists – though far from a consensus – that lawmakers can mandate sharp increases in the minimum wage without killing large numbers of jobs.
Assessing Biden’s $15 plan, for instance, economists at Morgan Stanley have concluded that “the impact to employment, positive or negative, would be minimal, while the social benefits to lifting real wages of lower-income earners and millions out of poverty are substantial.’’
Raising the minimum wage, they said, would also help narrow the chronic economic gap between white Americans on the one hand and Black and Hispanic Americans on the other.
The federal government introduced a minimum wage to a Depression-scarred country in 1938. Though Congress has raised the minimum over time, it hasn’t done so for more than 11 years – the longest gap between increases. Adjusted for inflation, $7.25 in 2009 dollars would be about $8.80 now. Twenty-nine states and Washington, D.C., have already adopted minimum wages above the federal $7.25.
The United States lags behind other developed countries in the size of its minimum wage. In 2018, the U.S. minimum amounted to 33% of the nation’s median earnings – deadlast among 31 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. By contrast, Canada’s minimum wage came to 51% of median income, France’s 62%
Biden’s plan would shake things up entirely. He proposes gradually raising the wage to $15 an hour by 2025, starting with a jump to $9.50 this year. Thereafter, it would be indexed to grow at the same rate as the U.S. median wage – the point at which half earn more and half earn less.
Advocates say that raising wages at the bottom of the pay scale would help relieve income inequality, including racial disparities in earnings. The liberal Economic Policy Institute estimates that 31% of African Americans and 26% of Latinos would receive a raise if the federal minimum wage were elevated to $15 an hour.
Two economists at the University of California Berkeley, Ellora Derenoncourt and Claire Montialoux, reported last year that the expansion of the minimum wage in the 1960s and 1970s “played a critical role’’ in temporarily narrowing the income gap between white and Black workers. They concluded that “minimum wage policy can play a critical role in reducing racial economic disparities.’’
Expert thinking on the minimum wage began to change with the publication in 1993 of a paper by
economists David Card and Alan Krueger, then both at Princeton University. Before then, economists had worried that their theoretical models did not account for the complexity of the job market.
So when New Jersey raised its minimum wage in 1992 – and neighboring Pennsylvania did not – Card and Krueger saw a real-world experiment in the making. Would New Jersey lose low wage jobs, as classical economics had taught?
The two economists surveyed 410 fast-food restaurants in both states. Their surprising discovery: The restaurants in New Jersey, despite the burden of a higher minimum wage, actually added more jobs than those in Pennsylvania did.
“What they found was very shocking: Wages rose
quite a bit, but there was no evidence of reduced employment,” said Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a leading minimum wage researcher. “This sent shockwaves through the discipline.’’
Dube, who himself worked a minimum wage job at McDonald’s as a teenager in Seattle, cites two reasons why he thinks higher minimum wages don’t generally kill jobs. First, many companies can raise prices to pass along their higher labor costs.
“A burger may cost 50 cents more,” Dube said. “What that means is that middle- and higher-income consumers are, in fact, subsidizing low-wage workers. That’s a feature, not a bug.’’
Second, he said, the higher a wage, the less likely it is that employees will quit. So a higher federal minimum
could reduce high turnover at, say, fast-food outlets and make them more productive. Employers wouldn’t have to constantly scramble to find and train new employees – a task that consumes time, money and resources.
Speaking with analysts last month, in fact, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said the fast-food giant would “do just fine’’ as long as the wage increase applied to everybody.
Yet by more than doubling the federal minimum wage over a few years, Biden’s plan would enter uncharted territory. Feroli and Silver of JPMorgan note that most minimum wage increases amount to 5% to 15%. A doubling of the minimum, as Biden proposes, could potentially exert a more harmful effect on jobs than research has suggested.