To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
November 7, 2020
Re: What's happening in the schools as COVID-19 surges
Some questions that we’re looking to answer are: How are relations between teachers and parents? Are teachers being allowed to choose how they teach, online or in-person? Is the opening of schools causing or contributing to virus outbreaks? How are the schools responding to virus outbreaks in their community?
First, an overall look at the record number of new cases of coronavirus. The highest ever two days were last weekend, Oct. 31/Nov. 1, and before that Oct. 24/25, and the last week has been the worst week ever, surpassing what happened in the July surge. Medical experts quoted say the next few months will be very bad. (1)
Here’s another grim report: The virus is spiking all over the U.S., both urban and rural areas, in all regions. (2)
There are also increased child COVID-19 cases. (3)
Moreover, after you've had a case of COVID-19, it seems that immunity wanes with time. A new British study indicates that antibodies to coronavirus wane after a few months. That means people who had the virus are susceptible to catching covid again in future months. This is a point Trump has been lying about at recent rallies, claiming that once you get it, you’re 100% immune. (4)
So COVID-19 is raging all over the U.S., urban and rural, and is
affecting children as well as adults, and there’s no guarantee of
immunity even if you’ve had it before. So it would seem that school
districts would be very careful about reopening schools in-person.
As before, I paid special attention to Des Moines and Little Rock, because teachers there seemed to be getting into a head-to-head battle with the state governor. In both cases the governor is a Trumpist Republican and demanded immediate in-person education, which the city’s teachers opposed.
First, consider the situation in Des Moines. The following article says that Iowa has had over 30,000 cases of COVID-19 in the past month; that’s over 1,000 per day. The White House Coronavirus Task Force has classified Iowa as a “red zone”, one of the worst hotspots, and told Iowans to avoid any small groups indoors, even at home. Iowa has a 14-day positivity rate of 11.8%. Hospitalizations for covid have been hitting record numbers all this week. (5)
Next, consider Little Rock: daily new cases in Arkansas increased by over 1,000 for the first time this week; also hospitalizations were up to a record number. (6) This is as much as I can figure out. The article tries to confuse things by giving a massive number of confusing numbers contradicting one another. The facts cited are contrasted with the pseudo-facts promoted by the Trumpist governor and Lt. Governor. Overall, Arkansas is rated as orange, less than Iowa’s red, but worse than New York’s yellow. (In Michigan, by the way, the eastern half is yellow and the western half is orange.)
So the virus is surging in Iowa and Arkansas just like in the rest of the country, though worse in Iowa. What’s the response to this situation in the schools? In Des Moines, it appears the board of education has come to some kind of compromise with the governor. The governor refrains from more public pressure to reopen, and the schools begin a phased reopening plan. Des Moines schools are going from completely online to a hybrid plan beginning with younger students. By mid-November all middle school and high school students will be involved. But this occurs at a time when various schools around Iowa are shutting down temporarily, forced to quarantine the entire school because of positive coronavirus tests among students or teachers. So Des Moines is opening up slowly and will respond to positive tests with quarantines. This seems reasonable, though it would be better to wait until the area’s positivity rate drops below 5%. We’ll see how that works out.
Meanwhile, parents in one suburban district demonstrated at a board meeting, saying their hybrid plan does not work, and asked for completely reopening in-person. (7) As in other places, parents find the hybrid plan complicated and unsatisfactory.
I can’t find much news about teachers in the Little Rock newspaper, but an opinion article in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette is interesting. (8) There’s much coverage in the Little Rock newspaper about school board elections, and apparently this is a big deal, as the governor, Asa Hutchinson, previously took over local school boards, but now has ceded some authority to them, and various progressives are running for school board. The article mentions they are running against the Walton Foundation, which promotes school choice (charter schools and the destruction of traditional public schools) and opposes teachers’ unions. The Little Rock newspaper has no coverage of teachers who refused to teach in-person, so it looks like these issues are going to be solved, or at least addressed, by voters at the polls Nov. 3rd, as they elect new school board members.
Now, what about the large school districts in the largest cities? In the first place,New York is still low compared to other cities with respect to the virus. But it has been increasing. Certain parts of the city are designated hotspots. Schools are allowed to continue in-person schooling there, but Mayor De Blasio has ordered they get extra testing in those areas. Even so, parents do not trust the mayor’s promises, and the reopening of schools has not gone as planned. Parents could choose whether to send their children to school. Last July, 25% of parents said in a poll that they wanted online education only for their children; 75% wanted in-person schooling. By August the number favoring online education had increased to 40%, as parents reacted to the late July surge in COVID. But still De Blasio thought over half of parents wanted in-person education. But by September the percentage of parents favoring online education had increased to 50%. De Blasio delayed reopening to meet teachers’ demands for health and safety; this reassured some parents, but also upset some parents’ plans for child care and work, and dismayed some parents at the delays and uncertainty. So when the schools finally opened, only 26% of eligible children showed up. The percentage of parents favoring online education has jumped from 50% in September to 74%! De Blasio and others are stunned by the negative reaction to their efforts to get schools reopened safely; parents are keeping their children at home regardless of the mayor’s pronouncements that things would go well. De Blasio says testing in schools has given a COVID positivity rate of only 0.15%, but that’s not convincing to parents.
Some parents choose online education simply because it’s consistent; it’s every day, something they can plan on, as opposed to hybrid education -- going to school some days and staying home others. And on the stay-at-home days, the children often do not get personalized instruction online; it’s just working with standardized recorded learning programs. Also, some high schools face staffing shortages, as teachers have refused to do in-person instruction and the city has had trouble hiring a lot of new teachers. As a result, those high schools have actually asked their children to stay home if possible, and only a few students come to school.
City officials remain optimistic about getting more children to attend in-person, especially those living in homeless shelters, but parents have only a couple weeks to decide for the rest of the year. Previously the policy was that parents could decide, and could change their mind, every quarter; but now school administrators have decided that’s too complicated, involving too much changing of plans, so now parents have until Nov. 15th to decide for the rest of the school year. (9)
Speaking of the complexity of hybrid plans, an article in Education Weekdescribes teachers in one district where the teachers do BOTH in-person and online teaching at the same time. Parents can choose whether to send their children to school or not, but the teachers are required to service both kinds of children at the same time. The teacher involved says she sets up two laptops and switches between them, communicating with both students in the classroom and students at home.
Los Angeles: schools won’t reopen until January at the earliest. The positivity rate came down around Labor Day, the same time school began completely online, and positivity has remained low, but the state and city want it to stay that way, so they’re being very careful about reopening.
Chicago will begin some in-person schooling for pre-K and needy students “sometime in the second quarter”, according to an announcement. Maybe in November or December? Right now the virus is surging in Chicago. The school year began completely online, and it appears administrators are being careful and slow about reopening.
San Francisco has decided to not reopen at all this school year, and Boston has frozen its reopening plans as COVID cases spiked there.
Florida’s Broward County (Miami): the state commissioner of education demanded that county schools reopen, the last in the state to do so. Under these orders, on October 9th county schools began a hybrid plan, with different grades attending on different days. But parents can also choose to stay home all the time. The result so far is that 25% of students are attending in-person classes (about the same as in New York). This has allowed plenty of social distancing in the schools, but it puts pressure on teachers who have to juggle in-person with online teaching. While only 25% of students are showing up for class, 80% of teachers are told they must concentrate on in-person classes. This leaves 20% of teachers dealing with the 75% of students who are online. Obviously those students are getting insufficient attention. The teachers union president went to a school board meeting to complain about this on October 29th, but she was thrown out of the meeting. Meanwhile, Florida Republican governor Ron DeSantis still refuses to release COVID data about schools and school districts. Some districts release it on their own. (10)
In Michigan, I’ve heard of school districts cutting back from hybrid learning to all-online again in Canton and in Portage. The Kalamazoo/Portage area is the worst in the state for coronavirus; other bad areas are mostly in the UP, around Marquette, Escanaba, and Houghton. Detroit is very low compared to them.
Wisconsin: big surge of the virus. Some high schools in Milwaukee shut down in-person learning (they were on a hybrid plan), while in the nearby city of Waukesha, parents dissatisfied with the hybrid plan demonstrate for total in-person.
South Dakota: Gov. Kristi Noem (Rep.) is gaining nationwide recognition among conservatives for her dismissal of the virus, saying South Dakota is doing a “great job” even though it’s one of the worst states for the virus.
Overall, it seems everyone in the country is aware of the coronavirus threat, especially teachers, and they are insisting on steps taken to control and reduce outbreaks. This has put a stop to Trump’s demands to simply reopen. But Republican governors in particular continue pushing to reopen as much as possible and try to confuse and obscure accurate statistics on outbreaks. Teachers are pressured to do even more things than usual, balancing online teaching with in-person teaching, learning new technology and trying to address individual differences, new types of grading and taking attendance, etc. Right now there seems to be a pause in outright struggle between teachers and political leaders as both concentrate on the national election. We’ll see what happens after November 3rd.
Speaking of schools and teachers, we should take note of the White House Conference on American History held on September 17th, Constitution Day. This was preceded by Trump’s speeches at Mount Rushmore on July 4th and other occasions, but this conference summed up his ideology and put forth a concrete plan. As a result of this conference, Trump set up a Patriotic Commission on Education whose purpose was to devise a new curriculum for schools to teach children about how great America is. The commission is composed of three men, two of whom are nothing but right-wing zealots. The third seems to be a respected academic, possibly African American, but clearly he’ll be outvoted if he stands against the Trumpist plan in any respect. The commission will draft curricula for history and other teachers and will make recommendations for textbooks and other teaching aids. Critics have noted that it will not be able to enforce its pronouncements, since education is in the hands of the states, not the federal government; but by twisting states’ arms financially and in other ways, I think Trump could enforce dictates from the commission to some extent.
Trump’s speech at the conference outlined the commission’s aims: to replace an objective view of history with one aimed at lauding America’s greatness. Trump said the U.S. constitution was “the fulfillment of a thousand years of Western civilization. ... No political document has done more to advance the human condition of people or propel the engine of progress.” Then he proceeded to denounce “left-wing mobs” who have torn down statues, “assaulted law enforcement”, or who dared to chant “America was never great.” Trump denounced left-wing leaders as tyrants and said “the left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.” He particularly attacked “cancel culture”, the culture of “cancelling” (criticizing) people who were previously held in esteem like Christopher Columbus or George Washington. Trump combined this with some fake anti-capitalist rhetoric, saying it’s the large corporations that are trying to silence dissent and promoting anti-patriotic cancel culture. Trump took particular aim at Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the USAand the New York Times's 1619 Project, which have been used as texts by some schools.
Trump is busy right up to election day trying to impose his version
of history on American schools. Couple this with his proposed National
Garden of American Heroes and his executive orders banning diversity
training, which mainly affect colleges and universities, and it’s clear
Trump is not letting up on his attacks on attempts at anti-racist
education. He and Devos and their followers in various state
governments also continue to push for charter schools and defunding
public education.
(1) Holly Yan, Madeline Holcombe and Therea Waldrop,"The US is close to have 'exponential spread' in some areas, and the hardest part may still be ahead, former FDA official says", CNN, October 26, 2020.
(2) Simon Romera, Mitch Smith, and Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, "U.S. coronavirus cases surpass 9 million with no end in sight", New York Times, October 29, updated November 4, 2020.
(3) Jen Christensen, "Group sees 14% increase in child Covid-19 cases with close to 800,000 US kids infected", CNN, October 26, 2020.
(4) Jan Christensen, "British study shows evidence of waning immunity to Covid-19", October 26, 2020 .
(5) Staff, "Iowa surpasses 80,000 COVID-19 cases in October as state reports another 11 deaths, 2,469 positive tests", Des Moines Register, October 29, 2020 .
(6) Andy Davis, "State's virus cases rise by 1,072", Arkansas Democrat Gazette, October 29, 2020 .
(7) Sarah Kay LeBlanc and Melody Mercado, "'My heart is warm': Des
Moines elementary schools welcome students back for in-person learning, Des Moines Register.
(8) "Opinion:
John Brummett: Focus on Little Rock Schools", Arkansas Democrat Gazette .
(9) Amelio Nierenberg and Adam Pasick, "New
York's School Reopening is Not Proceeding as Planning: Just 26
percent of students have attended any in-person class.", New York Times, October 28, updated
October 29, 2020.
(10) Lois K. Solomon, "Security
escorts Broward teachers union head out of school board meeting after
dustup with chair", South
Florida Sun Sentinel, October 29, 2020 . <>
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