Wednesday, August 5, 2020
US teachers defy threats to cut funding for schools that delay in-person learning
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/05/uste-a05.html
By Phyllis Steele
5 August 2020
Facing popular outrage over the reckless rush to reopen schools, several large districts, including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Houston and Miami-Dade, Florida, have been forced to start the school year with online learning only. As of July 29, Education Week reported, 20 of the 29 school districts with more than 100,000 students will reopen with remote learning only.
Four of the largest districts, however, including New York City (1.1 million students), Chicago (360,000 students), Hawaii (181,000 students) and Duval County, Florida (130,000 students), will require teachers and students to attend school for at least part of the week under a so-called “hybrid/partial” model, which also includes some remote learning.
Five large districts, Education Week reported, will hold a full in-person reopening available for all students. These include three in Florida—Hillsborough County (220,000), Polk County (101,000), Pinellas County (101,000)—and two in Texas—Dallas (155,000) and Cypress-Fairbanks (116,500).
Millions of students are being sent back to school in medium and smaller districts across the US, even though the numbers of COVID-19 cases are higher in many states across the country than they were when schools were forced to close in mid-March. While politicians from both parties profess concern about the academic and psychological impact of keeping schools closed, their chief concern is getting children out of their homes so their parents can be forced back into factories, warehouses and other workplaces to resume making profits.
Over the next week, several districts in Tennessee, Arizona, California, Florida, Nebraska, Mississippi and Utah will open with full in-person learning. At least nine cases have already been confirmed in Indiana’s schools, which opened last week, and in Gwinnett County Public Schools, the largest district in Georgia, 260 school workers have been quarantined after testing positive or being exposed to someone who had.
Protests against the unsafe openings continue to spread across the country. On Tuesday, teachers in Granite School District in Salt Lake City, Utah protested. Around 67,000 students are scheduled to return on August 24 for full in-school learning. About 100 teachers and parents in Columbia, Missouri also protested outside of the school board meeting Tuesday night in an event promoted on Facebook called “Not until it’s safe.”
Summing up the opposition by teachers, Mike, a high school teacher in central Michigan told WSWS, “The reason why they are giving each district their individual choice when and how to reopen is that if they mandated that all schools across country go back, it would ignite a huge general strike. They are trying to preempt a strike by placing onus on districts. This whole thing is from [Education Secretary] Betsy Devos’ playbook. She is the personification of all that’s wrong with education. DeVos and her husband are looking at this as a crisis to be exploited, to advance their campaign for school privatization,” he said.
As opposition continues to grow, the Trump administration, Congressional Republicans and various Republican-controlled state legislatures are threatening to reduce or cut funding to schools that do not reopen for in-person instruction.
The Senate version of the new stimulus package, dubbed the HEALS Act (Health, Economic Assistance, Liability Protection and Schools Act), commits two-thirds of the proposed $70 billion in federal school funding only to those schools that reopen for in-person instruction for at least half of their students for half of the week. Schools, along with universities, hospitals and other corporations, would also be granted a five-year waiver that prevents them from being sued for any illness or death related to COVID-19.
In Florida, Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran issued an order that says by August 24 all 67 districts Òmust open brick and mortar schools at least five days a week for all students. Schools that do not receive state approval for their reopening plans will not be fully funded, the order threatens.
In Texas, another hotspot for the virus, local health departments can close schools if there is an outbreak. However, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ruled that closing schools as a preventive measure—as they were in March—would be against the law.
Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath warned that district superintendents must offer a semester of in-person learning for high school students after no more than eight weeks of online learning, otherwise districts would forfeit their state funding. At the same time, the superintendents were mandated to implement in-person learning for elementary and middle school students, not hybrid options, or face funding cuts.
Several other states, including Arizona, Indiana, South Carolina and Michigan, are threatening to use the financial stick to force cash-strapped schools to reopen. In Michigan, the Republican-controlled state legislature is trying to blackmail teachers to return to the classrooms otherwise their jobs will be given to private interests, including “pods,” where parents who can afford them hire teachers to provide private education to small groups of children, along with online charters, private and parochial schools.
Michigan House Bills 5910 and 5913—called the “Return to Learn” bills—would outsource the jobs of teachers and other instructional staff to non-certified instructors and for-profit companies to replace experienced educators. They would also create a voucher-style system that funnels public school money to parents who send their children to several e-learning providers during the day. The bills would also require benchmark testing three times over the next school year, which will be used to further punish public school districts grappling with already inadequate funding and the public health crisis.
In Detroit, the state’s largest school district, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti threatened in a town hall meeting last month that if the district does not offer face-to-face instruction in the fall, it risks losing students to charter schools or suburban districts that do. Vitti also boasted that the school district had received a sharp increase in applications for new teaching positions, an explicit threat to older, higher-paid teachers, many of whom fear returning to the classroom out of health concerns.
The Democrats have postured as opponents of Republican efforts to use the pandemic and the resulting economic crisis to accelerate school privatization. But the Congressional Democrats’ federal legislation, dubbed the Heroes Act, would also leave school districts underfunded, forcing them to slash jobs and programs. Under the eight years of the Obama-Biden administration, the economic fallout of the 2008-09 financial crisis was used by the White House to vastly expand charter schools and slash teachers’ jobs and pay.
The back-to-school campaign is being enthusiastically supported by Democratic governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo, California’s Gavin Newsom and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer. As opposed to the Republicans, however, the Democrats have more closely coordinated the campaign to reopen the schools with the teacher unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
The NEA and AFT have spent the last two years desperately trying to prevent the wave of teacher strikes demanding improved school funding, wages and working conditions, from coalescing into a nation-wide strike against both corporate-controlled parties. Once again, the unions are seeking to divide educators by state and district and prevent a general strike against the homicidal plan to open the schools.
That is why teachers, school employees, parents and students must take the initiative in their own hands, through the formation of rank-and-file committees, independent of the unions, in every school and neighborhood. These committees should prepare for a nationwide strike of educators and fight for the broadest support from every section of the working class.
“I support a nationwide strike if there is a massive endangering of students’ and teachers’ lives,” said Mike, the Michigan teacher, who said there was no safe way to reopen schools during the pandemic. “Say we go from 30 to 15 students and social distance? What about air circulation? No one’s talking about air flow and filtration in schools. But science says this is best for keeping spread of COVID down. Filtration systems are going to cost billions of dollars.
“I am in the middle of a high school that sits on cinder blocks. The structure of most school buildings is not conducive to having good air flow. I know my high school students and they are social creatures by nature. Social distancing will not be happening all of the time. Also, who is enforcing it? Not me, how will I teach? Then what is going to happen when they say, ‘Hey! We’ve run out of money!’ It’s about money, as long as it’s coming, things will be fine. When money runs out that is when people will stop playing nice.”
The author also recommends:
Drive to reopen US schools continues despite mounting evidence of deadly consequences
[3 August 2020]
Hundreds of thousands mobilize on social media to oppose US school reopenings
[31 July 2020]
New York educators oppose city and state school reopening plans
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/05/teac-a05.html
By Sandy English
5 August 2020
On Monday, hundreds of New York City teachers, parents and students marched to the city’s Department of Education (DOE) headquarters in lower Manhattan to protest Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to open public schools in September under conditions of the coronavirus pandemic.
The New York City public school system is the largest in the United States, with approximately 1.1 million students.
In conjunction with a National Day of Resistance that featured rallies and car caravans of educators in cities such as Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago and Philadelphia to protest the unsafe resumption of classes, rank-and-file teachers marched from the headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) near Wall Street carrying body bags and coffins and a mock guillotine with a blade that read “DOE.”
Educators on Twitter participated under the hashtag #WeWon’tDieForDOE. One Bronx teacher told the mayor, “Buildings aren’t safe. Your plans are dangerous & unrealistic. You’ve defunded schools.” Another tweeted, “I give my all and do whatever I can for students and families, but I will not die for the DoE.”
De Blasio has announced a “hybrid” school program to start on September 10. Students will go to classrooms one day and on the next learn remotely at home. Other plans mandate students to attend physical classes and virtual learning on alternate weeks. Schools will close if the number of New Yorkers testing positive for the coronavirus rises beyond 3 percent of the total number tested. Currently, about 1 percent of all those tested in New York City are infected with the virus.
According to the DOE’s plan, if two or more students or staff members in the same classroom get sick and test positive for COVID-19, the classroom will be shut down and students will switch to remote learning. DOE and city health officials will investigate and the classroom will remain closed for 14 days after the investigation.
If two students or staffers in different classrooms get sick with the coronavirus, the school building will close for 24 hours. In this case, according to the DOE, “depending on the outcome” of testing and contact tracing, the building may be closed for 14 days. Each school, according to the plan, will also provide an isolation room for students who feel sick.
Teachers, principals and parents have drawn up scores of lists of unanswered questions about the plan and posted them on blogs and social media. One of the most widespread concerns is the absence of certified nurses. The New York City public school system is lacking, by its own count, over 400 nurses. The de Blasio administration, after cutting $773 million from this year’s school budget, has no plans to hire any.
In the absence of nurses, educators have asked who will escort sick students to the isolation room and supervise them. Others have asked what the protocols are for testing sick students and if a student’s friends and siblings at other schools will be tested. Another question is whether siblings’ schools will even be notified of a positive test.
Educators have asked how often and how thoroughly classrooms will be cleaned. Many have raised concerns about the heating-ventilation-air conditioning (HVAC) systems in schools, questioning whether they will be able to filter the airborne coronavirus. Others have pointed out that in some buildings, air conditioning systems are inoperative and classroom windows cannot even be opened.
The DOE, many teachers have pointed out, has made no provisions for supplying personal protective equipment such as gloves, masks and face-shields. This is in a school system where, like many across the United States, draconian budget cuts by both Democratic and Republican politicians have forced teachers to purchase basic school supplies. Principals are unsure if their schools will be regularly supplied with hand sanitizer.
No attention has been given by the DOE to building entrance and exit procedures that will ensure social distancing, or safety issues related to emergency procedures such as sheltering in place or fire evacuation.
The premature reopening of the city’s schools will result in a renewed public heath catastrophe, similar to the one that peaked in April and May. It will follow essentially the same game plan as the one that allowed the rapid dissemination of the coronavirus throughout the city and beyond in January and February.
At that time, the Democratic mayor and governor ignored the best scientific advice for weeks, until it was too late. The teacher unions kept quiet—or actively opposed the shutting of schools and other public institutions—although they, too, understood the threat. COVID-19 has now caused 20,000 confirmed deaths and another 5,000 probable deaths in New York City.
Governor Andrew Cuomo has not yet set a date for students to return to buildings, but while criticizing Donald Trump for his insistence on opening the schools, he has presented a program that is essentially no different from de Blasio’s.
Opposition among educators is widespread throughout the state. No doubt sensitive to the anger of teachers and parents, Cuomo told a press briefing on Sunday, “If the union and the teachers aren’t comfortable, they aren’t going to show up. No one wants to force people to go to work. This is about common sense and public health.”
Teachers have been quick to point out the absurdities of the reopening plan of the New York State Education Department (NYSED). One teacher on social media noted that the NYSED “recommends districts NOT require a negative COVID test prior to admission for in-person learning… Every year students are REQUIRED to have the appropriate vaccinations in order to attend, but no prior negative COVID test during a pandemic with a highly contagious virus that transmits asymptomatically—especially in children... This is the crowning height of irresponsibility and neglect of public health in educational settings...”
Another upstate teacher said, “We are being thrown into a Petri dish, with no care for what might happen. Are we only heroes to you when there is a shooting?”
The teachers’ unions in the city and state, which are little more than a wing of the Democratic Party and have supported Cuomo to the hilt, have come under increasing fire from teachers. The union in the state, the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), has been widely criticized by teachers for its failure to oppose school reopening. One hashtag on Twitter is #WhereisAndy, referring to NYSUT President Andrew Pallotta.
Michael Mulgrew, president of the UFT, this week paid lip service to the sentiments of many teachers when he called for randomized testing of students for the coronavirus—though not mandatory testing of each student. “What’s more,” Mulgrew added, “even if there are stronger safety standards in place, we still have grave concerns about the city’s ability to enforce them effectively in every school. Right now, this is not enough to protect students and staff.”
Mulgrew, however, told a teachers’ town hall phone-in that while he was weighing the possibility of a lawsuit against the city, there would be no strike to prevent schools from reopening.
This is the same man, representing the interests of the union officialdom, who privately warned de Blasio in March that schools should close. He said nothing to the membership of the UFT, and it was only the threat of a sick-out by rank-and-file teachers that forced the schools to shut down on March 16.
One teacher from Queens posed the question on Facebook that many are asking: “Can union members continue to put their full trust in our union and in its leaders? I have zero trust in the DOE and the UFT when it comes to our safety and well-being.”
Into the developing breach between the UFT—which did nothing to oppose this year’s massive budget cuts to education—and the city’s approximately 70,000 educators has stepped a “reform” faction of the union, the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators (MORE), which sponsored the protest on Monday and is emerging as a supposed alternative to the Mulgrew leadership.
As with every faction in the UFT, MORE is devoted to propping up the authority of the Democratic Party. While it has called for a possible sick-out in the event of a school reopening, it echoes the president of the American Federation of Teachers (the parent union of the UFT) Randi Weingarten in its refusal to call for a national strike. MORE is associated with a faction of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Its march on Monday raised no criticism of the Democratic Party and was oriented to pressuring Cuomo and de Blasio.
Educators in New York cannot let themselves be isolated and herded into fruitless protests to pressure the Democrats over life-and-death issues. Thousands have died in the city and state, including at least 70 educators, from COVID-19, while both capitalist parties have allowed the disease to run rampant. At the behest of Wall Street, Cuomo, de Blasio and Trump are seeking to opens schools so the working class can go back to producing wealth for the super-rich.
The disease can be stopped only by the working class itself, and teachers play a central role. As a first step, teachers need to create new democratic organizations that are independent of the two capitalist parties and the pro-capitalist trade unions: rank-and-file safety committees. A network of these committees across the US must prepare the way for a national teachers’ strike to stop the unsafe reopening of the schools.
Any educator, parent or student who would like to become involved in building rank-and-file safety committees should contact the World Socialist Web Site Educators Newsletter.
The author also recommends:
New York City releases dangerous school reopening plans
[14 July 2020]
Teacher arrested during protests speaks on social conditions in New York City
[13 June 2020]
Lancet warns of massive resurgence of coronavirus after UK school reopening
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/05/ukco-a05.html
By Thomas Scripps
5 August 2020
A modelling study published in the Lancet, “Child And Adolescent Health,” warns that the UK’s testing and tracing for coronavirus is inadequate to prevent a “rebound” of the epidemic once schools are reopened next month.
One author, Chris Bonell, professor of public health sociology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, warns, “Reopening schools fully in September, alongside reopening workplaces in society, without an effective test, trace, isolating (TTI) strategy could result in a second wave of infections between two and 2.3 times the size of the original wave [emphasis added].”
The study modelled an “optimistic” scenario, assuming 68 percent of contacts of people testing positive could be traced, in which “an epidemic rebound might be prevented.” However, the current level of coverage is closer to the study’s “worst case” scenario, which assumed only 40 percent were traced. Bonell explains, “Looking at the NHS reports from the TTI system, it looks like it’s about 50 percent coverage.”
Without an improvement, the government is “likely to induce a second wave that would peak in December 2020 if schools open full-time in September.”
This warning comes as a resurgence of the virus is already underway. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), 4,200 people are being infected with coronavirus every day, up from 3,200 the week before and 2,500 the week before that.
But the government’s response to the Lancet study has made clear its determination to reopen the economy in the interests of big business, whatever the cost to the population. Simon Clarke, minister for local government, told Sky News: “One thing is clear, schools are going to reopen in full in the autumn, that is not up for debate.” He described the NHS Test and Trace System as a “massive success.”
On Saturday, the government’s modelling expert Professor Graham Medley suggested pubs and restaurants may have to be closed as a “trade-off” to allow schools to reopen. He said, “closing some of the other networks, some of the other activities may well be required to enable us to open schools. It might come down to a question of which do you trade off against each other and then that’s a matter of prioritising, do we think pubs are more important than schools?”
Even this entirely misguided “trade off” was rejected. The Guardian reported, “English pubs are likely to be spare any new restrictions” after Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s spokesman played down Medley’s suggestion, adding “we are committed to supporting the hospitality industry, which has had a very tough time.”
Last week, Johnson met with Chancellor Rishi Sunak to discuss ways of avoiding a second UK lockdown in the event of a resurgence of the virus later this year. Their overwhelming concern is to maintain the flow of corporate profits. This precludes any serious public health measures, leaving only piecemeal interventions which cause serious distress to working-class households while doing nothing to substantially address the threat of the virus.
These sociopathic priorities led to the absurd situation last week when several million people in the north-west of England and Leicester were placed under additional public health restrictions at less than an hour’s notice, and mandatory mask wearing was extended, just one day before more than two million medically vulnerable people were told to stop shielding and return to work if ordered to.
As millions of people were prevented from visiting the gardens of their relatives, they were encouraged, along with the rest of the nation, to “Eat Out to Help Out” in pubs and restaurants. The slogan refers to a government scheme subsidising 50 percent of the cost of food and participating cafes and restaurants, up to £10 per head, for three days a week. Several pubs across the country have already been responsible for clusters of COVID-19 cases.
Britons also continue to be encouraged to travel for their holidays—yesterday EasyJet reported it was increasing its number of flights above expectations to cope with increased demand—even as countries like Spain and Luxemburg are suddenly removed from quarantine exemptions, Greek flights are cancelled, and French and German authorities warn of a second wave.
The new laws on wearing masks, which will not be properly enforced, follow months in which the government cast doubt on their effectiveness. According to a survey of 70,000 people by University College London, just 45 percent of adults in England feel they understand current government guidelines, compared to 90 percent in March, during the period of stricter lockdown. The danger is that this confusion, combined with the government and media’s relentless boosterism and lying complacency, will dull popular consciousness of the danger posed by the pandemic—facilitating the spread of the disease.
Dr Bharat Pankhania, senior consultant in Communicable Disease Control at the University of Exeter, told the Independent last week, “When the prime minister lifted lockdown, I said it was unbelievably premature. There were mixed messages… That public health message of ‘go carefully’ just isn’t there.”
Dr Gabriel Scally, President of the Epidemiology and Public Health section of the Royal Society of Medicine and member of Independent Sage, explained that “if there are too many [local flare-ups of the virus] the capacity at a local level won’t be able to deal with them and they will emerge as a wave.”
A major resurgence of the epidemic will bring tens and possibly hundreds of thousands more deaths. The longer the virus is left uncontrolled, the more damage will be done by the ongoing disruption of people’s lives. The Tory government’s cynical invocation of children’s welfare notwithstanding, it is undoubtedly the case that world capitalism’s shambolic response to the pandemic—necessitating the long-term closure of schools and other services—has caused a “generational catastrophe” for young children, in the words of the World Health Organisation.
The ruling class know that they are sitting on a ticking time bomb of unrest and are reaching for a military-police solution. A “major incident” has now been declared in Manchester, giving local police a freer hand to deploy national resources.
Early in July, the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) heard a report, “Public Disorder and Public Health: Contemporary Threats and Risks.” Using the threat of “disorder… facilitating the spread of the disease” as a cipher for mass social opposition, the report states, “There has been a step-change in threat levels since the last sustained period of serious rioting in the UK in 2011.” It warns, “The police are in a far weaker position in terms of capacity” and that they “would be likely to require military support.”
Among the risks it foresees over the coming months are “The beginning of protests planned during the lockdown, (e.g., anarchist/anticapitalist groups seeking to frustrate a ‘return to normality’,” and “Rising unemployment and/or anxiety about employment as furlough is wound down.”
On July 22, Lieutenant General Douglas Chalmers, Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff (Military Strategy and Operations), told the House of Lords’ Public Services Committee that the military was wargaming scenarios for a four-way winter crisis of a coronavirus resurgence, winter flu spike, Brexit disruption, and national flooding.
This is a development of the “Operation Yellowhammer” strategy formulated last year to suppress discontent, supposedly in the wake of a hard Brexit. Once again it proceeds with the full support of Labour and other “opposition” parties.
The British ruling class are in an unprecedented state of crisis which they hope to escape through an equally unprecedented exploitation and endangering of the working class, enforced by military-police repression. The working class must respond with their own perspective and programme, based on an international struggle for socialism, for the eradication of the virus and the safeguarding of all jobs, wages, and social services.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)