In a string of days spent doing great harm to nobody’s benefit but his own, Trump got busy Wednesday rustling up a fight between teachers and parents: Parents want schools to reopen, he says, and so they must reopen, CDC recommendations be damned. And districts that don’t fully reopen will be cut off from federal funding. (A spokesperson for Betsy DeVos confirms that the administration intends to make good on this threat, though it’s unclear whether the president has the power to withhold the ten percent of school funding that currently comes from the federal government.)
These are hard times, and there’s lots of desperation in the camps the president is trying to set at odds. So we may have to concentrate more than usual to see that their fight isn’t really with each other.
Parents are desperate for schools to reopen so they can get back to work. There are some rumblings about extending the unemployment insurance supplement that’s keeping so many people afloat, though it will almost certainly be less generous, and the lawmakers who are taking their time with this decision seem insensitive to the anxiety and suffering borne of just not knowing how precarious one’s material security is. Even those not in such precarious positions can be feeling desperate to get back to jobs that they love or that they risk losing down the road because of the work they’re not doing right now. Parents are insisting that the economy can’t reopen if schools don’t, and are incredulous that decisionmakers seem not to have noticed. (Note Juliette Kayyem’s observation that schools aren’t on the Department of Homeland Security’s list of 16 vital infrastructure sectors.) And of course, parents are desperate for their children’s health and education, which are imperiled by lengthy school closures.
Teachers are desperate not to be forced back to dangerous workplaces. Schools rely for the bulk of their funding on revenue from now-severely-strapped states and localities. Some experts are saying that schools could reopen safely and point to evidence which seems to support this. But there’s no money in state and local budgets and little time left now to do what seems to be necessary to make schools safe for everyone who works or learns in them. Meanwhile, the U.S. is regularly setting Coronavirus records of the bad kind. The American Academy of Pediatrics says that the risks of keeping kids home outweigh the risks of in-person schooling and emphasizes the growing body of evidence suggesting that transmission by young children is uncommon. But this can come as cold comfort to teachers who are in high risk categories…and lots of teachers are in high-risk categories. Even those who argue that we can reopen safely don’t make the case that we can reopen without risk.
Many teachers are parents, of course, and many in both categories feel the weight of both sets of competing considerations on a personal level. Parents are concerned about their children whether schools stay closed or not, and many parents especially of older children feel deeply conflicted about sending them back to school, even if they have a choice in the matter. But never mind; let’s grant this too-crude opposition: Many parents are calling on schools to reopen and many teachers understandably feel that reopening now puts them too much at risk. How is their fight not with each other?
My network is small, I admit, and unrepresentative. But I have seen no parents calling for schools to reopen in the blunt terms on which Trump is now making that demand. The desperation I see parents expressing is desperation for the conditions to be put in place for schools to reopen with mechanisms to minimize and manage risk and to protect the most vulnerable. Meanwhile, I have seen no teachers in my network who dearly want to be paid to stay home, or to teach from home. They didn’t get in it for the chance to provide screen-mediated education or nurturance. Their desperation is to avoid being pushed back into unsafe schools.
This is nothing profound, but the strategy of division does seem to rely on the assumption that hard times can obscure what is clearly true: that parents and teachers both want schools to reopen safely, and that they both want to feel confident that reopening is safe. This requires good will and ingenuity and elbow grease, and this is work that the parents and teachers in my networks are happy to contribute to. This is not to say that there are any really good solutions here, and we may yet disagree on what constitutes safe enough. None of us can reasonably ask to be spared all risk and hardship, but the most vulnerable among us might reasonably ask not to be the first ones in. The goal must be for schools to be made reasonably safe and for those whose risk is high to have the option to hold back. Still: What does reasonably safe mean? What alternative contributions will those who hold back make, and who will fill in for them in the classroom? How can we make schools safe now after having underfunded them for so long? I don’t deny that we’ll disagree about how to answer these questions. My point is this: To have these conversations with any reasonable hope of them bearing fruit, we need to have some reasonable hope of competent action by the federal government. We need to have had that hope months ago when the conversations could have borne fruit in time.
Sounds familiar, right?
We had a shutdown of the economy during which the Trump administration did virtually none of the things that the shutdown was meant to buy them time to do. We had a shutdown of schools during which the administration has done virtually none of the things that they could have done to prepare schools to reopen safely. A lot of what’s wanting is money, and Trump’s enthusiasm or lack thereof makes the critical difference even when it comes to spending. Now he’s actively working to thwart the efforts of states and districts to find a way forward through a seriously shitty feasibility set.
Sure: There are some unreasonable parents and some unreasonable teachers. And even the reasonable will disagree about what we should do in light of profound institutional failure. But our real fight here is with a president who has the power to make solutions thinkable, but spends his days setting fires.
{ 33 comments }
John Quiggin 07.11.20 at 5:33 am
Thanks for this Gina. This pandemic is creating lots of really difficult choices.
The impact of the pandemic differs radically from place to place depending on financing systems. It makes things massively more difficult when schools and hospitals are facing financial ruin as well as dealing with the virus and its consequences.
Bruce Baugh 07.11.20 at 11:48 am
Gina, your observations match exactly what I’m seeing in my social circles. It’s horrendous, particularly when big chunks of a desirable outcome are so simple and obvious.
Harry 07.11.20 at 1:11 pm
Re JQ’s point: that’s exactly right, In the US, Federal funding is going to be essential in the coming two years, because States and local authorities have limited fundraising powers, and State budgets are going to be devastated. (Like everyone I dislike local funding based on real estate taxes intensely, but my guess is that revenues from the real estate taxes will fall much less in the coming couple of years that State income tax revenues). It’s also worth noting that in k-12 the Federal government is highly progressive in its distribution of funds (whereas local funding is regressive, and state funding is, in most places, only the very slightest bit progressive). So districts with poor children stand to lose much more than districts with affluent children.
oldster 07.11.20 at 4:27 pm
Harry, I suspect most non-Americans would simply refuse to believe you if you described how public schools are funded in the US.
And then if you told them about how housing discrimination works, and how that interacts with school funding, then they would probably say, “oh! Now I get it. I always was puzzled by the phrase “structural racism,” but suddenly it makes perfect sense!”
LFC 07.11.20 at 6:14 pm
@oldster
On that point (or a closely related one), see: Salim Furth, “The Two-Board Knot: Zoning, Schools, and Inequality,” American Affairs, Winter 2017, pp.3-18. Author is not a leftist, but his depiction of the facts and the dynamics seems pretty much on target.
hix 07.11.20 at 6:27 pm
“Parents are desperate for schools to reopen so they can get back to work.”
Keeping parents from working, at least from working outside their own home might well be the best part of closing schools regarding covid containment.
Harry 07.11.20 at 8:49 pm
oldster — yes, its a great illustration of structural racism — and structural inequality more generally. It took me a very long time really to get a handle on the way schools are funded here (and it has improved over time but… still!)
John Quiggin 07.12.20 at 2:39 am
We discussed school funding a while back and Harry (I think) mentioned intense US attachment to localism (including among teachers and people who would self-identify as progressives) as an obstacle to equality. I wonder if the new salience of structural racism will change this.
Chetan Murthy 07.12.20 at 4:45 am
JQ @ 8:
John, I thought it might be worth noting that this “localism” is a form of racism in itself. It refers to local control, local funding, and local control of funding. The way this played out was that larger school districts would break apart into smaller ones, on racial lines, so that white residents in white areas would not have to fund schools used by children of color in non-white areas. The attachment to “localism” is just a code word for “we don’t want our school taxes going to THOSE people.” Sigh.
John Quiggin 07.12.20 at 7:21 am
@9 I get the impression it isn’t just code. That is, lots of people have managed to ignore the structural racism involved in local school funding, and focus on abstract ideas like “think global, act local”. Some can be educated, I think.
The same kind of thing goes on with NIMBYism. Progressive Boomers grew up with the idea that anti-development struggles are a good thing, fighting against the likes of Robert Moses, and have only gradually (or in some cases not at all) come to realise that they can entrench racism.
Of course, there are clear-cut examples where it is just overt racism, as in the reaction to school desegregation in the South with the establishment of a parallel private system.
J.Bogart 07.12.20 at 12:08 pm
The discussion of school funding in the US seems a little simplistic. In states like Oregon and California the local basis for school funding was part of the territorial and first statehood arrangements. I do not think the demographics work for local funding has a racist explanation will work. But maybe it is shorthand for current structural effects…
Harry 07.12.20 at 1:35 pm
I agree with JQ that the localism isn’t just code for racism. It is deeply ingrained in even left wing and progressive thinking about education, which sees furthering ‘democracy’ as the central justification for public education, and connects democracy to localism (which is only about 75% wrong). The problem: local funding means unequal funding, and local decisionmaking is eroded by state/federal funding (as we have seen). And don’t forget class! Sometimes what looks like white people trying to protect their advantages over non-white people is actually posh people trying to protect their advantages over non-posh people,
Jeremy Davis 07.12.20 at 2:39 pm
I work for a school district in Iowa and in my state, the state ensures that all school districts get equal per-student funding. Unfortunately, their role in this pandemic has been rather counterproductive. They’re strongly discouraging school districts from requiring masks.
Iowa, with a population of 3 million, now has more people test positive for COVID-19 each day than, for example, Germany. While it’s true that most countries that have re-opened schools have done fine, those countries had actually reduced the virus to low levels first. Sure, there’s only one obvious failure – Israel – but our levels of infection are currently similar to Israel, not to France, Japan, or other success stories. To steal someone else’s analogy, we shouldn’t try to figure out how to safely have class in a burning building, we should put out the fire first.
TheSophist 07.12.20 at 4:33 pm
There is a school district in Arizona that built a domed football stadium. There are others where schools have leaky roofs, teacher student ratios >35:1, no art, music, or language programs, etc etc. I spent over a decade working with a summer enrichment program for kids from the latter districts and we deliberately had an extra-long lunch period so that anybody who wanted could go back for seconds, thirds, fourths, because for so many that lunch (and the breakfast that the program provided) was it in terms of nutritional food for the day.
Chetan Murthy 07.12.20 at 10:04 pm
JQ @ 10: “I get the impression it isn’t just code.”
John, you’re aware of Lee Atwater’s “deathbed confession”, yes? https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/
There’s more at the link. And the examples of “seceding from school districts” isn’t some thing from the last century: I remember distinctly that it happened only a few years ago. Basically, sometimes when a district starts to turn “brown/block/those people”, the “good citizens” decide to take it upon themselves to separate their “good people enclave” from the larger district. For localism. It’s never for any other reason.
Perhaps you mean that there are people who are unaware of the structural racism. That might be true. But the people who make all this happen are well aware of it, and when they sell it to these more-ignorant folk, they’re pretty clear about why: “we don’t want our tax dollars going to fund THOSE people”. I mean, it’s like Obamacare in (the poorest, mostly-white counties of eastern) Kentucky, where the same people who basically lived off government handouts (disability, medicaid, etc) were irate that Obamacare money was going to THOSE people, undeserving as they are. I remember this distinctly from an NYT Cletus Safari, back in the day, just before the 2016 Apocalypse.
John Quiggin 07.13.20 at 4:58 am
@15 I explicitly mentioned the case of the South as an example of overt racism, and secession attempts there and elsewhere fit the bill.
But where local funding has always been the rule, it’s not obvious who are “the people who make this happen”. I thinik unawareness is a big part of the problem. My impression is that lots of people supported both busing and local funding, without realising that funding was the underlying problem.
Pllucky Underdog 07.13.20 at 10:06 am
… find[ing] a way forward through a seriously shitty feasibility set
Definitely adding this phrase to my repertoire. Looks like we’re firmly established on a timeline where it’s going to see a lot of use …
oldster 07.13.20 at 10:28 am
Surely part of why it is analytically helpful to talk about structural racism is for situations like this, in which the racism outruns the conscious intentions — perhaps even the unconscious intentions — of the vast majority of the agents involved.
Saying, “it’s the system and the structure that are doing the racism,” helps us to move past the pointless effort to prove the racism in their hearts, or in their bones — pointless in some cases because it isn’t there, and in others because the standards of proof are kept safely out of reach.
(If nothing short of Atwater’s confession counts as evidence of what was in Atwater’s heart, then we’ll very seldom know what is in the hearts of racists.)
In some cases the original intent of the funding structure may have been racist, in others not. It seems rather uninteresting now, when we can see the effects.
Was local funding originally designed and intended to produce racist results? J. Bogart points us to the case of Oregon in order to claim “no”, and his case is a strong one.
You see, Oregon could not have intended to create rich white school districts and poor black school districts because black people were forbidden to live in Oregon at all, both when it was a territory and when it became a state. So, no room for racism in Oregon’s school funding structure!
We have to ask not only, “how did it start?” but also, “what keeps it going?”
Fake Dave 07.13.20 at 2:25 pm
Localism is often a sort of reverse NIMBY-ism where middle class social strivers of the sort that utterly dominate local government try to “attract jobs” or “expand the tax base” or the like. In many cases, this puts them in blatant competition for limited resources with other communities that might actually need them more. When these local government cliques try their hand at social engineering, it’s usually an unconscious and ill-considered reproduction of the values they internalized from living there in the first place. In the absence of new blood, communities often become parodies of themselves hamstrung by anachronistic norms and identities. They become, as the current mayor of Eureka, CA said about her predecessors “governed by nostalgia.”
Likewise, I grew up in a San Diego suburb where the kids coming home still have to walk through yards or in the gutter when all our neighbors have sidewalks. You see, we were a rural community only incorporated in the 70’s and back then we still had a “country” feel that the old-timers were inordinately attached to. Even then we were a streetcar suburb with almost no open space. Now it’s just absurd. Unfortunately, a few years after we incorporated, California had its “tax revolt” and, among other things, passed Prop 13 — a massive corporate property tax avoidance scheme disguised as homeowner protection for seniors that also, as a bonus, made it almost impossible for the state to pass a budget on time — and destroyed the tax base for hundreds of small cities across California. We can’t raise property taxes or even reassess them, sales taxes put us in a race to the bottom with every other cash starved city, state funding dried up two or three budget crises ago, and the promulgation of virulent anti-tax rhetoric has made officials scared to even talk about it where the public might hear lest they sic Reagan’s ghost on them. So the kids walk in the mud.
J. Bogart 07.13.20 at 4:04 pm
I think you are missing the point Oldster. Maybe you could read Serreno, or look at the economic effects of local funding. Or maybe explain how the intense anti-Chinese racism of early years of California as a state are a cover for anti-Black racism. Or why the residents of a territory that barred Black people would go to the trouble of setting up a school funding system with the aim of underfunding schools for people that very group. Let me make the point more directly: local funding for schools certainly has racial effects. But that is not why local funding is the norm nor was it a sought after effect when the funding system came into existence.
Sebastian H 07.13.20 at 5:13 pm
Parts of this discussion are outdated. Local funding was a huge problem for schools in the 70s and 80s, which has been increasingly changed in the larger states. (Smaller states still have these issues but thankfully they have much smaller populations). I still see California regularly mentioned in these discussions even though state equalization has been the law since before I was born (Serrano v Priest was 1971). There are all sorts of problems with US education systems, but local funding increasingly isn’t one of them.
Systemic racism in zoning, definitely still here.
Harry 07.13.20 at 5:39 pm
Sebastian
it is much less of a problem than it was until the early 90s. But it is still a mjaor feature of the funding system and it gets worse when State budgets are hit (which they will be next year in a major way). And worse still without Federal funding, which, as DeVos knows, is the single most progressive element of the entire funding system. Even in California, which has one of the most progressive equalisation formulae schools in very affluent districts spend more per-student than in middling districts (Federal funds mainly target low-income communities, so that, eg, spending per student in Milwaukee, which is 100% poor, is close to spending per student in most of the suburbs, which are 0-10% poor).
Aardvark Cheeselog 07.13.20 at 5:43 pm
@Harry, 4
I intensely dislike local school funding being dependent on real estate taxes, for all of the obvious reasons, but note that real estate taxes are the only example I know of (in the US anyway) of a more-or-less direct tax on wealth, which I think we could use more of.
Aardvark Cheeselog 07.13.20 at 5:55 pm
With respect to fragmenting school districts enabling mostly-white, higher-SES communities to spend more on their schools than not-so-white, lower-SES neighboring communities, I note that in Florida the school districts are coterminous with counties. Which you would think would have the effect of evening things out.
Sadly, what actually happens is that all the schools get a basic (read: subminimal) level of funding from the district, and the schools where there are affluent white people with enough stay-at-home Moms to have a decently active volunteer base, there’s fundraising for things like art programs, decent computers, and so on. I’ve had kids in both kinds of schools over the years, and I can tell you that there is nothing more depressing than a PTA meeting at a mostly-African-American, mostly-free-or-reduced-price-lunch school. Households where whatever parents are present have to work two or three jobs to keep things sort-of together don’t have the ability to contribute to volunteerism.
alfredlordbleep 07.13.20 at 7:23 pm
Fake Dave 07.13.20 at 2:25 pm:
California had its “tax revolt†and, among other things, passed Prop 13 — a massive corporate property tax avoidance scheme disguised as homeowner protection for seniors that also, as a bonus, made it almost impossible for the state to pass a budget on time — and destroyed the tax base for hundreds of small cities across California.
Attempts have been made “merely” to rollback Prop 13 solely to benefit homeowners (which was the essence of losing Prop 8 originally put up against Prop 13). Publicizing the history of Prop 13 and its descendants/enlargements/(. . .) would be massively useful for the public, in and out of California.—to see political power, conforming reporting/editing/journalism in action and inaction.
Cian 07.13.20 at 7:55 pm
Federal funding also is provided to school districts that have a military base to make up for the loss of tax revenue. Wonder if that is part of this federal funding, or if it comes from a different source. But school districts with a large military base can receive a huge amount of their funding from it.
Sebastian H 07.13.20 at 8:14 pm
Harry, am I misreading you? Is the spending in CA currently U shaped (with the poor and rich neighborhoods out spending per capita middle class neighborhood spending).
I’m not sure it means very much for this discussion, but it would be interesting.
Trader Joe 07.13.20 at 8:28 pm
The strand has sort of taken a different track, but with respect to the OP.
Much of the conflict between parents and teachers, and where they are legitimately on different sides (to an extent) is the question of mask wearing. Schools are notoriously poorly ventilated (even nice and new ones) and once the weather gets cooler everyone will be indoors most of the time. Closed spaces being danger spots is perhaps the only thing the CDC and WHO have gotten consistently right.
Is it reasonable to expect a 1st grader to wear a mask for the usually 6-7 hours of a school day?
How about a 5th grader?
A teen ager?
For US school age children, the average kid isn’t going to do it. Even grown-ups are at best mixed on mask wearing and few of them are asked to do it for more than a few hours at a time – getting kids to do it all day to keep both the teachers and everyone else safe is an enforcement nightmare for a school because there is little a school can do but threaten to send them home which of course defeats the purpose.
I think the OP does a fine job of suggesting that parents and teachers aren’t in conflict the way some would want you to think – but I also think the average parent has done a poor job of reinforcing the concept of mask wearing such that whatever ‘solution’ is reached in any given locality is pretty well doomed the same way the half-ass reopenings have gone and then you’re just left with the blame game when little Johny or little Johny’s grandma winds up sick or worse.
oldster 07.13.20 at 11:34 pm
J. Bogart–
You granted me one of my points, sc. that “local funding for schools certainly has racial effects.”
And I granted you one of your points, sc. that at least in some instances, the racial effect was not “a sought after effect when the funding system came into existence.” (I really did grant that! Because in its own perverse and ironic way, Oregon really does show that!)
Now there remains a third point: you assert that the racial effect “is not why local funding is the norm” to the present day. And I am inclined to deny that, and say that it is the reason for the present day system, to a great extent. (I’ll grant you that it is not the sole and only reason why local funding persists. Inertia plays a role in human affairs, as does non-racial snobbery of the kind that Harry mentions in 12).
I don’t see that you have said anything to substantiate your assertion, any more than I have substantiated my denial. Mere assertion and counter-assertion.
But perhaps, if you are willing to bend a bit and concede that the racial effects do play some small role in perpetuating systems of local funding, originally instituted for other reasons, then we can move on to haggling about the more and the less.
And once we have moved on to haggling, we’ll probably want to take each state separately, given the differences of history and current climate. Do you really want to say that the continued production of racial effects plays no role in the continued employment of local funding in, e.g., Alabama? I hope you won’t argue that it is pure coincidence. And I will not argue that it plays a role of equal size in every other state.
This could be the start of a beautiful friendship!
PeteW 07.14.20 at 11:23 am
This attempt to exploit a perceived divide between parents and teachers for base political reasons is not confined to the US.
In the UK, prime minister Johnson has for several weeks tried to bait opposition leader Keir Starmer over the issue by using schoolteachers as a proxy for unions.
By trying to highlight Starmer’s (perfectly justifiable) caution about forcing teachers and pupils back into the classroom, his ploy is to paint Starmer as bending to the will of the teachers’ unions. He and his advisers clearly calculate this will give them a ‘win’.
It has nothing to do with concern for children, parents, or teachers, or with whether or not it is safe to return to class, or with forging policy consensus at a time of national crisis.
It has all to so with trying to damage a competent opposition leader who has been dominating Johnson at the weekly PM’s Questions session.
Harry 07.14.20 at 2:00 pm
Sebastian…. well, very roughly. Districts with high property values (and wealthy students) still spend more than other districts (but get less State funding, and much less Fed funding than poorer districts). Districts with lots of poor kids get much more Federal money, and somewhat more state funds (under the new LCF formula) than other districts. So, eg, from memory, Palo Alto spends about $4k more per pupil than LAUSD (and Beverly Hills similarly spends about $4,000 more than LA). Basically, although local taxes contribute only about 25% of funding overall, the inequalities in local revenue raising abilities are so large that they can more than offset the equalizing effects of State and Federal funding (which aren’t exercises in pure equalization, because funding formulae never are). I don’t mean this as criticism of California, just observing that even in the state that has done the most to reduce the effects of local funding, inequalities persist. (And they’ll get worse next year, for sure). You’re right that things have changed a great deal since the early 90’s in most states, but in most States it is worse than California.
And unequal spending doesn’t have to be extreme in order to create large inequalities in quality. The main inputs for education are the quality of the teachers and the quality of the management. But, except in the West, urban and suburban districts compete for the same labor pool (I forget the exact number but a very large proportion of teachers work within 30 miles of where they were born!). So, suburban districts don’t need to spend much more than urban districts to outbid them for the best teachers and principals.
The reason Republicans of a certain sort hate the Department of Education (and, to be fair, the reason Republicans of another sort go to great lengths to support it) is that it is by far the most progressive funding source in American education.
Trader Joe 07.14.20 at 6:22 pm
To build on Harry @31
There are a couple more funding games that are pretty popular and tend to favor a certain amount of inequality.
Testing results – states will mandate some basic ‘core’ standard of learning and administer tests standardized tests to measure that its delivering quality education for all. They will then “reward” a certain amount of funding to achieving certain levels and/or being the best. As history has shown over and over again, rich neighborhoods tend to get better testing outcomes for a litany of reasons we don’t need to rehearse here….the upshot being, the rich districts get additional resources which help cement the advantage.
Parents associations – every school has a parent association that does various things to raise money to fund “stuff” within a school. Sometimes its innocuous stuff like donuts for teachers, sometimes its fancy stuff like new computer labs or band instruments or gym equipment or whatever. Rich districts can fund more things via parent contribution and they do – sometimes its add on experiences, sometimes its add on equipment and sometimes it even becomes additional funded or partly positions (like college application and student aid counselors).
While the amount of monetary throw-weight might not be large in any given year, these differences add-up over time and every dollar a parent directly allocates to some need is a dollar the district can spend on something else that creates further advantage.
The thing I always find notable is that parents of all economic levels are mostly alike inasmuch as they want their kids to do well and have a good school experience. How they regard the baseline of that experience is where the differences start and what funding differences eventually address.
One district might be devoting money to security, keeping drugs out of the locker rooms and providing food to its students….another one across town might be spending the exact same dollars, but since they don’t have a drug issue, don’t need security guards and have no need for a food program can instead put the money into computers, instruction and better facilities. We know how this difference comes out.
Stephen Calhoun 07.14.20 at 8:24 pm
I like to vote. When I was an unmarried renter living in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland I would relish voting for school levies even though I didn’t have skin (children) in the game. At some point I learned that the percentage of registered voters who would vote in off-cycle or mid-term elections in the segregated yet overwhelmingly liberal suburbs I lived in rarely exceeded 25%.
In addition, many of the families of the professional classes had switched their children from public to private schools starting in the seventies.
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