How Trump’s Push to Backfired Schools Backfired

In June, with the coronavirus crisis looming in the United States, teachers and parents around the country finally began to be optimistic about reopening schools in the fall. Back in class it went possible. Districts began to pull plans together. Then came a tweet.

“SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN CASE !!!” President Trump declared on July 6, by voting a mantra, he would repeat himself again and again in the coming weeks, with varying degrees of threat, as he attempted to jump the nation’s flagging economy.

Around the same time, caseloads began to climb again in much of the country. In the weeks since, hundreds of districts – including almost all of the nation’s largest school systems, along with scores of district and suburban districts – have reversed the course and decided to begin the school year with distance instruction.

By some estimates, at least half of the nation’s children will now spend a significant portion of the fall, or longer, learning their laptops.

Rising infection rates were clearly the main driver of the movement to continue learning. But the aggressive, often bellicose demands of Mr. Trump for re-classes have helped harden the views of many educators that it would be unsafe – and feed their powerful unions to demand stronger security measures or resist efforts against physical re-education.

“If you had told me that Trump did this as a favorite for the schools-should-not-open public, I would believe you,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a Conservative think tank.

Indeed, since the president has instructed to reopen schools, major constituencies – parents and educators – have for the most part been put in the other direction.

A July interview by Education Week found that about 60 percent of educators said the pandemic had diminished their view of Mr. Trump, who already had many of that group badly fair. A recent Washington Post poll found that parents rejected Mr. Trump’s opposition to school opening by a two-thirds majority. And a new Gallup poll found that fewer parents want their children to return to school buildings now than they did in the spring.

The teachers’ unions, which tend to support the Democrats and have been under the strongest criticism of Mr. Trump, spent most of the spring after schools shot down the defensive wall, visiting their nervous members. to entertain without alienating parents through graduate learning. But Mr Trump’s intervention may have helped shift the political momentum in their favor.

LeeAnne Power Jimenez, vice president of the Tulsa Classroom Teachers Association and a member of the Republican caucus of the state union, said she was “frustrated” by Mr. Trump’s approach to re-election, which characterized her as more focused on the economy than on teachers’ health and safety.

Teachers “need to hear that our lives are important,” Ms Jimenez said, adding that the president’s pressure to reopen would help inform how she is voting in November.

At an event in the White House on Wednesday, the president called the leaders of teachers’ unions “disgraceful.”

There is widespread agreement on most aspects of the political spectrum that a functioning U.S. economy requires vocational schools, and that the abrupt, unplanned shift to distance education has been catastrophic for many children in desperate need of instruction.

But even conservatives who said they agreed with the president’s focus on reopening schools say he was a bad spokesman for the cause. They pointed to Mr Trump’s downplay of the danger posed by the virus, followed by his threats to withhold federal aid to districts that did not reopen classes, such as potentially alienating students and parents from the centers.

“I thought it was really good and useful to make those arguments with a big megaphone,” Mr Hess said. “But he made them in such a five-thumb, unserious, reckless way.”

Many teachers and their powerful unions said they liked the language of Mr. Trump was seen as bullying, wrong and out of touch with the reality that the virus was being spread through their communities, often in red states.

Over the summer, teachers ‘unions have played a key role in shaping decision-making by raising health and safety alarms, some of which have been linked to Mrs’ insistence. Trump that the guidelines of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on safe reopening of schools were too strict.

Teachers have threatened to carry out diseases or strikes, and have already filed a lawsuit to reopen in Florida, where the virus is raging.

White House spokesman Judd Deere said unions and Democratic leaders were using their schools as a way to attack the president.

“President Trump’s goal to keep schools open was never about politics, it was about the health, growth and learning of the children of our nation, and it is not backfired,” Mr Deere said in a statement. “Not only does the president want to see schools open safely, but so do teachers, students, parents and health professionals.”

Perhaps nowhere was Mr. Trump’s influence on the debate clearer than in Chicago.

When the local teachers’ association surveyed its members about opening in June, a little more than half said they were extremely uncomfortable returning to class. That number has risen to nearly 80 percent in recent weeks, said Jesse Sharkey, the union’s president, as infection rates hit the city and Mr. Trump continued to pressure schools to reopen in tweets and at news conferences.

When the president began marking successful reopening of schools in Scandinavian countries with very low virus levels, Mr Sharkey said: ‘That did a huge amount to undermine credibility over a safe reopening. It was not based on scientific or health criteria, it was based on political suitability. And it did not help that it was Trump. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced last week that the school year would only begin online.

The American Federation of Teachers, a national union, surveyed members in mid-June and found that about three-quarters were at least somewhat willing to return to classrooms with appropriate safety measures. That number has since dropped significantly, said Randi Weingarten, the union’s president.

Stephen Swieciki, a middle school social studies teacher in the Bronx and an active member of the New York City Teachers’ Union, said he was nervous about the prospect of going back to school, even before Mr. Trump made him so vociferous to the debate.

But when Mr. Trump began tweeting, it “simply stated that this should not be rationally planned as with the recommendation of health experts in mind,” he said. Mr. Swieciki has filed a medical exemption that he hopes he will allow from home when the city’s schools reopen in September for personal instruction.

Teachers in California said a similar dynamic was at work when Los Angeles and San Diego announced last month that they would stop their plans to physically reopen buildings and the state issued guidance that required about 80 percent of the state’s population to do so. years to start online.

Patrick O’Donnell, chairman of the California State Assembly Education Committee and a former union leader, said he believed Mr. Trump’s efforts in schools changed the political calculation in the Solidarity Democratic state.

“When you create so much division, it’s hard to build a bridge to a solution,” he said. “It’s a political hot potato now.”

Some education experts lamented that reopening schools had become so politically polarized and that education had become part of a culture war over how to respond to the virus. And they said Mr. Trump may have tainted legitimate arguments in favor of at least some personal lesson.

Millions of low-income children and students with disabilities will suffer severely without instruction in person, while wealthy families arrange pouches and tutors from home school to clean up the enormous gaps left at a distance.

Health officials claim that some schools in places where the virus is under control can safely reopen if strict health measures are in place, including mask mandates, ventilation improvements and social distance requirements.

Dr Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has often disagreed with Mr Trump on the safety of relapse, recently said he believed children in cities and states with “low levels of infection” could return get to school with the kinds of precautionary measures you take in ‘general society.’

Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, said Mr. Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos “are right that we should look at the big picture here.”

“If we had leadership that could bring people together and talk about all of these issues, then we could be in a better place,” he added. “You can imagine there would be some places where they make a decision to say, ‘We’ll try this.’

Report was contributed by Julie Bosman, Maggie Haberman and Shawn Hubler.