Biden urges flexible school openings

[teach1st]

Source: Washington Post

Joe Biden on Friday released a new plan on how public schools should approach reopening this school year, contrasting sharply with President Trump’s message that every school in the nation should reopen completely or risk having its funding cut.

Biden urged caution, saying that each district should make its own decisions based on local conditions, and that schools in areas with high infection rates should not reopen too soon. He also called on Congress to pass new emergency funding to help the schools.

“If we do this wrong, we will put lives at risk and set our economy and our country back,” the Biden campaign wrote in a plan released Friday afternoon.

...

Biden argued that the federal government should develop clearer standards to help local districts decide when and how to reopen, including how low the infection rates should be, what a maximum safe class size is, and who should return to classrooms first if schools can’t accommodate all students.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-urges-flexible-school-openings/2020/07/17/296792e4-c852-11ea-a99f-3bbdffb1af38_story.html

[TomCADem]

1. U.S. schools lay off hundreds of thousands, setting up lasting harm to kids

Biden's plan makes sense, rather than a one size fits all approach throughout the entire Nation. If cases are growing out of control, then school has to be conducted remotely. If cases are are sort of stagnant or decreasing, then it may make sense to adopt a hybrid approach that allows some in-person classes with social distancing. In contrast, Trump's proposal of immediate reopening without masks or social distancing is another disaster waiting to happen.

Thanks to Trump's mismanagement, thousands teachers may lose their jobs due to COVID-19 and Republican denialism.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-teachers-insig/us-schools-lay-off-hundreds-of-thousands-setting-up-lasting-harm-to-kids-idUSKBN23B39R

Macias will join the staggering number of public school personnel across the United States who have lost their jobs in the wake of school closures amid the Covid-19 pandemic. In April alone, 469,000 public school district personnel nationally lost their jobs, including kindergarten through twelfth-grade teachers and other school employees, a Labor Department economist told Reuters.

That is more than the nearly 300,000 total during the entire 2008 Great Recession, according to a 2014 paper by three university economists financed by the Russell Sage Foundation. The number of public school teachers hasn’t recovered from that shakeout, reaching near-2008 levels only in 2019.

Multiple school district administrators, public officials and teaching experts have warned that the current school personnel job loss will last for years, hurting the education of a generation of American students. It also could be a drag on economic recovery, for one thing because school districts are big employers.

The Labor Department reported on May 8 that 20.5 million non-farm workers lost jobs in April, including 980,000 government workers. Of those, 801,000 were local government employees. Although the Labor Department report does not break out the number, 469,000 of the 801,000 local government workers were K-12 public school teachers and other school personnel, the department economist told Reuters.

[Igel]

2. Biden's plan is a description of what is. n/t