Trump Threatens to Turn Pandemic Schooling Into a Culture War

[Zorro]

The president might sabotage parents’ best hopes for getting their kids back to school.

Two weeks ago, I asked Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, what a functioning Department of Education would be doing to prepare the country to reopen schools in the fall.

“A functioning Department of Education would have been getting groups of superintendents and principals and unions and others together from the middle of March,” she told me. It would have created a clearinghouse of best practices for maintaining grab-and-go lunch programs and online education. By mid-April it would have convened experts to figure out how to reopen schools safely, and offered grants to schools trying different models.

“None of that has happened,” said Weingarten. “Zero.”

Instead, Donald Trump has approached the extraordinarily complex challenge of educating children during a pandemic just as he’s approached most other matters of governing: with bullying, bluster and propaganda.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/opinion/school-reopenings-trump.html

[lagomorph777]

1. Not a figurative war. A literal massacre.