Friday, July 31, 2020


Hysterical Left Ignores CDC, Demands Schools Stay Closed

The teachers unions are very far Left and make extortionist demands, which may drive more kids to alternative education.

In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has been excoriated by Democrats and teachers unions for demanding that schools reopen this fall. He stands accused of ignoring the science and putting America’s 57 million school children in mortal danger.

Yet now that the CDC has issued new guidelines for opening schools, the outcry from Democrats and teachers unions has only become more hysterical.

“It is critically important for our public health to open schools this fall,” CDC Director Robert Redfield argued. “School closures have disrupted normal ways of life for children and parents, and they have had negative health consequences on our youth. CDC is prepared to work with K-12 schools to safely reopen while protecting the most vulnerable.”

Having previously stated that he would “absolutely” send his grandchildren back to school, Redfield’s statement is also in line with the 67,000-member American Academy of Pediatrics, which last month issued a public statement “strongly advocat[ing]” for reopening schools.

The wisdom of the CDC and the AAP’s position is obvious to anyone who has bothered to look at the data on the coronavirus and children. According to the CDC, “As of July 17, children and adolescents account for under 7 percent of COVID-19 cases and less than 0.1 percent of COVID-19-related deaths.” In other words, less than 1/1000th of COVID deaths are children and adolescents.

Though scientists don’t know why yet, the data also show that even when infected with COVID, children rarely die from it. Children rarely transmit it to adults either, so teachers are at very low risk of infection from children.

Yet Democrats and teachers unions continue to be science deniers, fighting vigorously against a return to in-person schooling.

That doesn’t, of course, keep them from making ridiculous, extortionist demands, from an additional $116 billion in federal education funding (more than the U.S. spent to rebuild Europe after WWII), to reduced class sizes, reduced work hours, banning new private schools, to defunding the police, Medicare For All, and new taxes on the rich.

Clearly, Democrats and teachers unions have taken to heart former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s admonition to leftists to “never let a crisis go to waste.”

Leftists see a golden opportunity to hold the American economy hostage to their demands. After all, if schools don’t reopen, tens of millions of Americans can’t return to work, depending as they do on schools to watch their children during work hours.

Showing just how deeply political the Left has made this decision, NBC News published an op-ed by high-school teacher Anne Lutz Fernandez, who repeated the false claim that White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters that “science should not stand in the way of” schools fully reopening. That lie was so blatant that CNN anchor Jake Tapper felt compelled to publicly rebuke his media colleagues for repeating it — before NBC did it again.

After melodramatically declaring “teachers did not enlist to die at work,” Fernandez says, “The federal government can make schools safer and help students learn, whatever form their learning must take, by researching the effects of COVID-19 on children, maintaining science-based guidelines, filling pandemic-related budget gaps and providing additional funding needed to meet safety guidelines.”

Except, as we mentioned, the research on COVID-19 and children is clear and overwhelming.

As for the alleged “budget gaps,” the Census Bureau reported last year that per-pupil spending in America had increased for the fifth consecutive year, with state and federal spending on education at $694.1 billion in 2017, up 3.7% from the year before. For perspective, the U.S. spends more on education (second highest in the world in per-pupil spending) than the entire GDP’s of Hong Kong and Ireland, though we get horribly mediocre academic results for all that spending.

Amazingly, Democrats and teachers unions don’t seem to grasp the damage they’re doing … to themselves. The longer they refuse to open schools, the more parents are forced to turn to private and religious schools or homeschooling. In fact, since the initial lockdowns, millions of parents have realized that homeschooling is a much better option.

How ironic would it be if leftist extortion tactics became the catalyst for parents to finally demand school choice en masse?

In the long run, this could be a tremendous benefit for the nation. Far too many of our “public” schools have become little more than government-run progressive indoctrination centers, churning out legions of academically incompetent social justice warriors who can’t read, can’t spell, and know no history, but who are marvelously self-assured that they know best how to run the economy and public policy.

Maybe, as the satirical Babylon Bee writes, “A concerning rise in test scores, independent thinking, and intelligence has been attributed to public schools being shut down across the nation.”

Imagine that — children learning reading, writing, arithmetic, and an accurate history of the United States, rather than the radically anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-religious pablum they are current force fed in public schools.

What a marvelous change that would be.

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Charters Close the Achievement Gap, Says Thomas Sowell

The economist Thomas Sowell turned 90 on June 30. He has made a career out of judging public policies by their actual results rather than their stated intentions and wished-for effects. As befits one of the great minds of our era, he celebrated his 90th birthday by doing what anyone would do on such an occasion, namely, by publishing a book—Charter Schools and Their Enemies, from Basic Books—analyzing charter schools, their effects, and those who oppose them.

Charter schools are publicly-funded schools that play by different rules. Importantly, they aren’t bogged down by cumbersome union contracts like the ones that make it prohibitively expensive to fire teachers. They are also accountable to the people who matter most: students and those students’ parents. If they don’t deliver results, they don’t succeed.

The first half of the book is commentary and analysis. The second is a set of data appendices that would allow readers to reconstruct the quantitative basis for his argument and, possibly, show that he is wrong.

Measuring charters’ effect is more complicated than just comparing simple averages because the pool of students who go to charter schools is very different from the pool of students who stay behind—they are chosen by lottery, but differences might still be contaminated by selection bias (the kinds of families that opt for charters might be very different from the kinds of families that don’t). To get around this, Sowell addresses each of the potential confounding factors that could explain seemingly-superior charter performance. He works to match like schools with like schools, preferably those where charters and traditionals operate out of the same building.

Sowell’s quantitative analysis is a few notches below what you would expect from a technical journal like the Economics of Education Review, but he still makes a pretty convincing case for a book published with a trade press. The well-organized data appendices are gifts to undergraduate statistics and econometrics students looking for a simple data playground. Sowell’s critics who might not trust his analysis can start with the data on which he bases his case.

Charter school critics argue that charters drain traditional public schools of the most motivated students and families. Sowell summarizes research by the Stanford University economist Caroline Hoxby showing that students who lose the charter school admission lotteries don’t do as well as those who win, suggesting that at least some of what we observe is a treatment effect of charter schools. Moreover, a 2008 paper in the Journal of Urban Economics shows that charters improve outcomes for students left behind.

After looking at the data, Sowell concludes that charter schools look like a very effective weapon against the “achievement gap” between white students and black students, pointing to the example of one predominantly-black charter school with average household income of $49,000 had higher test scores than wealthier schools with average household incomes some five times higher.

Sowell makes much of different kinds of “accountability.” There is accountability to inputs, procedures, and byzantine rules—the bureaucratic vision of monopoly education that Sowell says is based on wishful thinking. Then there is accountability that counts—or that should, at least—accountability to families for actually educating children. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and people are overwhelmingly trying to get their children out of traditional schools and into charters where they are available.

So why don’t charters meet universal acclaim? Curiously, why is it that so many people who typically think of themselves as squarely on the side of “the children” have lined up against them when it comes to quality schooling? Sowell advises readers to follow the money, quoting former teachers’ union official Albert Shanker (1928-1997): “I’ll put it this way: I’ll start representing schoolchildren when schoolchildren start paying union dues.” It’s an ugly quote, but it summarizes an even uglier reality.

Critics will argue that charters and other school choice initiatives are not magic bullets, but this doesn’t strike me as much of an argument because there are essentially never magic bullets in just about any context. Considered in isolation, just walking for thirty minutes every other day isn’t a “magic bullet” for weight loss. This doesn’t mean it isn’t a good idea. Similarly, if charters use fewer resources to deliver better—or even similar—results, expanding access to them is still a good idea.

The achievement gap gets a lot of press in education research circles, and its causes are complex. Thomas Sowell has celebrated his 90th birthday by pointing his prodigious analytical skills at an elephant in the room. He’s fond of saying that there are no solutions, only trade-offs—but the evidence he brings to bear on the charter question suggests that expanding charter school access is a trade-off worth making

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When Done Right, the Benefit of Reopening Schools Outweighs the Risk

This coming fall, my wife and I find ourselves stumped like so many other parents out there: what do we do with our three boys if the schools aren’t open?

Through our own hard work, we’ve been blessed to be able to afford childcare and distance learning measures that go above and beyond what the public system can offer. But what about so many parents out there – single parents going it alone, moms and dads out of work trying to make ends meet? With unemployment soaring, who is standing up for them and their precious children who deserve an education?

Science and medicine are on their side. The American Academy of Pediatrics states that we should start with – not merely consider –the goal of having students physically present in the classroom this upcoming school year. Any parent, myself included, can readily tell you that trying to keep squirming children active and engaged in front of a Zoom screen is not possible. Not only is keeping kids home ineffective, as a health professional and former public health official, I know that it’s also dangerous. Prolonged absence from schools means that terrible ills such as abuse, learning disabilities, mental health issues, and food insecurity slip through the cracks without the watchful eye of caring teachers. Moreover, these tragedies disproportionately affect minority and disadvantaged students.

While the science may tell us that kids belong in school, special interest groups and out-of-touch politicians tell us they know better. Whether it’s arrogance or ignorance, these elites are on the precipice of making sweeping decisions that could set children back for years.

So, what should be done? It starts with being honest: there is simply no way to eliminate the risk of the virus entirely before the school year starts. Rather, we must work to mitigate it and tip the scale in favor of education over the quantified and mitigated risk.

It’s already happening. This summer, private day cares and camps reopened by adapting to a new process – social distancing, masks, screening questions and daily temperature checks to name a few. To date, there is no data to support that the virus has spread in my home state of New Jersey due to their reopening or that children have been disproportionately affected. For our public schools, the conversation should not be whether schools reopen; it should be how to reopen them safely through risk mitigation efforts. We must start to accept this and plan for process changes now. It’s a small price to pay for the invaluable benefit school provides to both parents and our children.

Americans are understandably scared in the wake of the great human and economic toll that COVID-19 has taken on our country. From my experience as a former public health official, I have the humility to admit that mere discussion of supportive facts and figures may not be enough to assuage those who have seen their lives ravaged by this terrible disease. On the other hand, I can also see how political leaders make the mistake of communicating almost exclusively through emotion to a weary public that is desperate for some certainty. As Americans we must pivot, not freeze. We must implement stopgap process changes with the same ingenuity that has fueled the miracle of the American Dream for over 200 years. This is a basic risk-reward calculation, and for our kids and parents, we owe it to us all to make the brave and science-supported choice to send our kids back to school this fall.

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GOP Relief Bill: Schools Would Lose Two-Thirds of Aid Money if They Don’t Physically Reopen

Schools that don’t plan to physically reopen, or at least offer some in-person learning in the fall, would lose two-thirds of the relief money set aside for K-12 education under Senate Republicans’ relief bill.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on July 27 unveiled the much-anticipated HEALS Act, which would provide $70 billion to K-12 public and private schools, as well as $5 billion in funds for governors to spend on K-12 and higher education.

According to Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Miss.), who crafted the HEALS Act’s education provision, a third of the $70 billion relief fund would go to all schools, regardless of whether they plan to bring students back to classroom or not. The remaining two-thirds, however, would be available only for schools with a state-approved physical reopening plan.

While making it clear that most of the relief money will be directed toward schools that are set to fully reopen, the act doesn’t specify whether schools that reopen with a mix of in-person and online learning could still get their cut.

The act would also grant schools with protections from legal liability, a measure championed by McConnell to discourage “insubstantial lawsuits relating to COVID-19” while “preserving the ability of individuals and businesses that have suffered real injury to obtain complete relief.”

The qualification requirements laid out in the HEALS Act are in line with President Donald Trump’s push to have schools reopen this fall. Earlier this month, Trump threatened to cut off funding for those that don’t.

“In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS,” he wrote on Twitter. “The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but is important for the children & families. May cut off funding if not open!”

Democrats, on the other hand, voiced strong opposition to tying K-12 education relief funds to school reopening. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate education committee, said last week that Republican lawmakers were “using student safety as a bargaining chip.”

“Democrats have a plan to give schools the resources they need to keep their campuses safe and to keep students learning, whether in-person or online, while the president is irresponsibly trying to bully schools into reopening no matter the risk,” Murray said. “I hope Senate Republicans don’t stoop to that level just because the president wants to.”

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