Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has been part of the Trump pressure campaign on schools to reopen in person, but use the Department of Education to track how that’s going? Ha, no.
Asked what role the federal government has in boosting confidence in coronavirus-era in-person schooling, including by tracking the number of coronavirus cases in schools that do reopen, DeVos responded, “Well I'm not sure there's a role for the Department of Education to compile and conduct that research.”
In translation: Shrug, not my problem.
“The data is there for anybody who wants to search for it and look for it,” DeVos claimed. Except that’s not necessarily true, or not in a reliable way. And parents and teachers shouldn’t have to search for data on one of the most important things going on in the schools and in their lives. It should be there, readily accessible, from the federal agency tasked with overseeing education.
The Trump administration message to schools, students, parents, and teachers continues to be “You’re on your own … but if you don’t do what we want, we’ll come after you.”
There was a way to reopen schools safely and with the confidence of the communities affected that it would be safe. That, like so much else in the coronavirus pandemic, hasn’t been how it happened. Team Trump has made us less safe and then insisted we pretend everything is fine, putting us at even greater risk. Well over 200,000 people have died and Trump and his top officials don’t see it as their problem. There’s a reason Betsy DeVos is one of the Cabinet members who has survived Trump’s entire term: She’s right on message when she tells us the Education Department doesn’t owe the public anything during this historic crisis.
from Daily Kos https://ift.tt/35sS4PF
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