The United States was still in the early days of the coronavirus crisis when Donald Trump began pushing for states to lift their social distancing directives, claiming that the public health measures were “worse than the problem itself.” It took a bit of wrangling—tweets urging sometimes-armed protesters to revolt against state leaders; relentless messaging that the country was conquering the “invisible enemy”—but he ultimately got his way. To some extent, almost every state has lifted its lockdown orders. Some did so prudently, and have so far managed to keep their caseloads relatively under control. Others, cheered on by Trump, were less cautious, and have seen infections skyrocket. Even with the dangerous surge in cases, though, Trump has shown no sign of backpedaling from his position that the nation must return to normal no matter what.
That attitude, it seems, extends to reopening schools, the newest front in the administration’s fight to pretend everything is fine. This stance was embodied by Education secretary Betsy DeVos, who on Sunday insisted that every school must reopen in the fall, but failed to provide even a cursory explanation for how that might be done without increasing coronavirus cases. “Kids need to get back to school,” she said in a CNN interview, downplaying CDC guidelines as “recommendations.” “They need to get back in the classroom. Families need for kids to get back in the classroom. And it can be done safely.” She echoed the president, who last week threatened to withhold funding from schools that do not fully reopen, describing reopening guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as overly strict and “impractical.”
“There’s…nothing in the data that would suggest that kids being back in school is dangerous to them,” DeVos said.
As far as experts know, it’s true that children are less likely to be infected with COVID-19, and less likely to experience the most severe symptoms even if they are. But the evidence for that theory remains weak at best, caught up in the confusion of the early days of the pandemic. DeVos’s recommendation also outright ignores the danger to the adults who work in schools, and those that kids and teachers go home to. “You have no plan,” Democratic Representative Ayanna Pressley tweeted following DeVos’s interview. “Teachers, kids and parents are fearing for their lives…I wouldn’t trust you to care for a house plant let alone my child.”
Republicans, naturally, seem to be falling in line. “The costs of not reopening our schools are extraordinary,” Florida Senator Marco Rubio said Monday, a day after his state smashed the country’s single-day infection record with a reported 15,000 confirmed cases. But it’s also difficult to imagine states forcing their schools to reopen or stay open, given the toll doing so could exact. “There’s no way that you’re going to have full-time schools for all the kids and all the teachers the way we used to have it,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said over the weekend, citing a lack of funding to put adequate safety measures in place.
It’s possible that concern from educators, opposition from Democrats, and the undeniable reality of surging caseloads will force the administration to retreat, to some degree or another, from its insistence on full reopenings. A similar shift occurred with protective masks, the former frontline battle in Trump’s culture war. After weeks of defying recommendations despite the urgings of allies like Sean Hannity and Mitch McConnell, Trump finally caved over the weekend, making a point to be photographed wearing a mask while visiting Walter Reed.