In a daylong series of conference calls and public
events at the White House, the president, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and
other senior officials opened a concerted campaign to lean on governors, mayors
and others to resume classes in person months after more than 50 million
children were abruptly ejected from school buildings in March.
Mr. Trump and his administration argued that the
social, psychological and educational costs of keeping children at home any
longer would be worse than the virus itself. But they offered no concrete
proposals or new financial assistance to states and localities struggling to
restructure academic settings, staffs and programs that were never intended to
keep children six feet apart or cope with the requirements of combating a virus
that has killed
more than 130,000 Americans.
“We’re very much going to put pressure on governors
and everybody else to open the schools, to get them open,” Mr. Trump said at a
forum at the White House. “It’s very important. It’s very important for our
country. It’s very important for the well-being of the student and the parents.
So we’re going to be putting a lot of pressure on: Open your schools in the
fall.”
Education has long been a local issue, controlled by
district school boards and state superintendents. Indeed, Mr. Trump campaigned
in 2016 against efforts to nationalize education through programs like the
Common Core State Standards. So beyond jawboning, it was unclear what power
Mr. Trump had to force policymakers’ hands. He stopped short of threatening to
withhold federal funding, a potentially effective but risky lever.
Instead, the president used his bully pulpit, which
has been influential in steering parts of the country where he has support. Mr.
Trump heaped scorn on Harvard University for “closing for the season” this
fall. In fact, Harvard
said mainly first-year students and some students in special
circumstances would be invited to campus in the fall, then seniors would
replace them in the spring. “I think it’s ridiculous,” Mr. Trump said. “I think
it’s an easy way out, and I think they ought to be ashamed of themselves, if
you want to know the truth.”
During an earlier conference call with governors, Ms.
DeVos laced into school administrations that have done “next to nothing” to
educate students during the pandemic. She also criticized specific districts
“playing both paradigms” in planning a hybrid of in-person and online classes
for the fall, singling out Fairfax County, Va., a suburb of Washington.
“A couple of hours a week of online school is not OK,
and a choice of two days per week in the classroom is not a choice at all,” Ms.
DeVos said, according to a recording of the call obtained by The New York
Times.
The president’s focus on schools and colleges,
freighted with campaign-season politics, came as the United States topped three
million coronavirus infections and the vast majority of states were experiencing
new spikes. In Florida, more than 40 hospitals reported having no more beds in
their adult intensive care units. In Ohio, the governor ordered residents in
seven counties to wear masks in public, including those containing Columbus,
Cincinnati and Cleveland.
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