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Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images
The Daily Signal
Reopening Schools Doesn’t Require National Consensus
Jonathan Butcher
July 15, 2020
Parents looking for a national consensus on whether schools should open
in the fall won’t find one. But that’s OK. We don’t need one.
As soon as President Donald Trump announced his support for reopening
schools this fall, teacher unions said he was “brazenly making these
decisions.” So much for consensus.
And this despite the fact that both proclamations said students should
be kept safe, emphasized Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
guidelines on reopening (speakers on a White House panel cited no fewer
than eight CDC reports, while unions called the documents “conflicting
guidance”), and claimed to have the nation’s best interests in mind.
Well.
Luckily, many state officials and school leaders already had moved on.
In April, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat, said that schools
could hold classes in-person immediately, but left the decision to
local educators. In Idaho, closures varied by school district, but some
school leaders had students back in class by May.
Governors and state officials have announced in-person summer school
classes for Illinois, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Texas, and Virginia.
Even if relatively few schools thus far have decided to have students
return to the classrooms, that fact that some states have done so
should change parents’ question from if schools will open in the fall
to how quickly the process can happen.
“The CDC has issued guidance,” Vice President Mike Pence said at the
White House event, “but that guidance is meant to supplement and not
replace state, local, territorial, or tribal guidance.”
What may be “conflicting guidance” to unions is better described as
“federalism.” Fifty states, 50 different pandemics, 50 laboratories of
democracy.
That’s the way it should be. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
coined the “laboratory” phrase, prefacing it by saying, “To stay
experimentation in things social and economic is a grave
responsibility.”
We should be encouraged, then, that some local educators are not
waiting for Washington to decide for them, and, likewise, that parents
are not waiting on schools.
After the wild ride of sudden school closures in March, uneven attempts
at online instruction through the spring, and a school year that seemed
to have no official end date, polls showed more parents were
considering educating their children at home.
For those wondering if the 59% of respondents in a USA Today/Ipsos poll
who said they may homeschool now really meant it, a recent headline
weeks before school starts from North Carolina’s North State Journal
read: “Homeschool requests overload state government website.”
Those not ready to homeschool will find it difficult, if not
impossible, to return to work if schools are closed. Montana is not
Virginia, which is not New York City. And parents ready to homeschool
in Greensboro, North Carolina, may be thinking differently than a
family in Charlotte.
Parents should be wary of press releases with advice on education from
public or private national groups that use words such as
“comprehensive,” “nation’s schools,” or even “all.”
The Trump administration said that schools may lose federal money if
they stay closed. Such a move likely would be challenged in court.
But one problematic aspect of this threat is that it keeps the debate
over who should be making decisions for the “nation’s schools”—again,
beware the phrase—at the national level, a tussle between the federal
government and nationally-focused special interest groups.
A more effective talking point for the administration would be to encourage the laboratories.
For example: In areas where schools are closed, state lawmakers could
give parents and students who wish to opt out of those schools the
students’ per-student spending amount to use for homeschooling
resources, private school tuition, tutors, and more. Or erase district
boundaries and allow students to choose a traditional school other than
his or her assigned school.
The National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers,
the nation’s largest teacher unions, will howl at the suggestions, but
they should be loath to take the matter to court again.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that Montana could not prevent
families from choosing a religious school when students use K-12
private school scholarships created by state law.
Unions regularly cite provisions in state constitutions that are rooted
in religious bigotry when the groups sue to block such opportunities,
but the high court called precisely this language discriminatory in
Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, weakening the union’s
position in 37 other U.S. states with similar provisions.
The fight now has advanced to defending scholarships to religious private schools in Maine.
Washington should not force schools to reopen. But national officials
can remind state lawmakers and parents there are alternatives. Short of
a consensus on opening schools in August, that is the best news for
everyone.
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