We KNOW his push and threats are NOT about students, teachers the economy or even education…
It’s about his political hide…
It’s causing educators and even politicians from both sides of the political spectrum concern and annoyance ….
Trump and his Education Sec seem to be barking up the wrong tree….
Donald Trump’s desperate efforts to salvage the economy and his political career against the nations’s health isn’t working….
President Donald Trump has been on a rampage against public schools and colleges all week, threatening to use the power of the federal government to strong-arm officials into reopening classrooms.
But his effort is now creating a backlash: An overwhelming alignment of state and even Republican-aligned organizations oppose the rush to reopen schools. The nation’s leading pediatricians, Republican state school chiefs, Christian colleges and even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have all challenged parts of Trump’s pressure campaign.
“Threats are not helpful,” Joy Hofmeister, the Republican state superintendent of public instruction in Oklahoma, told POLITICO on Friday. “We do not need to be schooled on why it’s important to reopen.”
Both Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have issued federal funding threats to schools that don’t fully reopen. On Friday, Trump went a step further in blasting online learning — which many school districts and colleges are planning to use this fall as an alternative or supplement to in-person instruction.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, whose prominent study on the importance of reopening schools was repeatedly touted by administration officials this week, criticized Trump’s threats to withhold money from schools as a “misguided approach” in a new statement on Friday.
The pediatricians, in a statement with teachers unions and school superintendents, also pushed back on Trump’s focus on schools providing in-person instruction, seemingly without any regard to the intensity of the pandemic in a community. Schools in areas with high levels of Covid-19 community spread, they wrote, “should not be compelled to reopen” against local experts’ judgment….
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Trump needs support from women and suburban voters in his reelection bid against Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee. Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, spoke on Fox News Friday about the bind that parents are in as they try to balance work and kids at home.
“You talk to a single working mom, she’s got to send her kid to school, the kids at home, she can’t go to work, she may not be able to afford help,” he said. “It’s also true with working folks who are two-person families and I think that’s an important part of this.”
But teachers unions, parents and other education leaders have said they need more funding to reopen safely and that Trump’s political priorities will put children and educators in harm’s way. “Public health agencies must make recommendations based on evidence, not politics,” said Friday’s statement from the pediatricians, teachers unions and superintendents.