The country’s inability to reopen schools is the yardstick by which to measure all of the accumulated failures of the American response to COVID-19. Instead of uniting Americans behind the project of reopening schools, restoring the most important service that has not returned since the start of the pandemic, the Trump administration has politicized the debate. It is asking districts to solve problems—testing, tracing, community spread—that every other level of government has thus far failed to solve, but not providing funding to do so. In fact, Trump is threatening to cut funding to school districts that do not reopen.
“Trump and [Secretary of Education Betsy] DeVos threatening to withhold money—it’s insane. It’s mind-boggling,” Arne Duncan, who served as secretary of education in the Obama administration, told me. (Duncan is a managing partner at Emerson Collective, the majority owner of The Atlantic.) “I truly believe in my heart that he doesn’t care whether kids or teachers or parents live or die. There’s no body count high enough that would make him pay attention to science.”
On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters, “The science should not stand in the way of this,” blithely insisting that science supported reopening. She pointed out that most other Western countries have reopened schools, but ignored the fact that most other Western countries have also brought the pandemic under control better than the U.S. has.
