Tim Tyson spent his career as a public school educator. He was a teacher and a school administrator. Because of his success and international recognition, he then began consulting with educators and education policy makers the world over. You can learn more about his work at DrTimTyson.com.
Last week The United States Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, insisted with her boss, Donald Trump, that schools must reopen this fall. In fact, funding pressure is being used to force school districts across the nation to open.
Supposedly, only 0.02% of school children will die from COVID-19 infections if schools reopen this fall. Well, that amounts to almost 15,000 children. Who knows how many would suffer lifelong afflictions as a result of acute infections.
And even though Betsy didn’t really know much about the school accountability agenda that began with George Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation when she became the Secretary of Education1 , I would like to suggest to the Secretary of Education that this would be 15,000 school children permanently left behind. Forever left behind. Dead.
Betsy DeVos is a religious fundamentalist. She has been a lifelong supporter of the ProLife movement. Now, if these were 15,000 fetuses about to be aborted, she would then care. But since they are real, live, breathing, school-attending human beings–actual children… Well, not so pro-life after all.
Oh, and now that the Trump administration has taken the responsibility for reporting COVID-19 infections and deaths away from the CDC, we will never know the true number of infections and deaths. So, the administration can just start making everything all great again.
Because the religious schools she champions and is given vast amounts of public funding to keep afloat are not required to be accountable for student achievement ↩