By Steve Miller, Rosemary Lee and E.B. Shaw

With Corona virus cases spiking across the country, America is on the verge of forcing millions of people into extreme danger. Suddenly, everyone from CEOs, the President, state governors, and the corporate media are calling for schools to open “to save the economy”.

No country has tried to open schools with the virus spreading like here in the US. We are currently in a massive wave of surging cases in 40 states. There are not enough tests or testing. How do you open schools if you can’t test and trace? There’s no way that you can keep a school safe from coronavirus if the virus is raging out of control in the community where the school is located.

Before schools physically re-open, certain principles of public health must be established:

No re-opening without full scientific best practices. So far, this is seriously lacking.
No re-opening without dealing with the vast practical hurdles. These steps require more funding, not less. So far, the funding to address these problems does not exist.
No re-opening without total and complete public transparency. So far, decisions are made behind closed doors. Planning is slapdash and haphazard at best. Teachers, unions and communities must be fully involved as co-equals with politicians in establishing policies.
Schools should continue to be food centers for the communities, but they should reinstate and expand what government has cut — access to nurses, vision services, mental health and cultural support. Communities need these services now more than ever.
We cannot fail to hold government accountable for securing public health and public safety. Governments must do what it takes to guarantee childcare in safe ways.. We have no choice here. Public schools are still controlled locally. We must exert our power to protect our children.

We’ve already seen what happens when we use shortcuts and go against public health guidance in reopening. Other countries have been successful in suppressing the level of COVID-19, they have one thing in common — a national coordinated strategy.

The US response to the virus has been fractured, reckless, and incompetent. Rather than the federal government organizing a national coordinated response, it has put corporations in total control.

The government refuses to provide adequate unemployment or health care, thus making families desperate to work. Many European countries cover 60% to 90% of workers’ wages when they can not work. So do we really have to risk our children and our families so corporations benefit? It really does not have to be this way.

Corporations are demanding their workers return to work so they can make a profit from their investments, but they refuse to provide childcare. So children, teachers and school staff, families and communities, must risk their lives to open schools that could not even guarantee toilet paper before the virus. The only people to benefit from a premature physical opening will be billionaires and politicians of both parties. This is why they tout political reasons to re-open, while ignoring scientific precaution.

These same people, who previously had no trouble closing schools throughout neighborhoods and subjecting children to hours of high-stakes testing at computer screens, now state that keeping children out of school denies them the “emotional, social, and knowledge growth they desperately need.” Suddenly, also, the teachers who were degraded as the worst problem with public schools are now heroic essential fron-tline workers!

Schools are set to open district-by-district across the country while many nail shops, gyms, and bars remain closed. Many schools only use easily contaminated recycled air throughout whole buildings instead of widows that can be opened to bring in fresh air. Taking steps as minimal as social distancing will cost vast amounts. Little things become big problems. Before, a Kindergarten teacher could take the whole class to the bathroom at once. Now a class of 15, that requires 6 feet of spacing, forms a line 90 feet long! And how exactly are bathrooms going to be sanitized?

There are no clear guidelines; planning is confused and hidden from the public; PPE’s are in short supply; school budgets are being slashed even as the costs of adequately dealing with the virus skyrocket. School nurses were virtually eliminated before the virus hit. Now, what exactly is going to happen if a child feels sick?

The gap between school finances, destroyed by the virus, and the greatly increased costs, also caused by the virus, runs into billions. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has estimated the funding required to reopen public schools safely is at least $116.5 billion.

Trey Hollingsworth, Indiana Congressman, stated that people dying from the virus is the lesser of two evils to the economy not opening up. CNN reported that Hollingsworth said: “it is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.” Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, announced that old people should welcome re-opening, even if that means they would die.

This corporate class also touts the murderous notion of “herd immunity”, meaning that after 3 million people or so die, the virus cannot spread any more. We have watched health care workers sicken, live in their cars so not to infect their families, and wear plastic bags instead of PPEs. What will happen to school staff?

When policies and political choices set up people to die at “acceptable levels”, it is fair to conclude that this is not an accident. Even before the virus, digital technology has been turning jobs into temp work or no work at all. Corporations are simply not going to spend money to support people they cannot use. In this context, physical re-opening is designed to accept a specific amount of death, to establish toleration of death as a new normal.

Can schools physically re-open now? If so, how?

Hawaii has announced that schools will re-open when no one in the state has tested positive for one month. The Florida Education Commissioner, Richard Corcoran, is the former Speaker of the Florida House and a charter school owner. He demands that Florida open its schools 5 days a week even as Florida COVID cases reach record high levels. Precaution is scrapped for pragmatism.

America’s schools do not meet even the most lenient advice for physical re-opening, which are found on the White House website. Teachers advocate no physical re-opening until no new cases arise in the past 14 days, the time for symptoms to appear. Some districts are beginning to scrap immediate physical re-opening.

Once again, as with the George Floyd rebellion, our character as a people will be tested. Will we stand together, or will our passivity make us complicit in sanctioning unnecessary public death?

Yes, the mental, physical and emotional health of children is critical. No, this cannot be achieved by physical re-opening schools like before. That is impossible. We can find ways to bring young people back together again, but it means letting go of the idea that schools can return to normal. This step requires the imagination and agency of the communities schools serve.

The virus proves that no one is safe unless everyone is safe. The same is true for our schools. For a country founded on genocide, slavery and inequality, the challenge once again is to stand up for the right of quality public education for all.

Everyone now can see the critical and vital importance of public schools to our communities. Even before the virus, schools have been the anchor of the community. Closing public schools is a method of gentrification and community dispossession. Now we see once again that healthy schools create healthy communities and healthy communities create healthy schools.

Teacher unions and parents are advocating that public schools, in these times of COVID, should anchor the communities by expanding the public services they offer.

Immediate and Future Challenges

Whether schools physically open or not, the nature of public education has dramatically changed. Through the Spring, public schools offered online distance learning. As students graduated in June, Zoom Video Communications, Inc announced that it was being used by 100,000 schools globally.

Education has gone from being supported by technology to being dependent on technology and from being corporate-supported to becoming corporate-dependent.

Corporations like Pearson and Google tout online education as a way of saving money in tough times, but this just leads to private profits for corporations.

The latest vampire is Turnitin.com. Students turn in their essays. The website checks for plagiarism; then it sends it back to you, marked in red where you copied something out of the encyclopedia. But they also offer school districts more advanced options like: grading every paper… or maybe even student surveillance.

Under corporate control, online learning, distance learning and virtual charter schools are a dismal failure. The California Attorney General is investigating the entire virtual charter industry for putting private profit ahead of quality education. The largest virtual charter corporation, K12 Inc, “educates” 120,000 students, making $900 million in revenue, all from taxpayer money earmarked for public education. Only half of online high school students graduate within four years, compared to 84% nationally. The Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that students in virtual charters do so poorly in math and English that it’s as if they didn’t attend school at all.

Most teachers estimate that only about 25% of their students do well in online education. The education model is the same drill & kill, test & fail regime that students could not succeed in even before the virus. Most students have trouble learning through screens since the other vital ways that humans learn are eliminated or reduced. And, of course, how does a family provide enough laptops for every child, much less the expense of connecting through Wi-fi?

Government at every level has invited billionaires, tech corporations, and CEOs to determine what public education will look like as the virus rolls on. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo invited Bill Gates and Google into the state to “re-imagine public education.” In other words, government is systematically replacing elected officials, who are (theoretically) accountable to the people, with private, unaccountable capitalists in a campaign to defund and privatize public schools and debase the purpose of education.

The ethical and moral implications of this corporate effort to terminate the education our children and communities need are highly disturbing. There is little public discussion about this even as government proclaims online learning as the miracle of the age.

US schools at every level are facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions. By the time the 2020-2021 school year is over, corporations and governments – if unopposed – will establish a degraded model that works only for the elite and very few others.

When government can bailout billionaires with trillions of dollars, we see that the money exists to build a system of public education that can build the leaders we need to transform the world.

Teaching today must unleash the marvelous powers and creativity of our collective humanity. Students are the people the world needs today to overcome the challenges of a desperately sick population, a sick society and a sick planet.

Unlike most of the world, where the needs of society were put first, in the US every problem is presented as an individual problem and every solution is presented as an individual solution.

It is the same with public education. Ronald Reagan proclaimed that there was no such thing as “society”, meaning no problems result from society, so you’re on your own. This has been America’s mantra ever since, unless of course it relates to corporate governance.

But now we see, scientifically, that the only solutions that can work must be organized at the national level by government to benefit everyone. Social problems are not individual; the emanate from how society is organized. Social problems require social solutions.

Just as COVID-19 demands a national coordinated strategy, the problems of safely re-opening public schools demand national solutions. Not piecemeal, local, short-term quick fixes. Instead, upgrade our schools by combining a public health approach with a public schools approach.

Steve Miller, Rosemary Lee, and E.B. Shaw are members of the National Public Education Committee of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America

By J.E. Karla

Not even two weeks into an extraordinary response to the novel coronavirus outbreak, the upper echelons of capital are wondering whether saving millions of lives is really worth the damage being done to their investment portfolios. According to reports, the debate among the ruling class is over whether or not to walk back some of the measures taken to slow the spread of the virus -- efforts already considered tardy and inadequate by public health experts -- in order to minimize business losses.

Like many elite notions, this idea was first launched in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. An unsigned editorial there is the most visible the vanguard of the bourgeoisie ever really make their deliberations, and this one last week (behind a paywall, of course) was especially candid.

After opening paragraphs congratulating the response to date, hoping that “with any luck” the nation’s health care system won’t collapse, they lay out their basic thesis:

“Yet the costs of this national shutdown are growing by the hour, and we don’t mean federal spending. We mean a tsunami of economic destruction that will cause tens of millions to lose their jobs as commerce and production simply cease. Many large companies can withstand a few weeks without revenue but that isn’t true of millions of small and mid-sized firms.”

After some attempts at pulling heart strings over the entrepreneurs that will eat the most shit in the months to come -- using the petit bourgeoisie as human shields for big business, as is custom -- and some other telling admissions we’ll return to, they end with this:

“Dr. (Anthony) Fauci (Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) has explained this severe lockdown policy as lasting 14 days in its initial term. The national guidance would then be reconsidered depending on the spread of the disease. That should be the moment, if not sooner, to offer new guidance on what might be called phase two of the coronavirus pandemic campaign.”

They do not have the guts to explicitly state that this “phase two” would mean allowing most normal activity -- the contact the virus needs to continue its spread -- to return, but their weasel word description of “substantial social distancing… in some form” (emphasis mine) says it all. “This should not become a debate over how many lives to sacrifice against how many lost jobs we can tolerate… But no society can safeguard public health for long at the cost of its overall economic health.”

They don’t want to debate how many lives to sacrifice in the name of saving “jobs,” -- a euphemism for the fortunes of employers, the bourgeoisie -- but that’s a great way to describe dialing back the only measures so far demonstrated to work against this plague in the name of economic “health.”

How many lives are we talking about? As I write, 565 people have died of the disease in the United States, with fatalities doubling every 2-3 days. The experience in Europe and China indicates that response measures take roughly a week to slow the virus down. That means that we should see 2-3 more doublings before last week’s actions finally take effect, 2260 to 4520 dead people this week. The Journal and their allies are suggesting that we should let those effects last a week, and then ratchet up the spread of the virus again.

Even assuming a very optimistic scenario where the doubling drops by half -- i.e. to once every 4-6 days -- and then lands somewhere in the middle -- say 3-5 days -- that would mean somewhere between 72,000 and nearly 600,000 dead people just a month from now.

But it’s worse than that, because there are about 5 times as many critical cases as there are fatalities. The absolute best case scenario puts us at more than 360,000 critical cases in a country with less than 100,000 intensive care beds. The worst case puts us at 3,000,000.

You can then add thousands of deaths from non-coronavirus causes that could not get adequate treatment -- car accidents, allergic reactions, heart attacks, etc. And that month cut off is arbitrary; the deaths would continue after that. In the New York Times Nicholas Kristof quoted a British epidemiologist as estimating a best case of 1.1 million. That best case involves much more distancing than what the Journal and company are proposing. They are calling for hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, to be sacrificed for the sake of “economic health.”

This blood thirsty logic is precisely the sort of thing capitalists project onto communists. This, however, brings us to the admission I alluded to above, buried in the middle of the editorial:

“Some in the media who don’t understand American business say that China managed a comparable shock to its economy and is now beginning to emerge on the other side. Why can’t the U.S. do it too? This ignores that the Chinese state owns an enormous stake in that economy and chose to absorb the losses. In the U.S. those losses will be borne by private owners and workers who rely on a functioning private economy. They have no state balance sheet to fall back on.”

We don’t need to debate the class character of the Chinese state -- even the Communist Party of China will admit that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” accommodates global capital. Regardless, the Wall Street Journal openly admits that the options at hand are a state-controlled economy capable of stemming the plague’s advance or letting potentially millions of people die for the sake of sustaining a privately-owned one.

The US government could easily freeze all debts, rents, and other contractual payments, guarantee a short-term income for all families, and take all necessary measures to maintain provision of food, medicine, utilities, and vital services until the virus has run out of steam. But even a momentary economy run on the basis of human need and not the accumulation of profit poses the threat of a good example. It’s bad enough that China does it incompletely, hence official bellicosity against them even in this hour of mutual need.

There is no amount of human lives the ruling class wouldn’t trade to prevent that risk, especially when they know they are the least likely to die.

The only silver lining is that one way or the other most of us will come out on the other end of this nightmare, and when we do the argument we must make is clear: capitalism will continue to kill us by the millions and billions until it is stopped. You don’t even have to take our word for it -- you can read it in the paper.